It didnt take good eyesight to recognize her unrequited love for him. At some level, hed known about it for years. He simply ignored it. Shed grown up, become engaged to his best friend, but married someone else, been widowedher life had been more of thorns than roses. Hed offered her pain in return for those years of fierce loyalty and affection.
When shed gone out of his life, hed expected to have peace, finally. But the loneliness had worn him down until he became careless. In the past, it would have taken far more than a simple electronic bomb to damage him.
In past weeks, for reasons he didnt really understand, shed avoided him completely. That had hurt. Hed taken a case in Florida, wounded because Maggie didnt want to see him. Hed let down his guard and had almost been killed, by an old enemy whose livelihood had been threatened by Cords investigation of an employment agency with which he was somehow connected. Hed planted a bomb and Cord had walked into a trap because his mind had been on Maggie instead of the job.
At least shed finally come to see about him! Hed known that Eb was going to get in touch with her. But hed stopped just short of telling the man to ask her to come and see about him. Hed expectedno, hed hopedthat she cared enough to come running the minute he got home. But she hadnt. It had shaken him.
Hed become accustomed to Maggie on the fringes of his life, always laughing, making him laugh, making him feel safe. She was always there, always waiting for him to...
He cursed under his breath and ran an angry hand through his thick, dark hair. Maggie had finally given up on him. Shed decided that he was never going to turn to her with anything more than sarcasm or indifference. Shed removed herself from the periphery of his life and cut him out of hers. That was what had hurt the most. Having her wait days to acknowledge his injury had only added fuel to the fire.
Well, hed chased her away for the last time and he wasnt going to sit around counting his regrets. He couldnt blame her for not caring, when her place in his life had always been a reluctant one, a remote one, barely tolerated, and totally unappreciated. He couldnt remember a single time when hed admitted how much it mattered that she was concerned for him. Hed never told her the comfort it gave him when Patricia died, when he was wounded, when he was in trouble, to have her hold his big hand in her small one so tightly and never let go.
She was a rock in hard times. He hadnt realized how much he counted on her presence for comfort, for security. Now that comfort was removed, perhaps forever, and her absence was like a hole inside him that nothing could ever fill again. He forced his attention back to the computer screen, grateful that he still had his vision, even if he lost everything else. Not that he was going to advertise his recovery. Not yet.
Impulsively he closed down the spreadsheet and logged on to the Internet. He wanted to know where his nemesis was and what illegal activities might have prompted the attack on Cord in Miami. With a smile of pure arrogance, he walked into the back door of a government agency and right into the protected files on one Raoul Gruber, who had connections in the Cote dIvoire of Africa, in Madrid, and in Amsterdam....
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