The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

by Kathleen Creighton

  Ellie nodded. She took off her wristwatch and placed it beside the sun visor. And still she hadn’t spoken.

  “You can have first crack at the shower, if you want…”

  Her body gave a little jerk, face turned away from him, and he heard a soft, ironic laugh. “Right now what I’d give almost anything for is just to be dry.”

  He’d have liked to have laughed with her, but all he could come up with was a snort. “Best we can do is rinse our clothes out in the shower, wring ’em out good and hang ’em up for what’s left of the night-don’t think they’ll do much drying in all this humidity, but in the meantime we can share-I mean, each take part of the bedclothes…” Damn.

  It didn’t help matters, the way she was looking at him now, arms raised, fingers combing her wet hair back from her face. The room light, under a parchment shade, gave her skin a warm, buttery glow. The freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks looked like a sprinkle of cinnamon. His mouth began to water. Then he happened to glance down, and it went dry instead. Under the clinging T-shirt, her small round breasts stood out in perfectly defined relief, nipples dark and-there was that word again-pert.

  “Yeah,” she said softly, “we could do that.” She gave her head a little shake, then went on looking at him…her face so open, so honest, he wondered how he could ever have been so stupid as to believe her capable of committing a crime…or an infidelity. Even lying, he remembered, had made her blush. He remembered that he’d called her Goody Two-Shoes and wondered if that was why.

  “McCall,” she said, tilting her head slightly to one side, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Shoot,” he said, a sound raspy as a snarl.

  Her chin came up a notch, the only sign she gave of nervousness or that she might not be quite as confident as she seemed. “I know you don’t like personal questions, but I thought, since we’re about to make love, it would be really nice if I knew your name.”

  It was a moment or two before he could speak at all, and in those moments he watched a blush creep across her face-not the bright hot lying flush he’d come to know, but the sweet shy pink of wild roses.

  “Are we? Going to make love?” he asked gently.

  She nodded. “Yeah, we are. Now that you know I’m not married, and I’ve proven I’m not too young for you, and after…everything we’ve been through, I think it’s high time. Though I realize that I’m probably going to have to seduce you. With your exalted sense of honor, you’ll probably say I’m not thinking rationally, or I’m too tired or too upset after everything that’s happened, and refuse to take advantage.” She gave an exasperated little sigh. “And you call me Goody Two-Shoes?”

  Again for a few moments he could only gaze at her. He felt as though his body had been plugged into a powerful electrical circuit, temporarily shorting out his brain. Only for a moment, but apparently long enough for her to lose the tenuous grip she’d had on her self-confidence. As he watched, her face seemed to blur around the edges. She suddenly seemed almost unbearably young…achingly vulnerable.

  “Unless, of course,” she said, her voice gone thick and ratchety and much deeper than usual, “you really don’t want to. If your arm hurts too much or if you’re too tired. I wouldn’t-”

  He was across the room in less time than it took her to draw a breath in preparation, and took her face between his hands and stopped her words with his mouth. Stopped them right there. And while he was kissing her he thought of all the ways he’d kissed her before-or she’d kissed him. The first, desperate make-believe-wife’s kiss, then the little thank-you peck on the cheek, standing on tippy toes like a little child, that had made his sleeping heart stir and awaken to remembered pain. Then his own charade back there in the jungle, holding her close in his arms and nuzzling her ear, pretending to be drunk so he could tell her what he needed her to know. And the one after that…like water in the desert, like manna for the wandering pilgrim, the one that had made him believe in miracles again.

  He wanted to erase them all. He wished with all his heart for this to be the first, their very first moment together…ground zero, the birthday of a brand-new life. But since he’d never been in on a birth before, anyway not one he remembered, he tried to make light of the awe he felt, did his best to deny the overwhelming joy.

  Drawing back from her only a little, he said in his customary growl, “My arm doesn’t hurt and I’m not too tired. Quit fussing over me, woman.” Then he gave her a Snidely Whiplash smile, all the while quivering inside with a giddiness that was more like Little Nell. “Have to say, though, I rather like the notion of you seducing me. What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, for starters-” and he could feel her body trembling, too “-I thought we could share the shower. Save hot water-”

  “Overkill,” he rasped. And her laughter sang across his lips and danced on his tongue.

  He tasted rain and orange blossoms. She smelled of hot cinnamon and brown earth. Her warm body was the Sunday-morning kitchens of his childhood, and the ache inside him the wistful yearnings he remembered from back then, hearing his parents laughing and whispering together behind the closed door of their bedroom. Longing overtook him, so intense he felt a chill of panic, like a gusty little wind through his soul.

  He withdrew from her mouth again and stared down into her face, holding it between his two hands like a treasure he’d found, brushing his thumbs across the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. Her eyes gazed back at him, shimmering with a soft golden light. “So, seduce me,” he said in a ragged, breaking whisper. “Give it your best shot.”

  The only reply she could manage was a tiny whimpering laugh; her lips were hot and swollen, useless for forming words, though ideally suited, she supposed, for seduction. Give it your best shot… If only she knew what that might be! She wasn’t a virgin-she’d ceased to be one much earlier and more foolishly than she’d intended, and hadn’t always been Miss Goody Two-Shoes in the years since-but…seduction? In spite of the brashness of her opening gambit, she wasn’t at all sure how she should proceed. Would it be better to take off his shirt first, she wondered, or her own?

  His hands were on her neck, now, so warm and rough…callused and gentle. She wanted to lean and round herself into them, like a kitten; she could feel herself vibrating inside with a deep inner current, like purring. Her eyelids wanted to close.

  “I’m not sure…” she licked her lips and felt his lips, his tongue…their moisture blend with hers “…what I should do.”

  “Silly girl…you don’t have to do anything, don’t you know that? Just be.”

  She looked at him then, really looked at him, her passion-fogged eyes struggling to focus on his familiar beard-stubbly face. And all at once, as if the fog had suddenly lifted, she felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. Oh yes, there was the openness and honesty she’d seen there before, the character and strength and compassion. But now, for the first time she saw loneliness and longing, and realized that they’d been there all the time. And something else, now, too, lurking like a wild thing behind the challenge in his eyes…a hunger so intense and so agonizing, her loving, giving soul cried out in instinctive rejection of it-though all she let him hear of that was a tiny sound that might easily have been mistaken for a laugh.

  Confidence flooded her. Her heart felt certain and strong-in bewildering contradiction to the trembling weakness in other parts of her. “Take my shirt off,” she ordered in a shaking whisper.

  She heard a low growl of warning that seemed to come from deep inside his chest, and then his hands were on her shoulders, clutching, pulling…gathering the cold clinging material of her T-shirt and peeling it up and off her like an old skin. The growl deepened in intensity when she reached for him, meaning to return the favor, and he put his hands up like a barricade, holding hers at bay while he looked. Just…looked. Her heart flip-flopped. A great shiver tore through her.

  Instantly, he reached for her, offering her his warmth, a sigh of com
passion on his lips. But now it was she who held him off, with a scolding cluck and a murmured, “Uh-uh-me…”

  Then she divested him of his shirt, though not nearly as quickly and cleanly as he had hers. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons, and she had to fight a childish urge to rip them apart. She was whimpering, barely realizing it, by the time she’d managed to pull the two halves of the shirt apart; her breathing ceased…her heart hammered as she pushed them back over his shoulders and down.

  And just like that the game of seduction they’d been playing collapsed. A shudder rocked her. She gave a horrified cry and dropped the shirt to the floor. “Oh God- McCall, your arm,” she cried as she reached instinctively toward the ugly, dark-crusted slash across the fleshy part of his shoulder. “Oh Lord-I forgot-we should have-here, let me-”

  Again, the sound he made was much like a growl. “Sister,” he warned, “don’t you dare stop now.”

  His arms came around her, and she gasped when his cold skin met hers. He trapped her gasp with his mouth and gave it back to her, and then her hungry little cries and deep rasping breaths and thundering heartbeats were blending with his in a duet as old as passion and compelling as drums on a hot and sultry night. She no longer heard the rain…forgot she’d ever been chased through a jungle and shot at in a Mayan ruin. Forgot about the fact that there were men who wanted to kill her, and McCall, too. Only one thing mattered, and that was the man in her arms…and the fact that she was in his arms…and the fact that she loved him.

  There was no more talking, no more playing at seduction; the rest of their clothing came off…somehow; neither of them remembered how, exactly, or cared. Then he was bearing her down onto a hasty tumble of bedclothes, and his careless and sensitive fingers were urging her body into quivering compliance, molding it to his wishes like a master sculptor. Sighing, she closed her eyes and let his touch paint her world with the colors of joy…primary colors…sunshine colors…like a child’s box of crayons. Then, with the warmth and generosity of spirit that was her nature, she gave the joy back to him.

  Poised on the brink of accepting what she so eagerly offered him, he pulled back, his weight braced on his arms. She gave a soft, inquiring cry; she could feel him trembling, all his muscles taut with self-control. And when he spoke, his voice was guttural with strain.

  “It’s Quinn,” he said.

  A smile broke like a sunrise across her face. “Quinn…” she softly sighed, and wrapped him in that warmth and brought him home.

  Exhausted, McCall lay awake, listening to the rhythms of wind and rain and watching the ceiling fan stir sluggishly in the sultry air. Just below his chin and near enough to brush with his lips if he only tilted his head the slightest bit, Ellie’s cinnamon head rose and fell gently, like a boat riding a swell.

  He didn’t wonder about the ache of sadness deep inside his own chest, just beneath that tender weight, when such a short time ago he’d known happiness more intense than anything he’d ever imagined. The course of his life so far had taught him that the flip side of such happiness could only be despair.

  What had he been thinking of? How had he fallen so short of his own moral code? Not, “Live and let live,” but the code that had dogged him so quietly and insistently all his life, in spite of all his efforts on certain occasions to drown its implacable voice. He’d never been one to act so precipitously, without considering the far-reaching consequences of his actions.

  Very short-term, the woman sleeping in his arms was pleasure, the most incredible pleasure he’d ever known. Long-term, she was pain, pain such as he’d promised himself he’d never allow himself to know again. She was that ultimate cruelty-a glimpse of the heaven he couldn’t have. He thought he knew, now, how Moses must have felt, gazing across at that Promised Land.

  Short-term, she was sugar and spice, warmth and generosity and laughter and common sense-all the woman a man could ever dream of, wrapped up in one pert and sexy little package. Long-term…there was no way in hell she’d ever want to stay with him. No way in hell.

  His heart gave a lurch as the tender weight on his chest lifted. He propped his head on his uninjured arm so he could meet the eyes that gazed sleepily at him, luminous in the lamplight and wondering as a baby’s.

  “Hi,” he said, and waited for the miracle of her smile.

  “Hi, yourself.” Her voice was rusty with the aftereffects of sex, stimulating recently awakened responses in him. Pain twisted in his belly as he watched the smile break across her face. It’s beginning, he thought. Already.

  “Quinn…” she said, testing its sound like a child learning a new word. “Quinn.” She said it again, liking the crisp, clean sound of it. How like him it is, she thought. A little unusual, but simple…uncomplicated. Honest. She stretched to kiss him. “Nice to know you. Nice to know…who I’m kissing.”

  “You don’t know me.” His voice was harsh, and she froze in wary surprise, watching him. “You don’t know anything about me, remember?”

  She said nothing for several heartbeats, her gaze relentless, so searching, so intent he couldn’t bear it, finally, and looked away. When he felt her small hands on his jaw, firmly pulling him back to her, his chest contracted with the pain of a strange guilty happiness.

  “I know enough,” she said softly…stubbornly. “I know everything I need to know.”

  Enough for what? he wanted to know. Enough for this? For a few hours of pleasure snatched from a nightmare day? For a few days or weeks out of the rest of his life? He was dismayed to discover that “this” wasn’t enough for him anymore-if indeed it ever had been. That after tonight the “live and let live” numero uno solamente existance he’d nurtured and guarded so carefully for so many years wasn’t ever going to be enough for him again.

  He made a wordless sound of denial, of rejection, not of her but of the pain that overwhelmed him when he looked at her, trying to pull himself away, turn away from that piercing golden glare.

  “You don’t-” he began.

  She stretched up and pressed her lips against his, stopping him there. “I do,” she insisted in her funny, raspy little growl. “I know who you are, Quinn McCall. I know what you are. It took me a while to realize it, I know, but I do. You’re kind-” embarrassed, he made a sound of denial, which she silenced in her usual way “-and decent and honorable. Honest. And caring. You’re brave and clever and resourceful…” She paused, finally, eyes glowing, her lips bringing her smile close enough for him to taste it. “And…you’re one damn fine kisser, McCall.”

  He laughed with her, then, but reluctantly, opening the purse strings that held his happiness and letting a small measure trickle into his heart like a miser relinquishing his gold. Let this be enough, he thought, filling his arms and hands and senses with her, trying to drink in the very essence of her the way he once had the orange blossoms of his childhood.

  Thinking that maybe, if he could somehow make her a part of himself, he wouldn’t have to let her go.

  Ellie dreamed that she and McCall were riding horseback on her parents’ farm back in Iowa. She was riding Belle, her first gentle mare, and McCall was riding Rocky, Belle’s far more rambunctious colt. They were happy, carefree, laughing like children as they galloped down the dirt lane between lush green fields, with the sunshine hot on their shoulders and a sweet summer wind lifting their hair and rustling through the leaves and stalks of corn.

  Then suddenly, in her dream the world darkened. The wind turned fierce and gusty, and carried with it a strange, evil smell. Looking over her shoulder, Ellie saw the sky had turned that terrible color all midwesterners know and dread-the thick yellowish-purple of old bruises. The very air around her felt heavy and menacing.

  “Tornado!” she screamed. She couldn’t see it in the gathering darkness, but she could feel it, feel it like a massive and evil presence, coming deliberately and with purpose, straight for them. “Run!”

  Then somehow the horses were gone and she and McCall were running, running hand-in-hand th
rough the cornfields, chests straining and breath like fire in their lungs, afraid to look back, but knowing the tornado was there, coming after them, gaining on them, that strange, evil smell growing stronger and stronger, the aura of menace becoming thicker and heavier, suffocating her…

  She woke up in cold vibrating terror. The strange evil smell was still with her, only now she knew what it was. Cigars. And she knew, too, that the menace was real, and that it was there in the room with her.

  Chapter 13

  “Do not move. Do not make a sound…” So close to Ellie’s ear, General Reyes’s whisper seemed tender, almost like a lover’s. Which made his next words seem all the more obscene. “…if you do not wish to feel your lover’s blood and brains splattered all over your pretty face.”

  She was lying on her stomach with the pillow bunched in her arms, and it was the general’s weight that was bearing down on her. She could feel his knee pressing into the small of her back, his hand between her shoulder blades, compressing her chest so it was hard to breathe. Without moving her head, in the soft light of the lamp they’d left burning above the bed, she could see the blurred shape of McCall’s head on the pillow beside her, and just beyond that the slender dark shape of a rifle barrel. She didn’t have to look further to recognize the man who held it-the general’s lieutenant, the smuggler they’d nicknamed Smoker-she couldn’t recall his name. Behind him and toward the foot of the bed, a third form hovered, a faceless backup presence.

  “Understand?” The pressure on her spine increased until she feared it would break.

  “I…understand,” she gasped. Her mind was racing at lightning speed. She stalled desperately for time, knowing she hadn’t much. “I won’t…make a sound. Please-I can’t…breathe.”

  There was a soft chuckle. “I’m glad we understand each other.” The weight on her back lifted, first from her shoulders, then her lower back. She felt rather than saw General Reyes straighten up beside the bed.