CRY UNCLE

by Judith Arnold

  Oh, he was going to track her down, all right. And once he did, she was going to be one very sorry woman.

  ***

  PAMELA SAW NO POINT in lying in bed any longer. She hadn’t gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep all night; lingering under the sheet for another half hour wasn’t going to cure her of insomnia.

  It was hard to sleep in a strange bed in a strange room, she told herself. It was hard to sleep after drinking too much champagne, and after not eating enough solid food, and...

  Pamela saw no point in lying—either in bed, or to herself. Her restlessness had nothing to do with the unfamiliarity of her surroundings or what she’d consumed at the wedding. There was only one reason she hadn’t been able to sleep last night, and his name was Jonas Brenner.

  She dragged herself out of the bed in the pretty yellow room, and donned a pair of cargo shorts and a camp shirt. They were among the garments Kitty had insisted that Pamela buy in the days before the wedding. She’d stocked up on shorts, T-shirts—a Key West version of a trousseau. This wasn’t a place where any of her professional suits and dresses were going to do her much good.

  Once she was dressed, she brushed her hair and then inched open the door. The upstairs hall was silent. Joe must still be asleep. If she was lucky, she would be able to drink a cup of coffee and pull herself together before she had to confront him.

  She tiptoed along the hall to the stairs and down. The aroma of coffee wafted from the kitchen, cheering her until she realized its significance: Joe was up, probably in the kitchen. She would have no caffeine in her when she came face to face with the man she’d married yesterday, the man who had spent his first night as her husband in a bed at the opposite end of the house from her.

  Inhaling for fortitude, she followed the fragrance into the kitchen. Joe stood at the sink, his back to her as he rinsed stray coffee grounds from the basket of the coffee maker. He turned as she entered, and his blue eyes froze her in place.

  She hadn’t thought he was so terribly handsome the first time she’d met him, had she? She had thought he was a bum—and he was, she insisted. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair was tousled. Dressed in a pair of fraying denim cut-offs and a T-shirt that said “It’s Better In Bimini,” he looked more than a little disreputable.

  He also looked like someone who hadn’t slept very well. His eyes were bloodshot, underlined with shadow. The smile he gave her could have passed for a grimace.

  “Good morning,” she said, trying not to wince at how formal she sounded.

  “‘Morning.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair, then turned back to the sink and set the basket on the drying rack.

  When he said nothing more, she ventured timidly into the room. It was bigger than the kitchen in her condo, but not as nice. The cabinets were varnished pine, the counter-tops Formica, the floor a checkerboard of scuffed black and white tiles. The major appliances seemed fairly old, but they’d been augmented with more up-to-date equipment: a microwave oven, a food processor and the blessed coffee maker, its decanter full to the rim.

  “I’m usually not up this early,” Joe said without looking at her. “What with the bar and all. If it’s my turn to stay till closing time, I don’t get home till the wee hours.”

  “I’m a morning person,” Pamela told him.

  He nodded, as if he’d expected as much. “Lizard’s a morning person, too. She knows she’s not supposed to wake me up. She usually just grabs a box of cereal and goes into the den to watch TV.”

  Pamela knew she ought to say something, but the house was too quiet, the atmosphere too formal. She eyed the cupboards, wondering which one held the coffee cups.

  He answered her unasked question by pulling two mugs from a cabinet. Then he swung open another cabinet door to reveal a shelf stacked with assorted boxes of cereal. “We’ve got every sugary cereal known to man,” he told her, smiling sheepishly.

  Suffering a pang of shyness, Pamela smiled back. Looking at him seemed too dangerous, so she quickly shifted direction to focus on the selection of cereals. Indeed, they all appeared to be sickeningly sweet: chocolate puffs, honeyed wheat, sugared flakes, frosted corn, and something that, according to the picture on the front of the box, was pink.

  “It’s supposed to taste like berries,” Joe explained, noticing the angle of her gaze. “It’s Lizard’s favorite.”

  Grimacing, Pamela closed the cupboard door and opened the bread drawer. “I think I’ll just make some toast.”

  He gestured toward the toaster, then pulled a plate for her from a shelf and got butter and jam out of the refrigerator. She felt him hovering behind her as she made her toast, as if he wasn’t sure whether he ought to be making it for her. His nearness unnerved her. She wanted him either to give her a reassuring hug or to back off. Having him so close but not touching her only emphasized the tension between them.

  “I get the daily paper out of Miami,” he said, indicating the newspaper on the table. “They usually toss it onto the driveway. I don’t know if you like to read the paper over breakfast....” He drifted off uncertainly, then smiled even more uncertainly.

  His words brought home to Pamela how very little they knew about each other. Not just the trivia about whether they liked to read the paper over breakfast, whether Joe liked to watch TV with his dinner, what day he usually did the laundry—but real issues, like whom he’d voted for in the last election or whether he had a bad temper, or whether he liked sex hot and fast or slow and slinky or...

  She felt her cheeks grow warm. She didn’t care how he liked sex. For that matter, she didn’t care whom he’d voted for.

  Her toast popped up, and she carried it to the table and sat. He had the newspaper in front of him, but he didn’t look at it. He only held his mug and watched her. She smiled bashfully, then fussed with her toast, meticulously buttering it so she’d have something to do. Her mind scrambled furiously for something, anything, to latch on to so she wouldn’t have to wonder about how Joe liked sex.

  “Bones,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Kitty told me your mother digs bones.” When Kitty had mentioned that, Pamela wasn’t sure she’d heard her correctly. Now that she gave voice to the notion, she was sure she hadn’t.

  Joe proved her wrong. “Yeah,” he said, relaxing in his chair. “She’s sifting soil at some old Mayan ruin in Yucatan.”

  “Is she an archeologist?”

  “Nah. She’s a dilettante.”

  “It’s an unusual hobby.”

  He shrugged and lowered his gaze to his coffee.

  Pamela studied him intently. Now that they were finally talking, she wasn’t going to abandon the subject. “How did she wind up in Mexico?”

  Joe seemed to understand how anxious Pamela was to keep the conversation alive. He lifted his gaze back to her and smiled. “Her last boyfriend. They decided to sail across the Gulf of Mexico together. According to her, somewhere along the way they had a falling out, and the last few days were hell. He was ready to have her walk the plank; she was ready to mutiny. Soon as they reached Cancun they parted ways. I figure she must have hooked up with somebody there who was on his way to the ruins, and the next thing she knew, she was digging up ancient artifacts.”

  “Isn’t that odd?” Pamela asked carefully, hoping he wouldn’t take offense.

  He looked puzzled. “What do you mean, odd?”

  “Well, I don’t know....” As she chewed a bite of toast she pictured her own mother, as staid and stable a woman as ever existed. The only thing her mother ever dug was the soil in her flower beds, in her own yard. To sail to another country with a boyfriend, break up halfway through the voyage, and grab hold of another boyfriend was simply something her mother would never do.

  “My mother is a character,” Joe conceded. “Headstrong, bitchy and a whole lot of fun. You can’t always rely on her, though.”

  “That’s more or less what Kitty said.”

  “Kitty was speaking the truth.”
/>   Pamela ate a bit more of her toast. “How about your father?”

  “He died ten years ago.” Joe drained his mug, then stood and crossed to the coffee pot for a refill. “Thing about my mother, she was real loyal and steadfast as a wife. Then, when my father passed away, she spent a while mourning, and then she cut loose. She’d had enough of the loyal, steadfast wife routine.”

  “Yes, but then when you got Lizard, your mother wasn’t there to help you.”

  “She tried,” Joe defended her. “But you know, she’d already raised two kids of her own. And then she’d lost her daughter, and she just didn’t want to settle down and deal with it.” He shrugged again. “So I settled down and dealt with it, instead.”

  “Your family has had more than its fair share of pain,” Pamela murmured.

  “Hey, what’s a fair share? You get what you get.”

  “How did your sister die?”

  “Ballooning.”

  Pamela almost choked on her coffee. “I beg your pardon?”

  “She and my brother-in-law were ballooning. They got caught in a wind sheer and crashed.”

  “That’s...pretty dramatic.”

  Joe smiled wistfully. “What you mean is, it’s odd.”

  “Well...yes.”

  “They wanted to try ballooning. It’s supposed to be fantastic. They didn’t expect to die, and they didn’t want to, but my sister was adventurous and nothing stopped her. She was absolutely fearless. That was what my brother-in-law loved about her.” His smile grew bitter as he added, “And that’s what my brother-in-law’s family hated about her. He was a real stuffed shirt when she met him. She unstuffed him. He was crazy about her.”

  “Their daughter seems to have inherited their free spirit,” Pamela noted.

  Joe agreed with a grim nod. “Lizard’ll die if she’s got to go live with that bunch of stuffed shirts. They’ll sit on her till her spirit dries up and dies.”

  “Was your father a free spirit, too?”

  His smile returned. “My father,” he boasted, “was a bar owner.”

  “Oh?”

  “He left me the Shipwreck in his will.”

  “But ten years ago—” she eyed him speculatively “—wouldn’t you have been too young to own a bar?”

  “We wiggled around that.” He grinned. “This is Key West, Pam. People don’t bother with the fine print around here.”

  She finished her coffee, pleased to have learned a bit about her husband, even if what she’d learned struck her as rather strange. Through the open window above the sink, she heard the chirping of a bird. Sunlight bathed the room in golden warmth. Joe continued to grin at her.

  It was all too domestic, too cozy. If last night she’d been raging with passion, this morning she was awash in the tranquillity of home and hearth—which, in its own way, was just as dangerous.

  Abruptly she stood and carried her empty plate and mug to the sink. “Speaking of small print,” she said as she rinsed the dishes, “this morning I’d like to take care of some paperwork—getting my driver’s license and car registration changed, making sure my name is amended to Pamela Brenner on all my records and that kind of thing.”

  “That’s what you married me for,” he commented.

  She tried to interpret the hint of seriousness in his tone, then decided not to be so analytical. Joe was probably just sleepy.

  Not that she would dare to turn around and look at him. Just as he’d kept his back to her at the sink when she’d entered the kitchen, now she remained at the sink with her back to him. Life seemed marginally safer when she wasn’t gazing into his gorgeous blue eyes.

  “I was figuring I ought to go across the street and pick up Lizard first. It’s important for me to get to know Birdie a little better.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think it’s too early to call on them?” She glanced at the wall clock. Nearly nine o’clock.

  “They’ll be up. Probably performing some black magic ritual, even as we speak. Go on over.”

  Once again she struggled to interpret the wistfulness coloring his voice. Did he want to get rid of her? Did he feel as awkward with her as she did with him? Where had their companionability gone? Were they going to be this uncomfortable with each other for the rest of their married life?

  If so, how in God’s name was Pamela going to endure it?

  She shook the excess water from her hands, then dried them on a towel. “Well,” she said, sounding wooden. “I’ll need a key to your door.”

  “I have a spare upstairs. You won’t need it to run across the street, though. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  “Okay.” She wanted to say something more: that she understood his discomfort and shared it. That if they both put their minds to it—or took their minds off it—they could keep the strain between them to a minimum. That if Joe maintained his derelict grooming, she would probably stop experiencing an unwelcome surge of lust every time she looked at him. That once Lizard was back home, they would have her to distract them from each other, and to drain them of energy so completely that the thought of sleeping together would vanish.

  Then again, Joe might never have had much interest in sleeping with Pamela. Last night might have been an anomaly. This morning, perhaps, his edginess might simply be a result of his wanting to let her down easy, to back off from her without hurting her feelings.

  And perhaps she was analyzing too much again.

  She tried to smile, but it was a lame effort and Joe wasn’t looking at her, anyway. “See you later,” she said, then raced out of the room with all the subtlety of an Olympic sprinter, hoping with all her heart that Joe wouldn’t be around when she got back.

  ***

  AS SOON AS HE HEARD the screen door clap shut, he rose from the table and hurried to the front door. Through the metal mesh he watched her saunter across the dewy lawn. She’s too thin, he told himself. She lacks curves.

  But she did have curves, a slight flare to her hips, a nicely understated roundness to her bottom, an intriguing width at her shoulders. Her hair caught the morning sunlight and glittered with hints of silver and gold. Her arms were as graceful as a dancer’s.

  He wanted to be dancing with her right now. The way they’d danced last night to Stand By Me. The way they’d danced in the front hall, the way their lips had danced, and their tongues, and their hips. He wanted his wife in his bed.

  He felt a painful tug in his groin and cursed. Last night would have been perfect. They’d had the entire house to themselves. No five-year-old twerp to consider, no snotty little kid to startle them awake at the crack of dawn, no nosy young miss to ask how come Pamela hadn’t spent the night in her own room. It would have been one of the most fantastic nights in Joe’s life—and maybe Pam’s, too.

  Instead, he’d spent the night kicking his blanket, punching his pillow, engaging in all manner of bed-linen violence in a futile attempt to burn off what could be burned off only one way—and that way required a man and a woman and no violence whatsoever.

  Joe had exercised his scruples last night. What amazed him was that he actually had scruples to exercise. He didn’t use to be bothered by right and wrong and all that. Sure, he had always tried to avoid bruising a woman’s ego, and he was invariably a good boy when it came to protection, but the rest of it, the shouldn’t’s and mustn’t’s... When had he developed a sense of morality?

  The day Lizard had become his responsibility, that was when.

  How ironic that it was Lizard’s fault he was suddenly hung up on setting a good example, behaving properly, toeing the line. If it weren’t for the brat, he would have had no compunctions about seducing Pam last night.

  But if it weren’t for the brat, Pamela wouldn’t have become a part of his life.

  He watched until she was no longer visible. Abandoning the door, he tried to erase the image of her from his mind, her long, elegant strides, her fair hair, the curves of her not-too-curvaceous body.

  Tried to, but fai
led. Pamela was his wife, and no matter how much he’d like not to be tempted by her, she was going to be a full-time, under-his-roof temptation for quite some time.

  Blame it on Lizard, he thought, although he felt pretty damned guilty blaming the kid for his own wayward passion. It was Lizard’s fault he’d had to get married. But it was his own fault for choosing Pamela Hayes as his wife.

  Chapter Seven

  PAMELA SHOULD HAVE expected Birdie’s house to be strange. Any woman who attended a wedding dressed in feathers would be likely to live in a peculiar house.

  Then again, it had been a peculiar wedding. And Lizard was a peculiar child, with a peculiar name. Of course she would have a peculiar baby-sitter.

  Birdie answered the door wearing a flowing caftan printed with a tropical bird pattern. Her wooden-bead earrings were long enough to brush her shoulders, and silver bangle bracelets were stacked several inches deep on each forearm. When she beckoned Pamela into her house, the metal loops clanked, resembling the sound of dragging chains in a bad horror movie.

  Enhancing the spooky mood, the angular hallway was lit only by a few candles which lent the smell of hot paraffin to the air. Eerie paintings of brightly colored frogs adorned the walls. The floor was covered with braided straw rugs. If a candle fell over, Pamela imagined the entire building would incinerate in under a minute.

  “We’re making something,” Birdie said vaguely, leading Pamela through the dim hall and into a kitchen too cramped and narrow to hold a table. The window above the sink looked out onto another room. Pamela figured that at one time the sink had stood against an outer wall. The room beyond might at one time have been a porch, since it featured a floor of painted concrete, and it seemed to be on a slightly lower level than the kitchen.

  Through the smudged pane of glass she spotted Lizard kneeling on a chair, kneading a pink, doughy substance. If Pamela were an optimist, she’d assume it was modeling clay. But given its color—and everything else she’d learned about Joe’s niece—she suspected that whatever the stuff was, Lizard was eventually going to eat it.