BEVERLY BARTON - Egan Cassidy's Kid

Egan saw red. Figuratively and literally. Rage boiled inside him like lava on the verge of erupting from a volcano. How did Cullen know about Maggie, about the fact that he’d spent a week in her home?

He’s guessing about the affair you had with her, Egan assured himself. He wants to think Maggie meant something to you, that she still does.

“I don’t know where you got your information,” Egan said. “But you’ve got it all wrong. Bentley’s little sister was engaged to a guy named Gil Douglas and they got married a few months after Bentley’s funeral.”

“Oh, I know sweet Maggie was engaged, but she didn’t marry Gil Douglas until five years later. What Maggie did a few months after Bentley’s funeral—nine months to be exact—was give birth to a bouncing baby boy.”

Egan felt as if he’d been hit in the belly with a sledgehammer. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. He broke out in a cold sweat. No, God, please, no! He’d spent his entire adult life looking over his shoulder, waiting for Grant Cullen to attack. He had denied himself the love and companionship of a wife and the pride and joy of children to protect them from the revenge Cullen would be sure to wreak on anyone who meant a damn thing to Egan.

“What’s the matter, buddy boy, didn’t sweet Maggie tell you that you have a son?”

“You’re crazy! I don’t have a son.” He couldn’t have a child. God wouldn’t be that cruel.

“Oh, yes, you do. A fine boy of fourteen. Big, tall, handsome. Looks a whole hell of a lot like you did when you were eighteen and you and I were buddies in that POW camp.”

“I do not have a son,” Egan repeated.

“Yes, Cassidy, you do. You and Maggie Tyson Douglas.”

Cullen laughed again, a sharp, maniacal sound that sliced flesh from Egan’s bones.

“You’re wrong,” Egan said, his statement a plea to God as well as a denial to Cullen.

“Run a check. Your name is on his birth certificate. And one look at a photograph of Bentley Tyson Douglas will confirm the facts.”

“I don’t believe anything you’ve told me. You’re a lying son of a bitch!”

“Well, believe this, buddy boy. As we speak, your son is in my hands. I had him flown in from Alabama this afternoon. So just think about that for a while. And you have a good night. Bye now.”

It couldn’t be true. Maggie’s child couldn’t be his. She would never have kept the boy a secret from him all these years. Not Maggie. She would have come to him, told him, expected him to do the right thing.

Don’t be an idiot, Cassidy, an inner voice chided. You ended things with her rather abruptly once you realized she was in love with you. You gave her a hundred and one reasons why a committed relationship between the two of you would never work. You broke her heart. Why would she have come to you if, later on, she’d discovered she was carrying your child? You had made it perfectly clear that you didn’t love her or want her.

And there was another reason he couldn’t be the father of Maggie’s child—he had used condoms when he’d made love to her. He never had unprotected sex. The last thing he’d ever wanted was to father a child—someone Cullen could use against him.

His thoughts swirled through time to the week he’d spent with Maggie Tyson. She had been in mourning, torn apart by Bentley’s suicide. And she’d reached out to someone who had known and cared for her brother. Someone who had lived through the same hell, who understood why Bentley had been so tormented. She’d realized that Egan was on a first name basis with the same demons that had haunted her brother for so many years, had shared the same nightmares that finally had driven Bentley to take his own life. Maggie had reached out to Egan and, for the first time in his life, he had succumbed to the pleasure of giving and receiving comfort.

But the connection he and Maggie had shared quickly went beyond sympathy and understanding, beyond a mutual need to mourn a good man’s untimely death. Passion had ignited between them like a lightning strike to summer-dry grass. An out-of-control blaze had swept them away.

Suddenly Egan remembered—he hadn’t used protection the first time he made love to Maggie!

He paced the floor, calling himself all kinds of a fool and finally admitting that the only way to find out the truth was to telephone Maggie. God help us all if her child is my son and Grant Cullen really has kidnapped him.

Maggie escaped into the powder room, locking the door behind her. She needed a few quiet moments away from the crowd that had gathered at her house. All her friends, aunts, uncles and cousins meant well, as did Bent’s friends and their parents, who were congregated in her living room. Paul Spencer had stopped by less than an hour ago to give her an update on the local manhunt for Bent. No one had seen the boy all day and there wasn’t a trace of him or the book bag he’d been carrying. It was as if her son had dropped off the face of the earth.

The agony she’d felt earlier had intensified to such an unbearable degree that she wondered how she was able to function at all. But somewhere between the moment she realized that Bent was missing and this very second, a blessed numbness had set in, allowing her to operate with robotic efficiency.

If only she could shut down her mind, stop all the horrific scenarios that kept repeating themselves over and over in her head.

She held on to the hope that Bent was still alive and unharmed. That any minute now he would walk through the front door with a perfectly good reason for where he’d been and why he had worried her so.

She could hang on to her sanity as long as she could believe that her son was all right. If anything happened to Bent…if she lost him…

Maggie rammed her fist against her mouth to silence a gut-wrenching cry as she doubled over in pain. No! No! her heart screamed. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t fair. Bent was all she had. He was her very life. If she lost him, she would have nothing.

Her son deserved to live and grow up to be the man she knew he could be. He had a right to go to college and get a job and find a girlfriend. To marry and have children. To live a normal life and die in his sleep when he was ninety.

As Maggie slumped to her knees in the small powder room, she prayed, trying to bargain with God. Let him be all right. Let him live and have a long, happy life and you can take me. Take me now and I won’t care. Just don’t let my precious Bent suffer. Don’t let him die.

A loud tapping at the door startled Maggie. She’d been so far removed from the present moment that she had forgotten she had a houseful of concerned friends and relatives. The tapping turned into repeated knocks.

“Maggie, honey, there’s a phone call for you,” Janice said. “I told him that now wasn’t a good time for you, but he insisted. Mag, it’s Egan Cassidy.”

“What!”

“Do you want me to ask him to call back later?”

“No.” Maggie lifted herself from the floor, stared into the mirror over the sink and groaned when she saw her pale face and red eyes. “I’ll be there in a minute. I’ll take the call in the den. Would you make sure no one else is in there.”

“Sure thing.”

Maggie turned on the faucet, cupped her hands to gather the cold water and then splashed her face. After drying her face and hands, she unlocked the door and stepped out into the hall. She made her way through the throng of loving, caring, wall-to-wall people, as she headed toward the den. Slowed down by hugs and words of encouragement, it took her quite some time to finally reach the small, cosy room that she considered a private sanctuary.

Janice waited by the mahogany secretary, the telephone in her hand. Maggie hesitated for a split second, then took the phone, breathed deeply and placed the receiver to her ear. Janice curled her fingers into a tiny waving motion as she started to leave the room, but Maggie shook her head and motioned for her friend to stay.