Some Enchanted Season (11 page)

Last year he’d bought two pieces of jewelry—an emerald pendant in the deep, rich shade she favored, and a bracelet of two-carat round diamonds alternating
with matching sapphires. They were both dazzling pieces, but only the bracelet had made an impression on Maggie—one hell of an impression.

Soon after he’d made arrangements with Alex Thomas to oversee the reopening of the house, the lawyer had called him about the bracelet. The cleaning service had found it on the living room floor and turned it over to him. What did Ross want him to do with it?

Give it to your wife had been Ross’s first response. He didn’t want to see the bracelet again as long as he lived, and he sure as hell didn’t want Maggie to see it.

But Alex had refused, and finally Ross had told him to pack it with the rest of the gifts. He would dispose of it later, before the time came to pull out the decorations for this Christmas.

This was probably his best chance at “later.”

He opened the top carton and found the bracelet exactly where Alex had said it would be, in its velvet-lined box in the corner. Even under the less than adequate lighting, the stones glowed. From the first gems he’d bought—emerald studs to the last, this was the most stunning, the most exquisite—and the one piece Maggie had hated most. He and this bracelet had almost killed her.

After sliding it into his pocket, he headed upstairs to the office. He sealed the bracelet in an envelope and addressed it to Tom, with a terse note instructing him to get rid of the piece. Keep it himself, give it to a girlfriend, sell it, flush it down the sewer—Ross didn’t care, just as long as he never had to acknowledge its existence again.

Leaving the envelope on the hall table, he returned to the basement for the boxes. By the time he made his final trip up the steep steps, Maggie had enough boxes to keep her busy for days. He was tired but he still had one more thing to do before he could relax.

He flipped through the phone book until he found the address for the delivery service, only a half dozen blocks away. He could be there and back before Maggie realized he was gone.

Ten minutes later, as he watched a clerk toss the padded envelope into a bin of overnight packages, relief settled over him. Tom would get rid of it as requested, no questions asked, and Maggie would never know of its existence.

Unless she remembered.

He wouldn’t wish her memory lapses on anyone. He’d seen too clearly how it frustrated and haunted her. But the old saying was true. Some things really were better off forgotten.

Chapter Five
 

T
hanksgiving day dawned bright and sunny, with a chilly reminder that Christmas was less than a month away. While Ross was still in bed, Maggie slipped downstairs, started the coffee, and pulled out her favorite cookbook. Originally intended for use as a photo album, the book held recipes instead of snapshots—some handwritten, some cut from magazines, others collected from friends. These were all her old favorites, her reliable standbys that everyone loved most. Some were fairly simple, others complicated. The one she wanted that morning was on the simple side.

Grandma’s pumpkin pie. She didn’t remember where the recipe had come from and didn’t have a clue who Grandma was—certainly not
her
grandmother. Though her father’s parents had lived little more than an hour away, she’d seen them only three times after
the divorce. As for her maternal grandmother, Maggie remembered her from the annual summer trips she and her mother had taken to Ohio. To a little girl, her grandmother had seemed far older than her years. She’d been crotchety, cantankerous, and critical of everything Maggie or her mother did, and the week-long visits had ended with relief all around.

The last visit had come when Maggie was ten, when they’d gone back for the old woman’s funeral. It was winter, with six inches of snow on the ground and not a hint of genuine sorrow to be found. She’d worn a navy blue dress, white socks, and black shoes, and kept her hands in her coat pockets because her gloves were too gaily red for such a somber event. She’d thought she would freeze to death before the graveside service ended.

That the memory was so clear was ironic. She could remember all the details of a—sorry to say—relatively minor event more than twenty-five years ago, and yet major things from only a year before were wiped clean from her mind. Dr. Allen and her psychiatrist, Dr. Olivetti, had warned her that might be the case. People who suffered generalized psychogenic amnesia often had fantastic recall of distant events and yet knew nothing of their lives in the weeks or months preceding the amnesia.

She slid the pumpkin pie recipe from its plastic sleeve and laid it on the counter. She and Ross had gone to the grocery store the day before, and she’d purchased all the necessary ingredients. She hated to show up at the Winchesters’ empty-handed and had
thought her super-easy, never-fail pumpkin pie was her best bet.

After pouring herself a cup of coffee, she sat down on the nearest bar stool and read over the instructions. She could do this. She’d bought a refrigerated crust—she knew not to push her luck too far—and the rest was a simple matter of measuring, mixing, pouring, and baking. All she had to do was concentrate for a while.

All she had to do
 …

Some days she’d have more luck turning back the hands of time than concentrating. Some days thinking was so hard that it gave her a headache, and on the really lousy days, she got dizzy too. So far, she’d been spared that since leaving the rehab center. She’d had a few sleep disturbances—restlessness, wakefulness, a vague recurring dream—but for the most part she was doing all right. Better than expected. Maybe better enough that when Ross returned to the city, she would be able to live completely on her own.

If she needed live-in help, she could accept it. But she wanted the choice. She needed to know that she
could
be totally independent if she wanted to be.

Her gaze fell on the recipe card. Was her mind wandering because of the post-traumatic syndrome? Or was she delaying the moment of truth by delaying the pie baking?

In this instance she preferred the former to the latter.

Sliding to the floor, she circled the island and gathered the ingredients she’d left on the counter yesterday. She spread everything out in the order the recipe called
for, gathered measuring cups and spoons, bowls and utensils, and her favorite pie plate. She read the instructions on the pie crust box just to make certain there was nothing more vital to do than fit the crust into the dish, and she carefully measured the ingredients—spices into one bowl, cream and eggs into another, pumpkin into the third.

“Good morning.”

She looked up as Ross came through the doorway. He wore jeans and a ragged sweatshirt proclaiming his long-forgotten college loyalty. His feet were bare, his jaw dark with stubble, and his hair looked as if it’d been combed with his fingers—and he was still too damn appealing for any woman’s good.

“The coffee’s hot,” she said in greeting. “It’s … you know, the almond stuff.”

“Amaretto.”

“Yeah, amaretto. For breakfast, there’s banana nut bread. Butter and cream cheese are in the refrigerator.” Miss Corinna had delivered the bread the day before, along with a copy of the recipe. The lengthy directions for the low-fat, whole wheat, yogurt-enriched bread were now tucked into Maggie’s photo-album cookbook, awaiting the day she felt capable of doing it justice.

“What are you making?” Ross asked, taking a seat across from her with coffee and a pinched-off piece of cold bread.

“Pie.”

“To take to the sisters’?”

“If it turns out.”

“It’ll be fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”

She gave him a dry look. “Because nothing else I’ve cooked has been.”

“The stuffed potatoes last night were good.”

“They were frozen. All I had to do was put them in the oven and remember to take them out when the timer buzzed.” And that was a good thing, because the rest of the meal had been barely edible. The chicken cutlets were overcooked, the broccoli was mushy, and the simple cheese sauce had been thick and rubbery.

“So? The first meal you cooked was all bad. Last night you got one dish right.” He grinned. “You’re making progress.”

She simply stared at him, at that dear, familiar grin, before abruptly turning away. Her hands shook, and she spilled cream on the counter. After cleaning it, she went back to mixing with less force.

“Why don’t you teach me to cook?” Ross suggested.

“Why would you want to learn that? You have one of the best cooks in Buffalo as your personal chef.”

He shrugged. “I happen to have some time on my hands.”

“And you think you have a better chance of getting good food if you’re doing and I’m merely reading from the directions.”

He had the grace to sound guilty, if not contrite. “You said yourself that sometimes you can’t follow directions because your concentration’s out of whack.”

“And I’ve got to learn to deal with those times.” She used a spatula to scrape the mixture into the crust, and was about to place the pie in the oven, when Ross apologetically spoke.

“Seeing that you’re making an attempt at independence, I don’t suppose this would be a good time to mention that you left out the spices, would it?”

Heat flooded her face. Very carefully she straightened, turned, and carried the pie back to the island. Sure enough, half hidden under the dish towel was the small ceramic bowl of the spices.

Her first impulse, born of frustration, was to dump the pie, plate and all, into the garbage and walk out, but that would be admitting defeat, and she hadn’t gotten where she was today by accepting defeat. Without saying a word, she emptied the filling into the bowl, stirred in the spices, then refilled the crust. And as soon as the pie was in the oven, she walked out through the back door and onto the porch.

How
could she have forgotten? She had stood there just moments earlier and measured the spices so precisely, and then they’d slipped from her mind. She felt as if she had a sieve for a brain.

On the other hand, it would have been so much more embarrassing to take the pie to dinner and find out her mistake from strangers.

“Our first Thanksgiving.”

She didn’t turn to look at Ross but listened to his footsteps on the concrete as he crossed to her, laying a jacket over her shoulders—one of his, she realized immediately as the scent of his cologne perfumed the chilly air. Pulling it close, she breathed deeply of the fragrance as he leaned against the wall in front of her.

“Do you remember it?”

“Our first Thanksgiving? Of course. We were living in that awful little apartment, and we had no money.”
That was no exaggeration. They’d subsisted those first years on macaroni and cheese, peanut butter sandwiches, and mostly vegetarian meals.

Ross took over. “We couldn’t afford a turkey, and there was no reason for dressing without turkey, so we had roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans. And for dessert we had our only traditional Thanksgiving dish.”

“Pumpkin pie.” She raised one hand to massage the ache in her forehead. “Only instead of pie filling I’d bought plain pureed pumpkin, and I forgot to add sugar, and it was awful.”

He pulled her hand away. “It was an honest mistake. You were distracted. That was all.”

Then or now? she wanted to ask, but it didn’t matter, because the answer was both. This time she’d been talking with him—had been defensive with him—about her cooking. That time they’d slept late, celebrating a rare day off from both school and work. She’d just started making the pie when Ross had come in to entice her back to bed. Reading directions had been impossible when he was whispering wicked words in her ears, when his hands were doing wicked things to her body. Dazed and barely able to stand, much less think, she’d finished the pie in a hurry, and they’d made it only as far as the sofa in the next room before they made love.

Funny. She hadn’t thought about that day in years, and yet even then she remembered the heat, the longing, the need. Even then she felt the intense hunger, absent for so long, beginning to stir.

Hot, embarrassed, flustered, she pulled her hand
back and tucked it inside the jacket, curling her fingers into tight fists. “Thank you,” she murmured.

He didn’t ask for what, but merely shrugged. After a moment he did ask, “Is that really how you remember our first apartment? As an awful place?”

“Three tiny rooms, no hot water half the time, no air-conditioning in summer and enough heat only to keep from freezing in winter?” She sat down a few feet away. “No, it wasn’t awful.”

“It gave us a good reason to generate our own heat.”

And they had, every chance they got.

He looked up at the house, in a different universe from that shabby apartment, and gave an awed shake of his head. “God, we’ve come a long way.”

“You have,” she corrected him. “After you finished college, I was just along for the ride.”

“That’s not true, Maggie. I couldn’t have done half what I’ve done without you.”

Her smile was faint. “Better be careful. Under the circumstances, your pet shark would warn you not to say such things. I might repeat them to the judge in an attempt to get more than I deserve.”