Daye, Rainey - An Unconventional Love (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (33 page)

“And don’t forget to call us when you get to your parents’ house,” Jess told her.

“It’ll be after midnight your time,” Maggie protested.

“Don’t care. It’s a two-hour drive to the house. We want to know that you made it there safely. Do you really think we’re going to be able to sleep until we know that you’re safe?” Alex asked.

“Okay, I’ll call. I promise,” Maggie assured them.

“How long is the connecting flight?” Jess wanted to know.

“That flight is fifty minutes, and we should be boarding in about half an hour.”

“Okay, we’ll give you five hours then to check in with us. That should take care of any traffic or luggage delays. If you don’t call by then, we will be calling you,” Alex told her.

“When are you coming?”

“Miss us already?” Jess teased.

“Of course I do.”

“We miss you, too, sweetheart,” Alex said. “Letting you get on that plane was the hardest thing either of us has had to do. We’ve already emailed your mom and told her when to expect us.”

“You have?” Maggie asked.

“We want it to be a surprise, so don’t be badgering your folks to find out, or they’ll think something fishy is going on. You’re supposed to be missing your folks and wanting to spend time catching up with them, not missing your roommates,” Alex chided her.

“You mean missing my boyfriends,” Maggie corrected him. “By the way, I either made some enemies on the flight or became the envy of all the women on it. They saw our good-bye at the terminal and were quite interested in us.”

“Oh, what did you tell them?” Jess wanted to know.

“I told them that the two of you were my lovers and were quite fantastic in bed, and that I was going to miss our nightly orgies while I was away,” Maggie responded glibly.

There was stunned silence on the other end of the phone before both men burst into laughter.

“Ah, Mags,” Jess finally managed to say. “Have we told you lately how much we love you?”

“I love you guys, too,” Maggie replied softly.

A few minutes later, they ended their phone call, and Maggie sat down to await her connecting flight.

* * * *

Maggie climbed into her old twin bed later on that night, exhausted from the long plane and car rides and the slight feeling of panic that had set in shortly after she had arrived. She was truly ecstatic to see her folks again, but she couldn’t help but miss Alex and Jess. She had called them as soon as she walked into the house and spent a good five minutes assuring them that she was safe and sound while her parents stood there, smiling and nodding in approval at how concerned her two roommates were about her safe arrival and general welfare.

The rest of the evening had been spent in catching up as her parents relayed town gossip to her and asked her all about school and her studies.

“By the way,” her mom said as they were finishing dinner. “Troy is back home for the summer. He was asking about you. We invited him over to dinner tomorrow night.”

“Mom!” she gasped at the hopeful note in her mom’s voice. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to play matchmaker with us. We’re over.”

“Never say never, Maggie,” her mom said. “He misses you.”

“Uh-huh, sure he does. Besides, we both go to colleges a thousand miles apart. We couldn’t make it work our first year away at school. What makes you think we could make it work now?”

“Because he told me that he now has the option of transferring colleges. If not to yours, then maybe to one close by. Or you could both come back to one closer to home. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Mom!” she practically screeched, starting to feel the first stirrings of panic. “We’ve changed too much. We both recognized and acknowledged that last summer. That’s why we broke up. Besides, I’m sure he has another girlfriend by now.”

“Actually, he doesn’t,” her mother replied excitedly. “I know because I asked. He told me point-blank that none of the girls he met at college measured up to you. He said you ruined him for all time where other women are concerned. Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard?” She sighed.

“Very sweet,” Maggie replied in a flat tone. “But I don’t love him anymore, if I ever really did. And frankly, I haven’t even thought about him this past year.”

“Just wait until you see him again. All those old feelings will come rushing back,” her mother said.

Maggie had been forced to resign herself to Troy’s presence at their dinner table tomorrow and could only pray that he was simply being polite when he told her mother how much he missed her. She so did not need the stress of fending off his advances for the next six weeks!

So when she retired to her room, she dug out a picture that she had snapped of Alex and Jess along with a photo of the three of them on one of their group dates and propped them on her bedside table. She then pulled out the T-shirts that she had filched from both of them and climbed into bed, clutching them close, inhaling their unique scents, which clung to the cotton.

The next day began early, since many of their neighbors and friends stopped by the house to welcome her home and to impart gossip and garner some more for themselves about her adventures away from home. Maggie worried about how she was going to negotiate the minefield that was her living arrangement. Her Aunt Tanya had had a hell of a time when she had accidentally been outed and had finally felt compelled to leave town to get away from the stares and gossip of the small-minded people here. Her mother was still fuming over the fact that her little sister hadn’t been back home for fifteen years and that people still whispered about her whenever some scandal erupted, using Aunt Tanya as the standard that they measured all scandals against. For that reason alone, she couldn’t understand why her parents had stayed here. She even remembered her dad offering to put in for a transfer whenever Mom came home crying and furious about the gossipmongers bringing up her sister again. But her mother was a stubborn woman who refused to be run off by their nasty ways. She would throw their own misdeeds right back in their faces and save her tears for the privacy of her own home. Thus her mother and the town had fallen into an uneasy truce over the years.

And she couldn’t understand why her mother had made the suggestion that her roomies come to visit. Especially when she found out that her parents hadn’t breathed a word about her living arrangements to anyone in town. And their visit had been her mother’s suggestion. Maggie had told her that she was thinking about spreading her visit out, maybe spending a week or so at home both at the beginning of July and the end of August before the fall term began, and in between, maybe her folks could put in a vacation request and they could meet somewhere in the middle and spend a couple of weeks vacationing together. But her mom had wanted her to come home for the entire six weeks and suggested that her roommates come visit them instead.

But as her mother rushed to the door, breathing excitedly, “Oh, maybe Troy decided to come over early,” Maggie suddenly knew. Her mom was hoping that she would fall back into the arms of the town’s golden boy, and to ensure that that happened, she was willing to entertain her roommates for two weeks, anything to guarantee that Maggie spent the maximum amount of time that she could with Troy.

Shaking her head, Maggie decided that it was time to let both her parents and the town know that she was doing just fine where she was, and she headed back upstairs to her room to retrieve the slideshow of photos she had downloaded to disc and brought home to share with her parents. When she returned downstairs, it was to find the living room filling up with neighbors.

“So, Maggie,” Old Mrs. Peterson said to her from where she was ensconced on the sofa. “How’s college life? Lots of wild parties and excitement on that big old campus of yours?”

“There were some wild parties this past year, which was why I had to move off campus,” Maggie easily replied.

“Maggie Conner, what were you thinking? Moving into some rundown, rat-infested apartment? Not a lick of common sense in that pretty little head of yours.
Tsk, tsk
. I’m sure your parents have been going out of their minds with worry about you. Or did you not bother to even tell them?” she accused, and she shot a look toward Maggie’s parents to see if they were as shocked by this news as she was.

“Of course I told them. How else would they know where to forward my mail?” she added with a grin.

“Well, Lois, I sure do hope that you shook out your daughter’s luggage so she didn’t bring any roaches into your lovely home.” Old Mrs. Peterson clucked.

“There are no roaches in my home,” Maggie said with an innocent look on her face.

“Just because you can’t see them don’t mean they ain’t there,” the old biddy said. “You might keep everything neat and clean in your own little apartment, but you just know your neighbors ain’t as tidy. Mark my words, little girl, that shoe box of an apartment of yours is roach infested, all right.”

“Why would you assume I live in an apartment?” Maggie asked in a confused tone.

“Well, where else would you live, girl?” Old Mrs. Peterson demanded.

“Ohh,” Rita Collins breathed, leaning forward. “Did you join a sorority? I’ll bet that’s so much fun,” her former classmate said.

“Joining a sorority would defeat the purpose of peace and quiet and escaping wild parties so that I don’t flunk out of school,” Maggie replied with a laugh. “I share a house with two roommates about twenty minutes from campus.”

“Three girls sharing a small house with paper-thin walls in a bad part of town. I don’t see how that could be an improvement,” Old Mrs. Peterson sniffed. “And I bet you have some lecherous landlord who’s constantly sniffing around all of you.”

“Would you like to see pictures of the house I live in?” Maggie asked, holding up the disc before she flipped on the television and turned on the newer DVD player that her dad had gotten her mom to replace their old one when he had bought her digital camera for her. Their old one wouldn’t support the discs of photos that Maggie compiled for them and sent home every month or so because she didn’t want to fill up the hard drive on their computer by emailing them too many pictures. “I haven’t had a chance to show Mom and Dad pictures of my home yet, and put this together for them.”

Maggie wondered if she were shooting herself in the foot doing this publicly, but right now she didn’t care. If she couldn’t share the truth about her lovers, then she would share their home together. Did she want their friends and neighbors to be jealous? Not until Old Mrs. Peterson had started in on her. And since the Petersons owned the largest house in town, making them think they were better than everyone else even if it was falling down around their ears, then yeah, she would rub their noses in it. It might be petty of her, but she was tired of Old Mrs. Peterson and her thinly veiled contempt toward everyone else in town. Besides, the Peterson house was only about a quarter of the size of Alex’s, and right now she wanted everyone to know that the Petersons weren’t the be-all and end-all.

Maggie aimed the remote, and the first picture came up. It was a wide-angle shot taken from across the street so that the entire house would fit in the picture. She heard the shocked gasps from everyone in the room, including her parents, at the beautiful two-story, white-brick, neo-classical mansion with the two-story-high stately columns along the front, which followed the curves of the porch and roof.

And then she heard Old Mrs. Peterson let out a wheezing cackle. “Very good, Maggie,” she chortled. “Taking pictures of some stranger’s house. No one ever said you didn’t have a sense of humor.” The other people in the room gave uneasy chuckles in response.

Maggie cocked her head as she studied the picture. “Yeah, I was amazed myself when I saw the house for the first time in the daylight. Well, it was pretty impressive at night, all lit up like it was. But in the daylight you can really see the beauty of the place. I’ve claimed the flower gardens for my own. I’m glad that Aunt Ida left it to Alex in her will. It’s simply known as the Turner House around town, but since Alex’s last name is Cavalerri, no one knows where we live.”