Simon held out his hand. Sunday looked into his eyes, and then placed her hand in his. Tget wrapped the strand of beads around their wrists. The man took an earthenware jug from Siri and poured a small amount of cool, clear water over their joined hands. Then he began to chant.
A shiver coursed along Sunday’s spine. Intuitively, she knew this was a special hill-tribe ceremony between a man and a woman.
It was Simon’s tone of voice—calm, almost nonchalant, yet somehow fraught with meaning—that lifted her face. “Tget is asking if you are my woman.”
Sunday did not find the question as preposterous now as she would have at their first meeting in the Celestial Palace. She and Simon had shared so much in the intervening days.
Could it really be less than two weeks since they’d strolled through the gardens outside the Temple of the Reclining Buddha? It seemed so long ago, a lifetime ago.
In an odd way, she’d shared more of herself with Simon Hazard than with any other man of her acquaintance. Certainly no one had seen her day after day in the same jeans and sweater, sans shower, sans makeup, sans hairstyle.
Was she Simon’s woman?
No.
Would she like to be his woman?
Sunday recalled his kisses, his caresses last night in the rain. She thought of his kiss this afternoon as they stood in a field of butterflies. There was something about this place and these people. She couldn’t have lied if she’d wanted to.
Sunday nodded her head and, not without a certain amount of trepidation answered, “Yes, I am his woman.”
The question must have been repeated for Simon, for she heard him reply in his husky baritone, first in the hill-tribe dialect and then in English, “Yes, I am her man.”
Tget concluded his chant. He reached up and touched his hand first to her cheek and then to Simon’s, making some kind of mark with another drop or two of cool water. Then he and Siri smiled upon them, said something in their own language, gave a slight bow, backed out of the hut and retreated into the night.
It was several minutes before either of them spoke.
Simon broke the silence. “Thank you,” he said.
She looked up at him in the flickering lamplight. “For what?”
“For graciously accepting the village’s invitation to stay here, for treating these people with kindness and respect, for going along with the ceremony and for not rejecting me in front of Tget and his people,” he said, unraveling the necklace of stone beads and placing it carefully on the small table.
“I did all of those things because I wanted to,” she informed him.
“I know,” Simon said, dropping his eyes to the floor mat. “But you may not have understood the significance of everything we just did.” He looked up and gave her a tentative smile. “The good news is that nothing is binding outside tribal territory.”
She folded her arms under her breasts. “Perhaps you should tell me exactly what the ceremony was with the beads and the water.”
“Now, Sunday, I want you to keep a couple of things in mind,” Simon began as if he were addressing a business meeting.
It was not an auspicious beginning, in her opinion. She was instantly on her guard. “Yes?”
Simon gnawed on his bottom lip and then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “First, as I mentioned, it isn’t binding.”
Her eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Go on.”
“Second, I did it for your own good.”
Her eyebrows went up another notch. “For my good?”
He nodded. “These are simple, unsophisticated people. In their view, there are only two kinds of women.”
“And, pray tell, what are those?”
He dropped the bomb. “Wives and the type you find at—”
“The Celestial Palace?”
“Exactly.”
Sunday swallowed. “I see.”
“I’m glad that you do,” Simon said, visibly relieved. That seemed to settle the matter as far as he was concerned. He studied the layout of the hut. “Which bed do you prefer?”
“Whoa!”
His head snapped around. “Was there something else?”
She tapped her cotton-socked foot on the bamboo floor. “Just one or two points I’d like clarified.”
“Fire away.”
She was tempted, Sunday admitted to herself. “About the water and the beads and the chanting,” she prompted.
Simon appeared vaguely uneasy, perhaps even a little uncomfortable. “It was a kind of...” He seemed determined to find the right words. “...betrothal ceremony.”
She looked up sharply. “You mean like engaged to be engaged.”
He stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “Not exactly.”
“Then exactly what was it?”
He took another stab at an explanation. “It was more like an old-fashioned betrothal.”
Sunday was starting to get an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Historically, a betrothal was a promise to marry.”
Simon rocked back and forth on the heels of his bootless feet. “Yup, it was.”
“It was legally and morally binding in the eyes of society, in the eyes of the church, in a court of law.”
“Yup.”
“It often meant the couple engaged in...” she searched for a delicate way to put it “...full marital relations.”
Simon permitted himself a small sigh. “Yup.”
“These people think we’re married, or the next thing to it, don’t they?”
Simon jerked his hands out of his pockets and then seemed to realize he didn’t know what to do with them. He settled on hooking his thumbs through his belt loops. “That’s about the size of it.”
Sunday kept her eyes straight ahead and level with his chest. She had no intentions of finding out about the size of anything, under the circumstances.
“I’ll take the bed on the right,” she announced.
Eleven
She was in love with Simon.
It hit Sunday like a ton of bricks as she stripped down to her bra and panties and slipped beneath the blankets spread out on her sleeping mat.
“Simon, you can come back inside now,” she called to him, hoping that he wouldn’t notice the heightened emotion in her voice, or, if he did, that he would chalk it up to the extenuating circumstances in which they found themselves.
In the eyes of these hill-tribe people, she and Simon were married, or the next thing to it.
Simon opened the door and reentered the single-room bamboo hut. Sunday could see his features clearly in the lamplight: the high forehead, the dark eyebrows, the aristocratic nose, the full mouth, the strong line of his jaw and chin. Somewhere in the back of her mind, it registered that he must have shaved this morning before leaving their hotel in Chiang Mai; there were signs of a five o’clock shadow on his face but not an actual beard.
She wondered if all of the Hazard men were as ruggedly handsome as this one.
Simon unbuttoned his denim shirt, yanked his arms out of the sleeves and hung the shirt up on a rusty nail that was pounded into the back of the door.
Sunday couldn’t take her eyes off him as he undressed. He was all bronzed skin and bronzed muscles, with a smattering of black hair in the center of his chest. The hair narrowed to a thin arrow over his taut abdomen and then eventually disappeared beneath the belt line of his blue jeans.
At some point, she realized that Simon was deliberately not looking at her. He avoided her eyes all the while he removed his shirt and even when he leaned over to extinguish the oil lamp.
The hut was plunged into darkness. The next sound was the distinctive rasp of a zipper being undone; he was taking off his jeans. Then she heard, rather than saw, Simon stretch out on the sleeping mat a few feet from her own.
Sunday didn’t move a muscle. She simply lay there in the dark with her arms straight down at her sides and the covers pulled up to her chin. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the sparse amount of li
ght that filtered into the room through the bamboo slats. She turned her head and stared at the shadowy outline she knew was Simon’s profile. She sensed somehow that his eyes were wide open.
It couldn’t be love.
Simon couldn’t be the man of her dreams. He didn’t come close to fitting the description.
Infatuation—that’s what it was. She was infatuated with him because he was different from the men she usually met, the type who were impeccably groomed, impeccably dressed and impeccably mannered. It was odd, Sunday reflected as she lay beneath the handwoven blankets, but there was a softness to the men she knew. She hadn’t been aware of it before, but it was perfectly obvious to her now.
Simon, on the other hand, was hard. Rock-hard. Perhaps strong was the better word. It wasn’t a skin-deep kind of strength, either. It was the kind of strength that went all the way through the man, all the way into his heart and soul and mind, from the tips of his scuffed cowboy boots to the top of his unruly head of hair.
Nonsense! Simon Hazard was just a man like any other man. “Who are you trying to kid?”
It wasn’t until a masculine voice said, “Who are you trying to kid about what?” that Sunday realized she had spoken out loud.
She didn’t answer the question. Instead, she made apologies. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“You didn’t. I wasn’t asleep.” Simon also wasn’t about to be deterred. “Who are you trying to kid?”
“It was nothing. I was simply thinking out loud,” Sunday said.
She tried to swallow the lump in her throat and failed. She consoled herself with the thought that it wasn’t every day a woman had to face the fact she’d fallen in love with a man who was a cowboy, a ne’er-do-well, an adventurer, not to mention a tour guide!
“You sleepy?” Simon asked.
“No.” She was wide-awake. “Are you?”
“Nope.”
“Do you want to—” she tried to swallow the strange lump again “—talk?”
“Talk?” She could hear the amusement in his voice. “Sure. Why not? What should we talk about?”
Love. Sex. Marriage. Children.
How did he feel about commitment? How did he feel about her? Was the attraction between them merely physical or did he think it went deeper?
She picked a safer topic. “Are you planning to stay in Thailand?”
“I don’t know.”
Silence.
“What kind of job did you have back in the States?”
“I was a businessman.”
It wasn’t much of an answer. Then it hit her. Good grief, maybe Simon didn’t want to talk about the past, maybe he’d been involved in something shady, or something secretive, or something he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—talk about.
Sunday wasn’t entirely sure where to go from here. But the problem was solved for her.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Simon said.
She adjusted the small pillow under her head. “No.” At least she didn’t think so.
“Have you ever been married?”
“No.” She hesitated only a fraction of a second. “Have you?”
“Nope.” There was a rustling noise. Simon had turned onto his side. He was facing her now. She could discern the outline of his chest, his hips, his long legs. He had his head propped up on one arm; the other arm was extended out in front of him. “Now that we’ve told Tget and Siri that you’re my woman and I’m your man, it feels different somehow, doesn’t it?” he observed.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t expect that,” he confessed.
“Neither did I.”
“I mean, we both know the ceremony was strictly a formality.”
“Strictly a formality,” she echoed.
“It isn’t binding in any way, shape or form, according to our legal and social system.”
“True.”
“Then why do I feel different?”
“I don’t know.” Her mouth was dry. “But so do I.”
Suddenly, out of the blue, Simon announced, “What I feel, Sunday, is married.”
So did she. It was the craziest thing.
He continued. “Frankly, with my family history, I’ve always thought of marriage as something you put on and took off at will...kind of like a suit coat.”
No doubt his father’s cavalier attitude toward marriage was to blame for that.
“It was Grand Central Station around our house,” Simon went on. “A constant parade of ex-wives, stepchildren, half brothers, new spouses, old spouses and an assortment of relatives that, as a kid, I never could figure out how I was related to.”
Poor Simon.
“At least my parents were married for most of my childhood,” he told her. “Since then, Dad has decided to change his mistress every two or three years, rather than his wife.“
Sunday was mildly shocked. “How old is your father?”
“A robust and amazing eighty-five, which makes him old enough to be my grandfather.”
“People have children at all stages of life,” she said weakly.
She could see Simon’s chest rise and fall with each lungful of air he took. “I don’t think anyone should have children at the age my father was when I was born.”
Sunday did some quick arithmetic. “Fifty, more or less?”
“More. The difference in my parents’ ages was one of their biggest problems. My mother was thirty years younger than my father when they were married. She wanted a child. He didn’t. After all, by then he already had four sons and four ex-wives. Mom got her way...for a while.” Simon paused. “How old are you?”
Sunday wasn’t concerned with being coy about her age. “Thirty. How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.” Simon absentmindedly rubbed his hand back and forth across his bare chest. “Tell me about your mother and father.”
“My family is perfectly ordinary.” She liked it that way.
“What is perfectly ordinary in—?”
“Cincinnati, Ohio.”
She could almost imagine the raised masculine eyebrow as Simon repeated, “Cincinnati, Ohio?”
“My father is a dentist in Cincinnati.”
“You have beautiful teeth.”
“Thank you.” She smiled to herself in the dark. “My mother is a high school English teacher. I have a younger brother who is studying to be an orthodontist. There are a few aunts and uncles on each side of the family tree, a number of cousins—several of whom we prefer not to claim—two sets of healthy grandparents and a great-grandmother who enjoys being a bit outrageous and a bit eccentric.”
“Well, if you can’t be a bit outrageous and a bit eccentric by the time you’re a great-grandmother, when can you be?” Simon ventured.
“That’s what Eleanor always says.” She wondered if she was boring him with such trivial talk. Not that Simon gave any indication of being bored. In fact, he seemed inordinately interested in hearing about her family. “That’s where I get my red hair—from Eleanor.”
“Eleanor is your great-grandmother?”
Sunday nodded. “That’s one of her eccentricities. When she turned ninety, she suddenly insisted that we all call her by her first name.” She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Unlike some of my relatives, at least Eleanor didn’t blink an eyelash at the Sports Illustrated cover.”
“I think I’d like to meet your great-grandmother,” he said. Then he added, “Think you’ll ever be a great-grandmother?”
“First, I’d have to become a mother and a grandmother, in that order.” Sunday counted to three. “Since I’m thirty and unmarried, I would say the chances are fairly slim.” In spite of the hill-tribe ceremony, they weren’t married and they both knew it.
Simon cleared his throat. “Surely a beautiful woman like you must have had dozens of marriage proposals.”
“A few.”
“A few?”
“Fewer than you might think,” she said, digging her teeth into her low
er lip.
“Why didn’t you accept any of them?”
“I had my reasons,” she said, hedging.
Simon was like a bulldog with a tasty bone between his teeth. He wasn’t about to give it up or to let it go. “Give me one good reason,” he prodded.
“Well,” Sunday began, trying to sort out her scattered thoughts, “I think all of us want to be loved for who we are, not for what we appear to be. Men—some men, anyway—are interested in having a fashion model draped over their arm like a decoration or a prize, like something they’ve won at the county fair.”
“A successful man can feel the same way, that a woman is only interested in appearances...like how big his bank account appears to be.” Simon returned to his original line of questioning. “Tell me another reason you haven’t married.”
She wasn’t going to be the only one to bare her soul. “I think it’s your turn.”
“Okay.” There was a faint abrasive sound of skin rubbing against skin. Simon was moving his hand back and forth across his chest again. “I guess I haven’t found a woman I want to spend my entire life with.”
“I haven’t found a man I want to spend my entire life with,” she stated.
“My turn again?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never met a woman who I thought could be my best friend, my lover, my wife and the mother of my children.”
“And I’ve never met a man who I thought could be my best friend, my lover, my husband and the father of my children.”
“No fair,” he told her. “You can’t keep repeating what I say. You have to give your own reasons.”
“All right.” Sunday pressed her lips together while she considered the wisdom—or foolhardiness—of telling Simon the truth. “I’ve never been crazy in love.” Until now.
“Neither have I,” he claimed.
“I’ve never been with a man who made me forget where I was, who I was, what I was doing.” She had forgotten all of those things and more last night when Simon had kissed her in the rain.
“I may have lost my head once or twice when I was a kid,” he volunteered, “but it’s been so many years ago that I can’t remember where or when.” Then, in a husky baritone that sent shivers down her spine, he confessed, “I lost my head last night, Sunday.”
The Maddening Model (Hazards, Inc.) Page 9
