Free Desperado by Diana Palmer

close to the truth he really was.
    Maggie didn’t look at him. She couldn’t afford to let him see how accurate that guess was.
    “He was,” Travis agreed surprisingly. “Dana told me that his first wife had a hip injury from a beating that left her crippled, as well. She moved out of state to get away from him.”
    Maggie smiled. “I found her in Florida. She was working in a home for elderly women and coaching a volunteer baseball team at the facility. It was a real hit. She can’t run, but she can still bat.” She glanced shyly at Cord. “She’s using her share of the money to found a baseball camp of her own for retired people. I hear she’s got an ex-vice-president and two ex-governors on one team.”
    Everybody laughed. But Cord was looking at her with different eyes. This was a facet of Maggie that she’d never let him see. She did her good works without telling anybody. He’d always assumed that she lived on her inheritance from her late husband. It had come as a surprise to find her having to work for a living at all. Amy had left them a little money, but she’d lost the bulk of her fortune to bad investments long before she’d died. He’d often wondered if that wasn’t why Maggie chose investment as a career.
    Now he could see how caring a person she really was. Bart Evans had left an estate worth a fortune. He couldn’t imagine a woman who would willingly give up that kind of money out of the goodness of her heart. Until now.
    “She went through enough, like poor Dana did, to deserve something good in her life,” Travis said, watching Maggie. “But you kept nothing for yourself. Why?”
    Maggie lifted her coffee cup in numb hands and sipped at the cooling liquid. “I wanted nothing of his.”
    Travis’s eyes narrowed. “Your memories must be pretty bad, too.”
    She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at him. But her fingers trembled as she put her cup down. Something exploded inside Cord.
    He tossed his napkin down impatiently, got to his feet and pulled Maggie to hers. “You can have your cherry pie later. I want to talk to you,” he said, nodding to the others as he took her hand and led her away to his office.
    He closed the door behind them, glaring at her. “Why do I constantly have to learn things about you from strangers?” he demanded. “You couldn’t tell me that the rat was abusing you? I’d have mopped the floor with him!”
    “From Africa?” she asked deliberately. “From the Middle East? From Central America? And exactly how would I have found you to tell you? And why would you have listened? You hated me!”
    It was a painful question. His conscience had driven himclear of the States after Amy’s funeral. He couldn’t even face Maggie, remembering what had happened between them.
    He turned, with his hands rammed deep into his slacks’ pockets. “Eb could have found me,” he said dully.
    “I can handle my own problems, Cord, whether you think so or not,” she replied. She perched herself on the thick arm of a leather chair. “I’d already started divorce proceedings when Bart…crashed his car. I did them from the hospital…” She stopped at once, but it was too late.
    His eyes flashed at her from the window. “The hospital?”
    She bit her lower lip, hard. “All right. I was his third victim. But it was only the one time,” she added firmly. “And he knew as soon as he’d done it that I’d go after him with everything I had. I told him so, even before the ambulance came!” Her face looked odd, full of hatred and outrage. “I called my attorney and the police, in that order, and I had a call in to Eb,” she confessed, averting her eyes.
    That irritated him. “Why to Eb and not me?”
    Because Eb would have known where to find Cord, and she’d wanted him at that moment, wanted someone to share her pain and grief and anger. But it had taken Eb a while to phone back. By then, she’d come to her senses. She told him only that she’d had an accident