LITMIR.BIZ

      Leslie J. Wainger

      Executive Senior Editor

      The Man for Maggie

      Frances Housden

      FRANCES HOUSDEN

      has always been a voracious reader but never thought of being a writer until a teacher gave her the encouragement she needed to put pen to paper. As a result, Frances was a finalist for the 1998 Clendon Award and won the award in 1999, which led to the sale of her first book for Silhouette, The Man for Maggie. Frances also teaches a continuing education course of her own in romance writing at the University of Auckland.

      Frances’s marriage to a navy man took her from her birthplace in Scotland to New Zealand. Now he’s a land-lubber and most of the traveling they do is together. They live on a ten-acre bush block in the heart of Auckland’s Wine District. She has two large sons, two tiny grandsons and a wheaten terrier named Siobhan. Thanks to one teacher’s dedication, Frances now gets to write about the kind of men a woman would travel to the ends of the earth for.

      For my mentor, Enisa Hasic, my critique partners, Jean,

       Judy, Judith and Rowena, and for Joanne Graves, who never minds me bending her ear over the phone for hours, while I listen to myself talk out my plots.

      And in memory of Margie Rameka, who always believed

       I’d succeed one day.

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Epilogue

      Chapter 1

      “I won’t tell him! You can’t make me.”

      Maggie Kovacs heard the quaver in her voice above the soft rumble of conversation flowing around them. She heard feeble. She heard fear. And it annoyed the hell out of her, when what she really wanted was to bang the wineglass in her fist on the table. She would have too, if she hadn’t known every last person in the bar, ninety percent of them male, would turn around to see who was losing it.

      Jo looked at her over the rim of her beer glass, took another swallow and put it down. “The choice is yours, Maggie. No one’s forcing your hand.”

      Choice! She had none.

      All she had were delaying tactics, as she hoped against hope the police would do their job and her problem would go away. No such luck. Life became intolerable when you regarded all your friends with a jaundiced eye, wondering who…? She’d never thought the day would come when she thanked God for having no family to call her own, but thank Him she did.

      Maggie let her gaze drift past Jo between the crowded tables to where the fire crackled. The old fireplace was widemouthed and loaded with logs, someone’s attempt at cozying up the old pub. Anyone could see the bar was a relic from New Zealand’s early closing era. There weren’t many left in the inner city, and this pub, like most of the modernized ones, sported more paint than a K Road whore looking for business. But the bar owed its popularity to convenience. It was practically next door to Auckland Central, the city’s main police station.

      Wood smoke sputtered from the logs every time the door opened, joining tainted air already tangy from damp wool steaming in the heat. With each breath the scents filled her mouth.

      She tasted winter. The dead season.

      Quickly, she gulped down some wine to rid herself of a taste turned bitter, and glanced at the clock over the fireplace. Hard to believe she’d been here less than half an hour. There was a clock ticking in the back of her mind, not unlike that one, and it had been getting louder and louder in the last week until she’d panicked this morning and rung Jo.

      The evening hadn’t gone the way Maggie had planned, and her friend had caught the brunt of her failure. Hopes of Jo easing the stress jangling her nerves had died the moment her friend turned the tables and put the onus back on Maggie. And who could blame her? Not many people cared for spooky stuff. Not even Maggie, and she was its source.

      It was her own fault for not realizing Jo might have changed. In three years, her dark eyes had grown wary and a tight, repressed line had replaced her smile. Her face and chin, once soft and youthful had grown finer, as if someone had drawn them with a harder pencil.

      From across the bar Maggie had watched Jo arrive, taken in the forever irrepressible mass of dark brown curls hanging over the collar of Jo’s leather jacket, and been fooled. But cops had always been able to fool Maggie—she should have remembered. There were some who could cozen you into telling all your secrets, then laugh behind your back and blab them to the world.

      Was Jo, too, calculating the changes and taking a guess at their meaning? How had they turned out such opposites, when as girls they’d been so alike? Had all their years in identical school uniforms hidden their true selves? Leaving time to solve the mystery.

      Jo

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