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confessed reluctantly, and he wouldn't meet her eyes. "I lost both parents, my wife, Amy ...I don't have
a good track record with ... affection."
He was going to say love, but he couldn't get the word past his lips. She could understand. She'd been
betrayed herself, by the people who should have put her welfare first. Trust didn't come easily to
either of them.
She searched his eyes slowly, seeing the deep lines between his elegant eyebrows, the lines of stress
between his nose and his mouth, the hard set of his lean face with its olive complexion.
"I know how that feels," she said slowly. "Except that people have left you because of circumstances
they couldn't control, even Patricia. In my life, the people who were closest to me have betrayed me."
"Who betrayed you?" he asked softly, discerning that she wanted to talk.
"Just about everybody," she said after a long moment. She winced, remembering Bart's horrible act
and its ultimate cost. Her eyes closed and opened. "I'll never trust a man again."
"Can't you tell me what happened?" he persisted, tilting her face up.
She searched his eyes slowly. "It would be cruel," she said absently, and then regretted the slip of the
tongue when she saw his intelligent eyes flicker.
The unexpected answer made him curious. "Cruel to me? Why? How?"
She pulled away and moved to her suitcase. "I'm going to put on something else."
"What's wrong with shorts?" he asked, diverted. "You're home."
She shrugged. "I don't ever wear shorts except when I'm alone."
He was watching her, alert, assessing. "Who molested you, Maggie?"
She dropped the pair of jeans she was holding. He went to the door, closed it, and came back to her,
turning her to face him. He forced her eyes up to his. "It was your stepfather, wasn't it?" She winced.
"Did you have therapy?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I could never talk about it, to a total stranger."
His thumbs rubbed gently against her cheeks as he framed her face. "I know a woman. She's a merc.
but she has a degree in psychology. She's tough and honest. I think you'd like her. She's the sort of
person you could talk to, and she could help you."
"Do you think so?"
He bent so that she had to meet his eyes. "Do you want to go through life alone, without a family or
children?"
"I don't know if I can have children anymore," she said huskily and in pain.
His hands stilled on her face. "Why?"
"The beating I took when Bart hit me ...was...devastating," she confessed hesitantly. "I fell into a
marble coffee table and it shattered. I damaged one of my ovaries. The other one works ... but the
doctors told me that it might be difficult to get pregnant."
He immediately thought of ways and means to get her that way, and it shocked him. Children, family
life, had never been a priority. He was in a line of work that predisposed him to bachelor status.
But she looked torn, wounded, helpless. Inadequate. He thought about the long, lonely years ahead
when she would substitute work for love and companionship and the family she could have had. It was
a terrible waste.
He scowled as he looked down into her wan face. "Difficult, but not impossible," he said huskily, and
his whole body went taut. He laughed at the unexpected arousal.
"What's so funny?"
He pursed his lips. "I thought about kids and got aroused. That's a first."
She flushed, pulling away from him.
With a long sigh, he pushed his itching hands into his slacks pockets to keep from grabbing her.
"Well, it's a challenge, isn't it? I love a challenge."
Her hands were shaking. She folded them at her waist. "I really should change."
"I really would love to watch," he said softly, and he didn't smile. "Your skin has a delicate sheen, like
that on a pearl. You feel like the most delicate rose petal, silky and delicious, and the smell of roses
clings to you like an aura." He searched over her hair, her face, her body, hungrily. "I've had women
all my adult life, not in droves, but in sufficient numbers to appreciate them. You surpass every one of
them, in every way. If I had an ideal of womanhood, you'd be it."
She didn't know how to take such sweeping comments. They embarrassed her, even as they flattered
her. But this was Cord passing them out, Cord, who had been her most persistent enemy for years.
"Are you ... feeling sorry for me," she queried, "and that's why you say those things?"
He scowled. "Why would I pity you?"
Because she knew pity. She had an intimate knowledge of it. People were sorry for you, they tried to
spoil you to make up for the trauma. They wanted to help, and when words were all they had to use,
they flattered. But the words meant nothing.
"So many secrets, Maggie," he murmured as he watched her ponder his remarks. "You don't trust me,
either, do you?"
"It's not personal," she said in a stark whisper while her eyes mirrored troubling memories.
"If I'm slow, and careful, and I don't pressure you," he said gently, "can I win your trust?"
"What would you expect in return?" she asked with helpless suspicion.
That was when he realized what a long, slow road it was going to be. And it wouldn't be an overnight
victory.
His lips parted as he looked at her and hungered for her. He frowned, because he hadn't thought much
about the end result, only the path that led to it. He cocked his head. "I'm thirty-four," he said slowly.
"I've lived fast and hard. I've done things I'm not proud of, and I've done a lot of them for nothing
more noble than money. But this Gruber thing has changed me. Now, I want to stop him and his
cronies, and it isn't for money." He hesitated, choosing his words. "If I had a child, of eight or nine,
and had to see it become nothing more than a slave in a cocoa field, or a mine, or a sweatshop and I
could do nothing to save it because I had no money at all..." He drew in a sharp breath.
"Cocoa field?" She moved closer to him, curious. "Little children?"
He nodded. "Little children. Some are sold for as little as eleven or twelve dollars, because their
parents can't provide for them and hope they'll find a better life working for some multinational
corporation in another country. But what happens is the children are taken away, worked up to
eighteen hours a day and beaten when they don't work. And they're never given a dime for their
labors."
She gasped. "Good Lord! How can things like that happen in a civilized world?"
"Civilization isn't all that far-reaching," he told him. "Especially in developing nations which need
economic assistance just to keep their people from starving. Many of them look the other way when
their own citizens become slave dealers. But Gruber is setting a precedent-he's organizing a global
labor pool to sell to those corporations which will deal with him, to cut their production costs in a
tightening retail market that lowers their profits."
"That's dirty," she said icily.
"Dirty. Cowardly. Merciless. Yes, it is. And very few of the nations outside the industrial ones can, or
will, crack down on the labor exploitation. Some of it has been exposed on television news programs,
but it was mostly the use of child labor to produce retail merchandise for resale in this country and
others. And it was a sanitized version. They don't show the scarred little bodies, or the malnutrition, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]