And so, carefully not breathing, he said in a tight, airless voice, “So, you’ve always had a thing for animals, then.”
“Oh yes…for as long as I can remember.”
“Did you always think you’d have a pet shop someday?”
She threw him one of those quick, mysteriously guilty looks, then laughed-a low, husky chuckle that stirred like a stroking hand across his already sensitized nerves. “Oh no-I always thought I’d be a vet. Farm animals, you know? I never imagined I’d ever leave Iowa.”
Sister, you’re a long way from Iowa now, he thought, helpless frustration a pressure inside him, squeezing his heart. Aloud he said softly, “What happened to change your mind?”
He felt her shrug, then turn to face him. “College happened, I guess. I found out there was a big world out there, and a lot of things in it-a lot of causes-that needed me more than my mom’s cattle and hogs did.”
Causes? My God, thought McCall, what happened to you? How could you go from “causes” to wildlife smuggling for profit and not even bat an eye? He wanted to grab her by the arms and shake some sense into her…
He wanted to take her by the arms and kiss some sense into her.
To keep himself from it, he folded his arms across his chest and tucked his hands against his sides and held himself so tightly in his own embrace that his body quivered with the strain.
He didn’t have anything to say to her. He stood there looking down at her and she looked back at him, and messages flew back and forth between them as night swallowed up their features, leaving faces like pale blank places in the darkness. Anonymous, covering darkness. It would be so easy to forget who she was…who he was.
Don’t do it, McCall. It’s not who you are. Don’t do it.
“I’m going for a swim in the lake,” she announced, hurling herself away from him in a jerky pirouette. “There are lights on the hotel’s dock. Coming?”
She fled from him without waiting for his answer, on legs that had suddenly become unreliable-like so many other parts of her. Her mind and body seemed bent on betraying her lately, and she couldn’t find a way to stop it. Coming? Why had she asked him that? It was the last thing she wanted. The last thing she needed. What she desperately needed was to get away from him, to clear her mind and cool her overheated body in the fresh cold waters of a tropical lake fed, according to the guidebooks, by underground streams.
Oh, but, be honest-there was a part of her that just as desperately wanted him to come after her. And try as she would to block them, the images came to her of two bodies coming together in the soft purple night, meeting and touching with the water like cool silk between them…then slowly warming, melting together, heat soaking through skin and muscle and deep into their very core… She ran faster, fleeing in vain from the images, and felt frightened and frustrated and filled again with that unfamiliar urge to cry.
Why are you doing this to me? Ellie asked of God-knows-who, breathing hard in silent fury as she dropped shorts and sandals on the end of the dock and knifed into the air in a clean, sure arc.
The water’s embrace was a sweet, exhilarating shock, like stepping from a hot sultry day into a cool shower. She swam hard for a few minutes with her mind a blessed blank, concentrating on things that usually took no thought at all-like the rhythm of muscles, and breathing and heartbeat. When she paused at last, winded, and turned to float languidly on the gentle wake of her own making and gaze up at the vastness of sky and stars, her mind felt calmer, if no less concerned.
This isn’t the real thing, she told herself. It can’t be. But, she told herself, it’s probably normal-certainly understandable. A combination of circumstances. A tropical setting as romantic and beautiful as anything she could possibly have dreamed…a man who kept showing up on her radar screen as her white, if somewhat tarnished, knight. Who knows, maybe some sort of biological clock kicking in, though well ahead of schedule, as far as she was concerned. Normal. Understandable.
Oh, but why now? Why did such a thing have to happen to her now, distracting her mind when she so needed all her wits about her, undermining her self-confidence just when she needed it most?
She swam back to the dock with slow, measured strokes, concentrating once again on breathing and rhythm, on relaxing her body and clearing her mind. All for nothing, as it turned out. A familiar form was standing on the end of the dock, haloed by the strings of lights overhead, looking somehow incongruous in cutoffs, tropical-print shirt and the Panama hat she was beginning to think of as his trademark-rather like Indiana Jones’s stained fedora. Just short of the ladder she pulled up, treading water, and heat rose to her head like magma, and her heart was pounding beyond all reason.
“What are you doing here?” she asked as she glided over to the ladder through water that had become as viscous as honey. She kept her voice light, breathless, but no more so than normal for someone who’d just completed a vigorous swim; he would never know how her heart was banging against her ribs.
“Brought you a towel,” he said, strolling unhurriedly toward her. “I noticed you forgot to take one with you.”
“Didn’t think I needed one.” She pulled herself up the ladder, ignoring the hand he offered, and straightened bravely and defiantly before him, smoothing her wet hair back with both hands. “It’s a warm night.”
“Then why are you shivering?”
She said nothing for a moment, but aimed a hard, meaningful look straight into his eyes. Then… “It’ll pass,” she snapped. “It’s no big deal. Nothing I can’t handle.”
His chuckle stirred like a breeze over her already shivered skin. “Yeah, I know. There’s not much you can’t handle.”
She turned her back to him in rejection, then closed her eyes as she felt the towel embrace her anyway. Her throat ached and tears burned behind her eyelids. Through the thick and slightly scratchy toweling she felt the warmth and weight of his hands on her shoulders.
“Besides…” he growled the words close to her ear “…what if someone’s watching? We’re supposed to be honeymooners. How’s it gonna look, you out here swimming all alone?” He gave her shoulders a little shake and a squeeze, and she thought if her heart beat any louder he would surely have to hear it.
Oh, she thought, if I were to lean only a little…hardly at all…that would be it. That’s all it would take.
Yes, and then what?
What was she thinking? She barely knew this man. She was in the middle of a mission. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?
She stood utterly still, frozen inside, holding the towel together with a fist so tightly clenched it hurt. “The water’s nice,” she said with barely a hint of a tremor in her voice. “You should try it.”
He gave his patented snort, soft and wry. “Maybe after all this is over. If I’m still alive…”
They had started walking together, McCall with his arm still draped across her shoulders in what must appear to be a casual, comfortable intimacy. To Ellie it seemed an impossible weight. “Don’t do that,” she said in a choked voice.
“Do what?” He sounded truly puzzled.
“Put your arm around me.”
The weight of his arm slipped away, but the warmth, the feel of it remained, a tingling awareness in her muscles, a cringing in her spine. “Solely for appearances’ sake, I assure you,” he said dryly, taking cigarettes and lighter from his shirt pocket.
“Do you really think it’s necessary? Just because we’re supposed to be married?” She gave her shoulders an impatient little wiggle, trying to shake off the residual effects of his touch as she bent over to scoop up her shorts. She shot him a look as she struggled to force her still-damp feet into her sandals. “I mean, all married people don’t grope each other in public, do they?”
“I don’t know,” he said in a mild tone, blowing away smoke. “Do they?”
They began walking, close together and in silence, McCall methodically smoking, Ellie carrying her shorts clutched against her chest underneath th
e towel because putting them on in front of him seemed too great an intimacy. When they came to their cottage, she stopped abruptly and for a moment simply stood gazing at the cloud of mosquito netting cascading down over the hammock from a coat hanger hooked in the veranda’s thatched roof. She looked up at McCall. He gazed back at her, but the light over the door cast his face in unfamiliar shadows, making it unreadable.
“Thank you,” she said, once again dangerously and inexplicably close to tears. She remembered how she’d thanked him once before, standing on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. She thought how strange it was that what had seemed so natural to her then now seemed utterly impossible.
He shrugged and unlocked the door. “No problemo.” He pushed open the door and flipped the light switch, then gave the inside of the cottage a quick once-over before turning back to her. “Well,” he said. And there was an awkward pause.
Ellie finally muttered, “We should probably-” just as he was starting to say something. So she stopped and said, “Go ahead.”
He cleared his throat and made a careless, throwaway gesture. “No, I was just going to say that according to our new instructions we’re going to need to get an early start tomorrow morning.”
She nodded, her head bobbing foolishly. “Right. So we should probably call it a night…”
“Turn in early, try to get a good night’s sleep…”
“Plus,” said Ellie, her voice rusty and blunt as an old trowel, “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m beat.”
He glanced at the hammock and his lips curved in a rueful smile. “Don’t know that you’ll fare much better on that thing.”
“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
He hesitated, while her heart hammered out-of-sync rhythms. Then he jerked his head toward the open door. “Okay, then. Why don’t you go in and do whatever it is you need to do? I’ll wait out here.”
“Right…okay.” Still clutching her towel across her chest, she stepped past him into the cottage and shut the door behind her. Then, instead of crossing immediately to her overnight bag or the bathroom, for a few minutes she just stayed there, leaning against the door and drawing long, deep breaths, and waiting for her legs to stop trembling.
She’d been in there a long time.
Sure taking her time about it, McCall thought, grumpy with the awareness that he-and she-were fast becoming a genuine honeymoon cliché. Woman taking forever in the bathroom…man pacing impatiently while his pulses pounded and his blood backed up in predictable places. It might have struck him as funny if he hadn’t been so damned uncomfortable, what with needing the bathroom himself, and way too much nicotine in his system and not nearly enough tequila. Not to mention the fact that his mosquito repellent was wearing off.
Five more minutes, he promised himself. Then he was going in.
He noted the time on his watch, then ambled the length of the veranda and back. Glanced in the window, not expecting to see much of anything with the curtains drawn…then did a double take and looked again.
The curtains were open only a crack, but the angle was just right, and Ellie was in just the right place. He could see her clearly. She was kneeling on the quarry-tile floor in front of her open overnight bag. She had her back to him and was dressed in an oversized T-shirt and baggy shorts, and the turned-up bottoms of her feet looked pink and wrinkled and childlike.
And there was nothing childlike at all about the gun she was holding in her hands.
He hadn’t meant to spy on her; for God’s sake, he wasn’t a Peeping Tom. But when he saw that gun, what the hell was he supposed to do? Shock had already exploded through him in gusty, whispered swearing he’d had enough presence of mind-after the first word, at least-to stifle. After that he just held his breath and shrank back as far as he could and still see through that crack in the curtains and prayed to God she didn’t turn around and see him there.
What’s this? What the hell is this?
For a few more minutes that was all he could think of, the only thing in his mind. And then he thought, Goody Two-Shoes, Tillie Tune-up, Mike Lanagan’s daughter and now…what? Mata Hari? Annie Oaklie? Who was this woman?
One thing for sure, she didn’t have that gun in her bag by accident. He watched her run through preparations for firing the thing-slap in the clip, check the chamber-click-click-set the safety-with professional efficiency. She knew what she was doing, all right. He didn’t know a whole lot about handguns, but this one looked efficient-slim, dark and deadly. He felt a cold and alarming clamminess creep over him as he saw her fasten it into an ankle holster, strap it in place, then pull on a pair of boots to cover both of those and check them for fit and comfort, and the gun for accessibility.
How much longer could he stand here and watch this? He could remember only one other time in his life when he’d made so shocking a discovery. He remembered how he’d felt then, too…cold like this, and a little sick. He remembered how disappointed he’d been, and angry and-hell, he wasn’t ashamed to admit it-scared. And just like then, wondering what in the world he was going to do about it.
Then, just when he thought he was either going to have to sit down and put his head between his knees or barge in and confront her, she did something that sent his thoughts careening wildly off in another direction entirely.
She’d taken off the boots, holster and gun and laid them carefully aside. Now she took something else from her bag, something he couldn’t immediately see. Then he heard the unmistakable r-r-rip of a Velcro fastening and a moment later her hot pink sun visor with the rainbow-colored Acapulco embroidered across the headband was placed to one side as well. Only…it looked different, somehow. It took him a moment to make sense of what he was seeing-to realize that the headband part of the sun visor had been opened along its top seam like a pea pod to reveal a hidden compartment lined with some sort of light-absorbing material.
And that was all the time he had to wonder about it before she picked up the sun visor and inserted something into the compartment, then held the visor up to the light while she painstakingly fitted it, whatever it was-camera? Recorder? Some kind of secret weapon?-into position, directly under the embroidered Acapulco. Then the newly “armed” visor went into the neat pile beside her along with the boots, holster and gun.
Next to come out of the bag was her watch, which she put on her wrist and then proceeded to fiddle with, but not in any way he’d ever seen, turning the watch this way and that while she stared at it-more like a compass than a timepiece. Apparently satisfied that it was working the way it should, she then, of all things, took off her earrings-the tiny gold studs he’d seen her wearing-and replaced them with a different, much larger pair.
Did that make sense? One minute the woman was calmly prepping lethal weapons and James Bond spy toys, and the next she was primping like a teenager going to a party. Who the hell is she? What the devil’s going on?
By this time, McCall was just about beside himself with impotent fury and unsatisfied curiosity. It was taking long-forgotten reserves of self-discipline-the kind he hadn’t thought he’d ever be called upon to use again-in order to maintain his silence, his distance and his calm. While his mind was busy jumping to impossible conclusions and shrieking questions at him for which he had no answers, he had to force himself to stand utterly still and watch with narrowed and burning eyes as she took a fat manila envelope from her bag and dumped its contents onto the tile. He wasn’t all that surprised to see money-lots of it, American bills, thick stacks of them, bundled with paper strips, the kind banks use. What did seem odd to him-though by this time he didn’t think anything could really shock him-was when Ellie carefully removed all the paper strips, then divided the pile of money into two roughly equal parts, one half of which she returned to the manila envelope. The other half she wrapped up tightly in a plastic bag and placed in the overnight bag, then covered it with the casual jumble of her clothes.
That done, she sat motionle
ss for a moment with her hands in her lap, the rigidity of her spine and the slump of her shoulders betraying both tension and exhaustion. Her head was turned to one side as if she were deep in thought, going over a mental checklist one more time, perhaps. Though her profile was set in lines of grim resolve, she looked pale…vulnerable but determined. Watching her, McCall felt a sudden twisting sensation in his chest, a manifestation of emotions he’d hoped never to feel again and angrily squelched.
Since it was obvious she’d just about reached the end of her preparations, he moved quickly and silently away from the window. When she came onto the veranda a few minutes later he was standing on the pathway at the bottom of the steps, smoking a cigarette, depending on the nicotine to quiet his vibrating nerves and provide an excuse for the harshness he couldn’t keep from his voice when he spoke to her.
“So soon? I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind about taking the bed.”
“Sorry it took so long.” Her voice sounded breathless-with nerves, he wondered? Or guilt? “I was getting things ready for tomorrow-my clothes and things.” It was too dark to see if she’d blushed.
But then, he told himself, she wouldn’t, would she? Not if, as he suspected, she only blushed when she lied. After all, “clothes and things” covered a lot of territory.
Resentment simmered inside him, a slow burn underneath his breastbone. He thought of a dozen things he could have said to her, hinting of his knowledge, offering her openings to tell all. He couldn’t utter a one; all the words in his mind seemed to be stuck there, dammed up behind a bitter disappointment and sense of betrayal he didn’t understand at all.
Instead he took a final drag from his cigarette, threw it down onto the pea-gravel path and ground it viciously under his shoe, then started up the steps to where Ellie stood waiting for him, looking wholesome and innocent and lovely…and about as dangerous and deceitful as a handful of sunflowers.
And as he passed her, his heartbeat provided a timpani accompaniment to his soft, “Well, I’ll say good night, then…sleep well.”
The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes Page 13