The Marriage Conspiracy

by Christine Rimmer

  She turned over, adjusted the covers, smoothed out her pillow, tried not to sigh. She had a little time, anyway. Before he would start pushing her again to tell him what was going on in her head.

  Maybe, in that time, some workable solution to this predicament would occur to her.

  She sent a silent prayer to heaven that that might be the case. And after the prayer she lay very still, hoping sleep would find her.

  It did, but not until a number of endless hours later.

  Joleen woke with a start. It was morning. She had that where-am-I feeling. This was not her house, not her bed….

  She was lying on her stomach. She lifted her head from the pillow and squinted at the satin headboard. “Ugh.”

  Before she could think better of the move, she rolled over and sat up.

  That was when she saw Dekker. He was up—barely—standing over in the sitting area, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, folding up the blanket he had slept under. His hair was squashed on the left side, and he had a sleep dent on his cheek.

  He looked…really good, in just his boxer shorts, as good as he’d looked yesterday, at poolside, in those swim trunks he’d borrowed from the men’s cabana. He had powerful legs, that narrow waist, those heavy, wide shoulders corded with muscle.

  And there it was—that shivery, infuriating thrill, zipping through her again.

  So much for the false hope that it would all be over in the morning.

  “’Mornin’.”

  He returned the greeting, then gestured toward the bathroom. “You want to…?”

  “Are you, uh, plannin’ to take a shower?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Well, maybe, if I could just—”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I will only be a minute.”

  “No big rush.”

  But she did rush. She rushed in there and she used the toilet and she washed her hands and she rushed back out. “Thanks. Your turn.”

  He laid the folded blanket over his arm, picked up his pillow and headed for the dressing area. When he got in there and shut the door, she sank to the edge of the bed with a tiny moan.

  Oh, she hated this, all these stilted exchanges over the big, important issue of who would use the bathroom when. It was all so…dumb.

  There was plenty of room in there, after all. That bathroom was like everything else at Angel’s Crest. Fit for a king—and for his queen, too. That bathroom had two sinks, two showers, a huge tub with massaging jets and two commodes, each in its own little marble-walled cubicle. If they were really married, if they were doing all the things that married people do, they could go in there at the same time. They could each do whatever they needed to do without one of them in the least inconveniencing the other.

  Or, if they only didn’t have to pretend that they were really married, then she could share Sammy’s bathroom, and Dekker could have the king-size one all to himself.

  But no. They weren’t really married and the maids could not be allowed to discover such a shocking fact.

  She let out a huffy little breath—and decided she was making way too much out of this.

  “Lighten up, girl,” she said to the empty room. “It will all work out. Just give it time.”

  They shared the morning meal in the breakfast room, all four adults and the children, as well. Jonas suggested they fly to Las Vegas. “Just a day trip, the four of us. What do you think?”

  “Jonas finds gambling relaxing,” Emma said.

  “That’s right, I do. But if you two would rather do something else, just speak up.”

  Dekker said the idea was fine with him, and Joleen agreed that she would love to go. It sounded wonderful, she said.

  Wonderful in more ways than one, she was thinking. They’d be good and busy, exploring the casinos, making their way among the crowds. There would be zero opportunity for private conversation. No time for her and Dekker to be alone, no time to dwell on the painful new awkwardness between them.

  Leaving Sam and Mandy in the capable hands of the nanny, they headed for the airport at a little before eleven. The flight, in one of Jonas’s aircraft, took hardly any time at all. They spent the better part of the afternoon wandering from one huge pleasure palace to the next. Jonas and Dekker played craps. Emma and Joleen yanked the one-armed bandit and tried a few hands of blackjack.

  Some time after four they were recognized by an intense-looking fellow in plaid shorts with a fancy camera hung around his neck. Within ten minutes they had two other men a lot like the first one following after them.

  “Time to go home,” Jonas said wearily.

  By seven they were back at Angel’s Crest. They visited the nursery, then the four of them shared a late, light supper out on the loggia with the lights of L.A. and the blue of the Pacific spread out in a glittering panorama below.

  The two couples retired to their rooms at nine-thirty. Dekker and Joleen stopping by the nursery to collect a sleeping Sam.

  Once Sam had been tucked into his bed, there was the grueling who’ll-use-the-bathroom-first routine to get through.

  “Just go ahead.”

  “No, really, it’s—”

  “I mean it. Go on.”

  So Joleen went first. She took care to get the blanket and the pillow from the closet area on her way back out to the main room, since it was her turn to take the couch.

  Dekker went into the dressing room as soon as she emerged from it. The minute the door closed behind him, she flew around the main room, turning off all the lights save one lamp beside the bed.

  Then she plunked her pillow on the end of a sofa and lay down. Holding one side of the blanket and kicking the rest of it into place with a bicycling motion of her feet, she settled the blanket over her. She turned over on her right side, with her back to the room.

  And she heaved a heavy sigh. Dekker was fast, when he used the bathroom getting ready for bed. She had wanted to be on the couch, under the blanket, in a position that would clearly signal she was on her way to sleep, before he returned. And she had succeeded.

  Dekker emerged from the bathroom about three minutes later. She heard the whisper of his feet across the rug—and then nothing. He had stopped, was just standing there, midway between the dressing room door and where she lay on the sofa.

  Joleen lay very still under her blanket, her eyes shut, willing him to say nothing, to go over to the bed and get into it and just…let it be.

  She didn’t quite get her wish. He swore. And he said her name.

  She did not breathe. She did not move.

  She was handling this all wrong and she knew it. She was hurting her dearest, truest, lifelong friend, leaving him to worry and wonder what could possibly be the matter with her.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

  And at the same time, she just didn’t know how to pretend with him. How to act as if everything was normal, when it wasn’t normal, when she was a wreck of unsatisfied yearning inside herself.

  Just wanting a man shouldn’t mess everything up like this. But somehow, it did. She couldn’t relax with him, couldn’t really talk to him. Not now. She knew that if she even tried, it would all come pouring out. She would embarrass herself and put poor Dekker on the spot.

  She also knew the time was fast approaching when she would have to do just that.

  But now all she wanted was to put it off. Avoid the inevitable. For a few days, a few hours, however long she possibly could.

  She heard movement. He was walking away from her. He had given up, for now, on trying to talk to her.

  There was a soft rustling—the blankets on the bed. And then a click as the room went dark.

  On Monday, Jonas and Emma both had to work. Joleen spent a lot of that morning and afternoon in the nursery with the children, then later she gave the nanny a break and took them out to the pool. She didn’t see much of Dekker, didn’t know how he occupied himself.

  Apparently, he had decided to giv
e her what she’d said she needed—time and space to deal with what was bothering her.

  At four, though, they were both due at the offices of Jonas’s lawyer. They rode there together, in one of the long, black Bravo limousines. It was a silent ride. They looked out the smoky glass of the car’s windows and avoided each other’s eyes.

  When they got to the offices of McAllister, Quinn and Associates, Attorneys at Law, a pretty, beautifully dressed secretary showed them to a conference room. Jonas and Ambrose McAllister joined them a few minutes later. The attorney, who was tall, white-haired and soft-spoken, listened to the same story Dekker had told Jonas and Emma two nights before.

  When Ambrose had heard it all, he told them what Jonas had thought he might. He said they had done all that could be done until Robert Atwood made his next move.

  “I want you to contact me immediately when that happens,” Ambrose McAllister said. “We’ll see what, exactly, we’re going to be dealing with, and I’ll advise you from there. Now. Is there anything else I can help you with? Anything at all?”

  Dekker said he’d been thinking about changing his name, legally, to Bravo. “After all, it’s my real name, anyway.”

  Ambrose nodded. “And did you want to go back to Russell, as well?”

  “No. I’ve been called Dekker so long, I don’t think I want to try getting used to another first name.”

  Joleen felt relief when he said that he’d keep his first name. She might eventually become accustomed to calling him Russell, but somewhere in the back of her mind, he would always be Dekker to her.

  And, apparently, to himself, too.

  “A name change is a pretty straightforward procedure,” Ambrose said. “It is handled, though, in the state of residence. Were you planning to make your home here, then, in California?”

  Dekker said that no, they’d be living in Oklahoma.

  “Then I’ll be glad to refer you to a good attorney there.”

  Dekker shook his head. “I can handle that.” In his line of work, he knew quite a few lawyers. “Just wanted you to point me in the right direction.”

  They rode down in the elevator with Jonas, who had a limousine waiting to take him back to his offices at Bravo, Incorporated. Joleen and Dekker returned to Angel’s Crest, went their separate ways, meeting again in the living room off the grand foyer when Palmer served the predinner drinks.

  At ten-thirty, they said good-night to their hosts and climbed the curving staircase. They stopped in to pick up Sam, carried him to their rooms, put him to bed.

  Then Dekker said, “I’m not really tired right now. Think I’ll go out for a while.”

  Go out where? she thought.

  But she didn’t ask. She didn’t feel she had the right, since she had spent the better part of the past few days trying to figure out ways to avoid him. What could she offer him right now, anyway, if he stayed here with her? Good company?

  Hardly. All the old easiness between them was gone—burned away, it felt to her, by the heat of her unspoken desire.

  She thought of Stacey, who had pretty much gone off the deep end over Dekker. The poor man. When women fell for him, it really messed up his life. His first wife had made him into her obsession. And now his best-friend-turned-second-wife wanted him so much she didn’t dare let herself even talk to him.

  “All right,” she said. “Good night, then.”

  He gave her a brief nod in response and then he was gone. She got ready for bed and slipped between the covers.

  She must have been asleep when he came in, because she had no idea what time that was.

  The next day at four, in a big meeting room at the offices of Bravo, Incorporated, in downtown Los Angeles, they held the press conference.

  Joleen and Dekker sat at a long table together, holding hands—Jonas had advised that—and sharing a microphone, which Jonas had suggested, as well. He said people naturally tended to be nervous in the glare of the lights, under the eyes of so many prying news people; they drew into themselves.

  “If you use one mike, you’ll have to sit close together. You’ll be turned toward each other, leaning in. Body language sends a powerful message and we want yours to have ‘happy newlyweds’ written all over it.”

  Jonas sat on Dekker’s left, with his own microphone, ready to jump in if things got too rough.

  Dekker gave a short speech about how much it meant to him to have found his real family at last. Then he explained that he’d grown up next door to Joleen, in Oklahoma City. They’d been friends all their lives. And recently they’d realized that they both wanted it to be more. They had married four days ago. He also said he had a stepson named Sam, the “greatest little guy in the world.”

  He said he couldn’t be happier, leaning toward her as he said it, to speak into the mike, holding her hand as his brother had advised him to do. His hand was warm, enclosing hers. Hers felt small. And cold at first. It warmed, though, wrapped in his. She stared at his mouth as he spoke, at the cleft in his chin, thought about all the years she had known him—her whole life. For Joleen, there had never been a world that didn’t have Dekker in it.

  Her throat closed up, right there, in front of all those news-hungry reporters, while Dekker said how happy he was and she stared at the cleft in his chin. She felt an insistent pressure behind her eyes….

  She could have slapped her own self right smack in the face. She never cried. She couldn’t afford to. In her family, someone had to keep her head at all times.

  Dekker finished speaking. Then came the questions, fast and furious, all the reporters vying to get Dekker’s attention. Some of the questions were awful. Dekker handled them with a steady voice and a direct stare.

  “How does it feel to be raised by your own kidnapper?”

  “I didn’t know she was my kidnapper. I believed she was my natural mother. She treated me well—better than well. The woman pretty much dedicated her life to raising me.”

  “We understand that Lorraine Smith is dead. What would you say to her, if she were still alive today?”

  “She’s not alive today, so I guess I don’t have to figure out what to say to her.”

  “Your first wife died tragically, didn’t she? I wonder if—”

  “My first wife is not why we’re here today. Next question.”

  At the end, the press wanted more details of the honeymoon. Were the bride and groom going anywhere else on their wedding trip, after their stay at the fabulous Angel’s Crest?

  Dekker answered that one with an outright lie. “No, we’ll spend our entire honeymoon here in Los Angeles. We’re enjoying our visit with my brother and his wife.”

  Joleen couldn’t blame him for lying. No doubt the news people would eventually track the famous Bravo Baby down wherever he might go. But why draw them a map?

  Then again, she thought, maybe it wasn’t a lie. Last week Dekker had mentioned spending the second half of their honeymoon in Hawaii. But since then, he hadn’t said anything about where they would go next. Maybe in the last few discouraging days he’d decided they might as well just stay in Los Angeles until it was time to go home.

  And maybe he was right. Here, the distance and the silence between them was almost bearable. They had Emma and Jonas to distract them. Sam had Mandy to play with and the nanny to look after him whenever Joleen wanted a break from the full-time job of caring for a toddler.

  It would have been fun, before, just the three of them. Building sand castles on some silvery beach, catering to Sam—and just being together, talking easily about anything and everything the way they always used to do.

  But now? No. Not much fun at all. Not with this silence yawning between them. Not with the secret she wouldn’t share. Not with her impossible yearning eating her up every time she looked at him….

  “It went well,” Jonas said, after the press conference was over. “Very well. You have the knack for handling yourself in the spotlight, Dek.”

  “It’s a knack I wouldn’t mind never us
ing again.”

  That night, when they went to their rooms, Dekker said he was going out again.

  She longed to ask, Where will you go? What will you do? When will you be back?

  But she kept all the questions locked up inside. She knew if she asked them, she would only be opening the door for him to ask questions of her. She still was not ready for that.

  “Well, good night then….”

  “Yeah. Good night, Jo….”

  Dekker went outside by a set of stairs that led down to the huge back patio. As he emerged from the stairwell and shut the door behind him, he spotted one of Jonas’s bodyguards, in the shadows beneath a palm tree about ten yards away.

  Dekker waved. The guard raised a black-gloved hand in response.

  That’s me, Dekker found himself thinking, as he watched that shadowed hand saluting him through the darkness. That’s me. Just two weeks ago.

  So strange. His life now. It was as if he had crossed some invisible line. Gone over to the other side.

  Before his brother had found him, Dekker was often the one standing in the shadows, peering in on the lives of others. Watching. And sometimes watching over. He’d taken a bodyguard assignment or two in the couple of years since he’d set up his agency.

  Dekker strode aimlessly across the patio, to the edge of the cobalt-blue pool. He stared out over the lights of the city, the ocean beyond.

  But he wasn’t really seeing them. He was thinking. Thinking that now everything had changed. Now he was the Bravo Baby. The Bravo Baby all grown up.

  Someone worth watching. By reporters and syndicated press photographers. By his brother’s bodyguards.

  By Atwood’s detectives hired to get the dirt on Jo.

  Jo…

  How did that happen? What was she doing, creeping into his mind now?

  He’d come out here, after all, to get away from her. From her silence. From the thing she couldn’t make herself tell him. The thing that had no substance yet stood, impenetrable as a thick plate of shatterproof glass, between them.

  He sat down on the edge of the blue, blue pool, slipped off his shoes, peeled off his socks, rolled up his trouser cuffs and dangled his legs in the water. It felt good, warm and satiny, against his skin.