With a nod toward Ms. Whitley, she turned from the doorway and headed for the stairs. To her dismay, Joe excused himself and hurried after her, reaching the foot of the stairway a step ahead of her and blocking her path.
His gaze wasn’t on her chest anymore. He stared directly into her eyes, searching. “Are we okay?” he asked, his voice muted, husky.
She bit her lip. No, they weren’t okay—but it didn’t matter, as long as they could pretend to be okay for the social worker. “Jonas...”
“That paint looks kind of cute on your blouse,” he said, although his gaze never left her face.
“My blouse is ruined,” she said coldly. She wasn’t in the mood to be teased.
“You ought to dress a little less formally when you’re finger-painting.”
“I dressed for Ms. Whitley,” she hissed, darting a quick glance toward the living room. “I really don’t think we ought to be having this conversation right now.”
“Well, we aren’t going to have it later,” he said reasonably. “I’ll be at the Shipwreck.”
She checked her watch. “Gee, it’s after ten. Maybe you ought to be on your way right now. It’s not as if anyone expects you to be home at this hour.”
Instead of matching her sarcasm, he laughed. The skin around his eyes crinkled; his teeth flashed white. “I’ll be on my way real soon,” he promised. “As soon as Ms. Whitley is done raking me over the coals.”
Pamela put aside her hostility long enough to consider the woman in the living room. “Is that what she’s doing?” she whispered.
“She’s trying to get a handle on our marriage,” Joe whispered back. “She’s been giving me a hard time about our whirlwind courtship.”
“Courtship?” Pamela snorted softly, then cast another quick look toward the living room to make sure Ms. Whitley couldn’t hear them. The woman was hunched over a notebook, scribbling. Reassured that she wasn’t eavesdropping on their conversation, Pamela turned back to Joe. “I don’t recall our having any sort of courtship.”
“Honey, if I courted you, this marriage would be a whole other thing. My style of courtship doesn’t lead to separate bedrooms.”
Pamela felt her cheeks grow warm. She didn’t want to be teased—and she didn’t want to be wondering about Joe’s style of courtship. “I’d rather not discuss this,” she muttered through pursed lips.
“I know you don’t. That’s why I’ll be leaving for the bar in a few minutes. Meanwhile...” He trailed his index finger lazily along her jaw line, behind her ear and around to the nape of her neck, leaving a tingling trail of heat on her skin. “I think we ought to put on a little show for the lady, so she’ll believe my song-and-dance about how it was love at first sight between us.”
“Is that what you told her?” Pamela asked, her voice unfortunately faint.
He slid his other hand along her side to her waist. “What else could I have said?”
Certainly not the truth. Actually, the truth seemed kind of cloudy to Pamela at the moment. Every time Joe stroked his fingertips across the nape of her neck, every time she peered up into his eyes, she became less sure about truth.
It wasn’t love at first sight; that much she knew. But their marriage wasn’t merely a survival tactic, either. At least, it wasn’t merely a survival tactic when Joe was this close to her, his lips an inch from hers, his gaze boring into her and his hand molding to the curve of her hip.
He brushed his mouth against hers, then straightened up and smiled hesitantly. “Faking it is easy, isn’t it,” he murmured, drawing his hands away and clearing his throat. His eyes were luminous, his breath uneven. He didn’t seem to be faking anything. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I’m done with Whitley.”
Pamela understood then why he was avoiding her: not only for her own sake but for his. The instant his mouth touched hers, she felt his yearning. She felt the air temperature in the hallway rise, the beat of her heart accelerate. This must be Joe’s style of courtship—and it definitely didn’t lead to separate bedrooms.
“I’m going to go change my clothes,” she mumbled, gripping the railing for support as she started up the stairs.
“Yeah, slip into something more comfortable,” Joe joked, although she heard no laughter in his words. She didn’t dare to turn around. She didn’t want to see him. And she didn’t want him to see her all flushed and flustered.
Reluctantly she acknowledged that he was right. For her sake—and his—it was better if he stayed away from her.
***
“BEING MARRIED HAS changed you,” Kitty observed.
Joe avoided eye contact with her, focusing instead on the blender, watching the rum, bananas and crushed ice turn into a thick beige froth.
He knew being married had changed him—far more than he’d ever expected. It was different from the change he’d undergone after his sister’s death, when Lizard had invaded his life. That change had entailed moving to a real house, devoting his free time to the kid instead of to boating and flirting, and developing a sense of responsibility.
Pamela had changed him in a completely different way. He had always thought the up side of marriage was you could have sex whenever you wanted, and the down side was that you couldn’t have sex with anyone but your wife—at least, if you took the relationship seriously. Instead, he was finding that the only lady he wanted to have sex with was his wife—and sex with her was out of the question.
Part of his and Pamela’s agreement, he recalled, was that they could take lovers if they were discreet about it. But he didn’t need Mona Whitley’s court-appointed intrusion into his life to remind him that screwing around with women who weren’t Pamela would pose a grave risk. Even if a leggy, stacked woman sauntered up to the bar right now, handed him a key and purred, “Meet me at midnight, I’ll bring the condoms,” he wouldn’t follow through.
He poured the banana daiquiri into a chilled glass and gave Kitty a bland look. “Sure, marriage has changed me,” he drawled. “Ever since Pam and I tied the knot, I’ve been speaking with a British accent.”
“Cheerio, old chap,” Kitty scoffed. “You’re still talking like the same guy you were always were. You’re just acting different.”
Joe studied her through the haze of blue cigarette smoke that clouded in the air. Her hair looked less brassy in the Shipwreck’s muted light, but her tank top was too snug; her breasts bulged from the scooped neck like two yeasty mounds of dough. He used to admire her luscious curves, but now...it was too much of a good thing.
Yeah, marriage had changed him, all right. If he could find himself looking at Kitty and thinking wistfully about Pamela’s modest proportions, the change was profound.
“Okay, I’ll bite. How has marriage changed me?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to put my finger on it.” Kitty scooped a few cocktail napkins from the pile on the bar and set them on her tray. “It’s like you underwent an attitude adjustment. You seem more serious or something.”
It wasn’t that he was serious, he almost argued, but rather that he was tired. And hornier than any newlywed ought to be.
“I mean,” Kitty persisted, “I want to know if everything is going okay with you and Pamela. Because, I mean, I feel kind of responsible, on account of I set you guys up and all.”
“You didn’t exactly set us up,” Joe said, thinking he was doing Kitty a favor by letting her off the hook. She had set them up, but if the marriage was a mistake, he didn’t want her to feel guilty about it.
The marriage wasn’t a mistake. In terms of proving to the court that Joe could provide a good home life for Lizard, the marriage was a stroke of brilliance. The only mistake was that he’d gone and married someone he found himself lusting for.
“I mean, I knew Pamela before you did,” Kitty reminded him. “And she’s kind of serious. Is she making you serious?”
“I’ve always been serious.” Right. And the sun always rose in the west. “Isn’t there a customer waiting for that banana daiquir
i?”
“Let her wait. Brick? Help me out here. Doesn’t Joe seem more serious to you than usual?”
Brick joined them at the bar, carrying a cutting board heaped with the lime wedges he’d been slicing. He eyed Joe up and down and grunted.
Kitty pounced on this as corroboration. “See? He thinks you’re serious, too.”
“I am serious. I’m seriously going to fire you, Kitty, if you don’t serve that banana daiquiri soon.”
“Come on, Joe, what is it? Pamela isn’t a good wife?”
“She’s an excellent wife.”
“She’s not getting along with Lizzie Borden?”
“She and Lizard are getting along phenomenally. It’s weird, how well they get along. This morning they did finger-painting together. They run errands together. Lately they’ve been collaborating on a scheme to renovate Birdie’s house together.”
“No! You’re kidding! You hear that, Brick? Lizard and Joe’s wife are going to renovate Birdie’s house.”
“Uh-huh,” Brick grunted.”
“Thing of it is,” Kitty continued, then read Joe’s lethal frown and lifted the daiquiri onto her tray, “Pamela’s smart, you know? She must have had a good reason to marry you. Something more than she wanted to finger-paint with Lizard.”
Joe knew Pamela’s reason. He wondered if Kitty did. “You think she had a good reason, do you?” he asked casually. “Like what?”
Kitty shrugged. “Like, you’re a great guy.”
He was tempted to reveal Pamela’s true reason, which had nothing to do with Joe’s greatness. But, as Kitty had pointed out, she’d known Pamela longer than he did. If Pamela had wanted Kitty to know about her Seattle assassin, she would have told Kitty herself.
He nudged Kitty’s tray, giving her the choice of either lifting it or letting it crash to the floor at her feet. Rolling her eyes at his impatience, Kitty balanced the tray on one hand and moseyed through the dense evening crowd.
Free of her badgering, Joe contemplated Pamela’s reason for marrying him. Ever since they’d tied the knot, she hadn’t said a word about the hit man. She’d been in a big hurry to change her name and her legal papers, but that was it. She didn’t behave paranoid, barring the windows and carrying a firearm at all times. As far as he knew, she wasn’t constantly on the phone to Seattle, tracking the moves of her nemesis. She didn’t act like someone with a price on her head.
What if there wasn’t a hit man? What if she’d made the whole thing up?
The idea jolted him. He gripped the bar, nodding vaguely as Lois hollered for a malt liquor and a Seven-and-Seven. God, he thought—it was possible. Pamela could have invented that cock-and-bull story as an excuse to marry him. She was smart, and anyone as smart as she seemed to be wouldn’t testify publicly against a professional murderer, right?
But why would Pamela have made up such a story? Why, if her life wasn’t hanging in the balance, would she have married Joe?
Surely not because he was a great guy. Kitty’s concept of what made a guy great would likely bear little resemblance to Pamela’s. Joe happened to agree with Kitty that he himself was a great guy, but he doubted Pamela would rate him that high.
She couldn’t have married him for his money. He was no millionaire—and if she were a gold-digger, she wouldn’t hook up with a guy raising a kid. Someone like Pamela had enough class to reel in a stock broker or a bank executive, if finding a sugar-daddy had been her goal.
“Come on, Joe, wake up. I need a Seven-and-Seven,” Lois declared, rapping the bar with her knuckles to jar his attention.
“Oh. Yeah.” He glanced around and saw Brick about to slice lemons. “Hey, Brick, cover for me for a minute. I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“Uh-huh.”
Ignoring Lois’s frown of bewilderment, Joe hurried to the end of the bar and around it, down the hall and into his office. He nearly stumbled against Lizard’s box of toys in his haste to slam the door shut. Even with it closed, he heard the noise of the bar, the cacophony of voices, laughter and juke-box music infiltrating his private haven.
Tuning out the din, he slumped into the chair behind the desk, propped his head in his hands and glowered at the telephone. If he called Pamela, what would he say? “Hi, honey—I crave your body but I don’t trust you.” “Hi, Pam—just checking to see if your life is truly in danger.” “Hi, wife—I want to know the real reason you married me.”
His uneasiness surprised him. Why should he give a damn about her real reason for anything? She’d done him a favor by marrying him, and she was continuing to do him favors by making his house presentable and taking care of his niece. So what if she’d lied about why she married him? He’d gotten what he was looking for.
Even so... Back in the beginning he’d had a few qualms about marrying someone with a price on her head. He’d swallowed those qualms—and, rational or not, it ticked him off royally to think those qualms might have been baseless. Not just ticked him off—it made him wonder what Pamela was after. No sane human being would take on Lizard without expecting something in return.
He fingered the phone, trying to decide whether to call her and demand proof that her life was in jeopardy. It didn’t seem like something he ought to do over the phone, but if he faced off with her in person, it could turn into a nasty scene. A man couldn’t accuse his wife of scamming him and expect her to laugh and kiss him on the cheek for being so perceptive.
One thing Joe couldn’t afford was a nasty scene, not when he had Ms. Whitley breathing down his neck. He’d rather be conned by Pamela than let the social worker catch a whiff of trouble between the oh-so-happy Brenner couple.
He ran his fingers over the phone buttons again, then woke his always-on computer from sleep mode did a search for the Seattle Police Department. He dialed the first number listed on the website. When the operator asked which department he was trying to reach, he faltered for a moment, then said, “The main office, whatever. Cop Central.”
While he waited for her to transfer his call, he gave himself a brief, silent pep talk about how he wouldn’t panic if it turned out that the woman he’d married—the woman he lusted after—had invented a cockamamie story about a hit man for some ulterior purpose. He breathed deeply and promised that whatever he learned through this phone call wouldn’t change his arrangement with Pam. He needed her, after all. He needed her to convince the court he was respectable.
“Seattle Police Department,” came a woman’s voice. “This phone call is being recorded.”
Joe took one more deep, steadying breath. “Hi,” he said in a ridiculously casual voice. “I’m hoping you can answer a question for me. It’s about a woman named Pamela Hayes, who testified in a murder case in Seattle a few months ago.”
The woman on the other end of the phone didn’t respond right away. “A murder case?”
“She witnessed a professional murder, and she testified against the hit man. I don’t know his name, but—”
“Who is this?”
Now it was Joe’s turn to hesitate. “Do I have to give you my name?”
“If you want your call taken seriously, yes.”
He sighed and assessed the situation. These were law enforcement folks he was talking to. They were supposed to be on Pamela’s side. Joe could give them his name without doing harm to her. “I’m Joe Brenner. I’m...a friend of Pamela’s. A very good friend. And I’m worried because she thinks she’s in danger from this murderer she testified against.”
“I’m going to have to transfer your call to homicide,” said the woman at the other end. “Perhaps they can help you.”
He heard a few clicks as his call was transferred, and then a man came on the line. “Detective Wilcox here,” he identified himself. “What can I help you with?”
Joe started all over again: “I’m concerned about a friend of mine, Pamela Hayes. I mean—she’s concerned, and I’m concerned for her.” He was rambling, and he gave his head a sharp shake to clear it. “She testifie
d against a hit man at a trial a few months ago, and she’s worried that the hit man might come after her.”
“Pamela Hayes?”
“Yeah. She’s a very good friend of mine, and I want to make sure she’s safe.”
“Ah, yes. I know that case,” Detective Wilcox said. “I understand she got so spooked after the conviction fell through, she left town for a while. The D.A. says her only contact with Seattle is that she occasionally calls her lawyer. No one else knows where she is. Then again, even if I did know where she was, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“That’s all right,” Joe said magnanimously. He knew where she was, and he wasn’t going to tell Wilcox, which he figured made them even. “I was only wondering—is she still in any danger?”
Detective Wilcox chuckled. “Still in danger? I don’t think she was ever in any danger.”
“But she did testify against a hit man,” Joe reminded him, although his voice curled up at the end, turning the statement into a question.
“Yes, she did. She’s a gutsy lady.”
“So what makes you so sure she isn’t in danger?”
“Look,” Detective Wilcox said gently, “if I had my druthers, the perpetrator wouldn’t have been released on bail once his conviction was overturned. The guy’s guilty as sin, but these courts, you know—one screw-up, one minor technicality, and the process has to start all over again. That’s the American legal system for you.”
“I see.” Joe should have been appalled that Pamela’s story was checking out—if she’d testified against a hit man, then she very well might be in danger, regardless of what this detective was telling Joe. But he was too relieved by the knowledge that she hadn’t lied to him. “So...is she in any danger?”
“Nah.”
“Are you sure?”
“We have the perpetrator under constant surveillance. We’ve got a cop assigned permanently to him. He hasn’t been anywhere near Ms. Hayes since he got out on bail. He hasn’t come within a mile of her. If he had, our man would have stepped in.”
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