style="font-size:15px;"> It was her own fault for not realizing Jo might have changed. In three years, her dark eyes had grown wary and a tight, repressed line had replaced her smile. Her face and chin, once soft and youthful had grown finer, as if someone had drawn them with a harder pencil.
From across the bar Maggie had watched Jo arrive, taken in the forever irrepressible mass of dark brown curls hanging over the collar of Jo’s leather jacket, and been fooled. But cops had always been able to fool Maggie—she should have remembered. There were some who could cozen you into telling all your secrets, then laugh behind your back and blab them to the world.
Was Jo, too, calculating the changes and taking a guess at their meaning? How had they turned out such opposites, when as girls they’d been so alike? Had all their years in identical school uniforms hidden their true selves? Leaving time to solve the mystery.
Jo drained the last half-inch in her glass, then set it down with an exasperated click. “If you didn’t want my advice, why’d you bother to look me up?”
“Come off it, Jo. You know why. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone but you about it. Where else would I go?”
“You managed it once—”
“Yeah.” Maggie placed her arms on the table, her elbow accidentally hitting her wineglass. She heard it skitter across the laminated top, but if a crash came she blanked it out as unimportant. “And only just lived to tell the tale. Look what happened!” Look what they did to me! “I won’t let it happen again!” I can’t.
“Is this a private argument or can anyone join in?”
Maggie looked up, startled by the deep resonant voice. Immediately, she went into denial. “We weren’t arguing.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jo smile at the new arrival. Someone special?
“Max, I didn’t think you’d be here this evening.” Delight rang in Jo’s voice. “I thought you were pulling an all-nighter. Come and join us.”
So this was Max. Detective Sergeant Max Strachan, to be precise. Jo’s boss. The man she’d been pressing Maggie to speak to.
“Never spilled a drop. Neat trick. You’ll have to show me how to do it.” A large hand, slim fingered with blunt tips, set the glass it had caught back on the table. All she could see was his hand with its sprinkling of dark hair as the lights behind him captured all but his silhouette, making his features invisible.
“It’s not something you can learn overnight. I’ve had years of practice,” Maggie said, watching him hook the leg of a chair from the table next to theirs with a large, black-shod foot.
She flinched as the chair scraped across the tiled floor and he pulled it up to their table. His gabardine-covered thigh, cold from the night air, brushed against her nylon-clad knees as he sat down between her and Jo. At the same time a searing heat from the hard-muscled flesh molding the soft cloth made her ache to pull away. But that would be too obvious.
Wide shoulders blocked the rest of the bar from view as he settled into his chair, giving Maggie the uneasy feeling of being trapped. He could easily be six-five. Built like a brick outhouse. A man who would make male offenders shake in their shoes and female ones want to get down and slobber over his size twelves. A man to avoid. And as soon as she could, Maggie aimed to do just that.
“This is my friend Maggie Kovacs. Maggie, Max Strachan.”
Max held out his hand. Automatically she placed hers in it and felt her own swallowed up by a mass of contained strength. Since he was impossible to ignore, she let her reluctant gaze travel over him. A scar ran from his left eyebrow to his hairline, and a streak of silver made his dark hair, as dark as hers, look jet-black. Was there irony in the way the silver striation turned his already handsome face, with its black winged brows and aesthetically high cheekbones, into a prototypical pirate? In the midst of all that perfection, the slight bend in the bridge of his nose should have been a reminder that the man was a cop who had more than likely done battle before. It wasn’t. Cops were supposed to be good guys, but Maggie usually took them as she found them; her last experience had colored most of them charcoal-gray. But in Max’s case she’d rather remain in ignorance.
His eyes paid Maggie the compliment she’d given him—a detailed inspection. She swallowed at his intense look as their gazes collided. His eyes were truly blue. The truest blue she’d ever seen, ringed by long sooty lashes any woman would envy. True blue eyes that searched and sought out her deep hidden secrets. Maggie blinked in self-defense. He was the last man she wanted to share secrets with. Especially the one she’d just added to the list—the mind-blowing attraction he stirred, like a sleeping volcano wakening. Max smiled, just a slight curve of his chiseled lips, but enough to make her insides quake.
“Margaret Kovacs.” Her name rolled off his tongue one syllable at a time, as though he savored each nuance with teeth and tongue before letting it go.
Someone had let loose a whole load of geese in the graveyard. How else could she account for the shivers running down her spine?
Maggie gauged his thoughts. Was he trying to place her name, flicking through the filing system in his brain for where he’d heard it before? “Maggie,” she corrected. “I prefer Maggie.” By repeating her name, she hoped to nudge him off the track his mind had started down.
“Maggie it is. And what brings you to this neck of the woods, Maggie? We don’t usually see ladies like you in here.”
“I wanted to catch up with Jo. It’s been a while,” she said and flashed him a scathing look. He’d had to state the obvious. It hadn’t taken a detective to recognize her as the most overdressed person in the bar. Or did she mean underdressed? The only person in a miniskirt in this place where jeans and casual gear were the uniform of the day.
Even her hairstyle set her apart, with its precision cut. She’d let her stylist crop it ruthlessly to the shape of her head, leaving a shiny black length of hair to swirl across the tops of her ears and eyebrows. “It’s a crime to hide that bone structure, my dear. Your cheekbones are to die for,” was Stefan’s cri de coeur.
Maggie took a deep breath. At twenty-eight she should be past the age of letting people like Max get to her. But at least she hadn’t let it show how much his comments had bothered her.
“Almost three years,” confirmed Jo. “I couldn’t even make it back to Maggie’s father’s funeral, and that must have been a year ago, when I was in Gisborne.”
“Fifteen months.”
“A year this past March. That would have been Frank Kovacs?”
Maggie caught the gleam of recognition in his eyes, the slight tensing of his hand around his glass, and knew the seed of speculation had been sown. This was exactly the situation she’d wanted to avoid. “Yes. Did you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
I’ll just bet you have.
Suddenly she just wanted out of there, wanted to run away from eyes that saw too much. Too easily.
She’d come to talk to Jo on a wave of courage, and the longer she stayed the more it ebbed. She’d already had her fifteen minutes of fame, and taking a chance on thirty might just push her over the top.
Max drained his glass. “Can I buy you both a drink?” He looked
