None of which seemed to McCall to fit with the kind of woman who’d do business with thugs and smugglers in dangerous backstreet bars. At least not for the sake of the money involved.
Unless her husband had gotten her into this. He supposed that might make sense; he’d heard there were women out there who’d do anything for the men they loved. Never met one in his lifetime, but…hey, who knew?
But-that was another thing-what about that blush? The one that showed up every time she mentioned that absent husband of hers. What the hell was that all about?
He stirred angrily-then froze as he heard rustlings from the other room. The creak of rattan. His houseguest was restless, too, it seemed. He wondered if she could be lying awake as he was, staring wide-eyed into the shadows and wondering about him.
Just for a moment-though it might have been his imagination-he caught a whiff of her orange-blossom scent, carrying him back once again to a distant past, and the sweet, sad ache that always came over him when he thought about his beginnings…his boyhood…his parents. From across the room the photograph on the dresser was only a faint rectangular edge in the darkness, but he could see his mom’s and dad’s faces in his mind, looking, as always, not out at him but toward each other. It was the way he remembered them-high-school sweethearts, lovers first, parents only a distant second to that.
McCall knew he’d come a long way from Bakersfield, California, in more ways than one. Why was it, looking back at times like this, he always got the feeling he’d missed a turn somewhere along the way?
Damnation, he needed to sleep; he had what looked to be a long and uncertain day ahead of him. What he needed was a cigarette-that would help. Yeah…and a shot or two of tequila. But…since he had a guest in his living room and a hard and fast rule against smoking in bed, he got up as quietly as he knew how, pushed the window open and, cigarettes and lighter in hand, stepped onto the veranda.
Far down at the other end of the veranda, Ellie heard the window creak open on its hinges. When she saw the shadowy form emerge she tensed instinctively and flattened herself against the wall. A dumb thing to do, she immediately realized. Even without a moon she’d be plainly visible against the white wall, if he chose to look this way.
If he didn’t hear her first. Counting her thudding heartbeats and trying not to breathe, she watched a lighter flare…a tiny bud, blossoming into a wider glow that included cupped hands…a face…deeply hooded eyes. There was a click, and the face slipped once more into shadow. She heard an exhalation…a soft, grateful sigh.
I have to let him know I’m here, Ellie thought. Oh lord… But better now than later.
Summoning her courage, she pushed herself away from the wall. “Don’t freak out. Just wanted to let you know you weren’t alone.”
Other than a little grunt of surprise, he said nothing. She watched the glowing end of his cigarette arc upward, flare briefly, then wink out. Cupped in his hand, perhaps, or obscured by his body.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she explained, her voice gruff with nervousness. “Thought maybe some fresh air would help.”
He cleared his throat, but when he spoke his voice was as gravelly as hers. “Told you that couch wasn’t comfortable.”
“No, no-it wasn’t that.” She smiled, even though he wouldn’t see it. “Or Inky, either. I think maybe I’m just a little nervous-about tomorrow.” That was true enough, but only partly. The other reasons for her sleeplessness she didn’t want to think about or examine too closely.
She moved away from the wall, inhaling deeply as she looked out over dark rooftops and darker water toward a horizon that was fading to milky gray. “It’s nice out here, though. I think there’s going to be a moon. Not full though-not for a few more days.”
Again the cigarette’s tiny yellow eye winked at her, and again he said nothing. Finally, she let the breath out in a rush and leaned against the base of an arch, her back to the view. “This is awkward for you, isn’t it? Having me here.” She waited, and when he still didn’t respond, added dryly, “I take it you don’t have too many visitors.” At least, not like me…not the kind of visitor that sleeps on the couch.
There was the faint hiss of an exhalation, and then a grudging, “Not many.”
Okay, Ellie thought, he just stepped out for a smoke and doesn’t feel like talking. I can handle that. Don’t take it personally. It isn’t like the man’s a scintillating conversationalist at the best of times.
But the silence was like a tender tooth she couldn’t stop herself from probing.
“Seems funny,” she remarked after a moment. “It’s your house, and you have to come outside for a cigarette?”
This time the winking yellow eye was accompanied by a grunt that may have been amusement. “Not generally.” His voice was raspy in the darkness. “Just don’t smoke in bed, is all. Habit I picked up a long time ago, when I was…”
“Married?” Ellie ventured when he left it unfinished. Then, momentarily emboldened by his soft affirming chuckle, she got as far as, “How did-” before stopping herself with a hand clapped across her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled, more resentful than contrite. “Forgot myself there for a minute.”
She listened to the night’s sounds…the rustle of breezes in tropical foliage, the far-off barking of a dog. The faint sound of a throat being cleared. She pushed abruptly away from the arch and let out her breath in an exasperated rush. “Dammit, McCall. I don’t think I’m a nosy person. Really. I mean, it’s normal for strangers forced together by circumstances to ask each other questions. It’s not prying, it’s…it’s just trying to find a common ground. Like, ‘What do you do for a living? Where are you from? Are you married? Have any kids? Read any good books lately?’ Then you go from there. Maybe you find out you don’t have anything in common with this person and you never want to see them again as long as you live. Or, maybe you hit it off and you’ve made a new friend. How are you ever going to know if you don’t talk?”
There was a long pause. Then, just as Ellie was uttering a whimper of pure frustration, the raspy voice came again. “Maybe I just like to maintain an air of mystery.” Definitely amused.
Ellie’s frustration morphed into a kind of cautious joy. A little frisson of excitement shivered through her, finding its way into her voice. “You mean, like Batman?”
The cigarette’s ember arced away into the night, exploding in a tiny shower of sparks as it made contact with the ground. “Batman?” The chuckle seemed easier this time, though loaded with irony. “A superhero? Not hardly.”
“Hey, if you don’t want me to know the real story, you could always make something up,” Ellie suggested. “Then, I’ll tell you something back-”
“Make up something, you mean?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
“So we stand here and tell each other lies.”
“At least we’d be speaking.” But she felt breathless, suddenly, and not from laughter. And a peculiar shaking deep inside. Did he know? Could he read her so easily? Liar liar, pants on fire…
For a moment there while they’d been talking she’d begun to move closer to him, as if words were an invisible line pulling them together in the alienating darkness. Now she saw the space between them as a zone of safety and shrank back into it, the darkness an ally, protection for her own lies. Necessary lies, she told herself. It wasn’t as if she had any choice.
“For instance,” she went on, but too quickly, her voice too light and too glib, “you could tell me how you and your wife were childhood sweethearts, and she died tragically when she fell overboard on your honeymoon cruise, and that’s why you don’t have any children, and ever since-”
“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid,” he interrupted dryly. “My wife and I met in college. We’re divorced. Not having kids was a mutual decision-a wise one, as it turned out.”
“Ah,” said Ellie. A dozen new questions were buzzing around in her brain. College? You went to college? Where? How long were you married? Why didn’
t you want kids? Was it the divorce that brought you here? Then she remembered. “Is that the true story?” she asked suspiciously. “Or did you make it up?”
“Ah, but that’s the question, isn’t it?” His chuckle was soft and dry as the wind in the bird-of-paradise. “That’s the trouble with lies-after the first one, you can’t ever know what to believe.”
Now it was Ellie who had nothing to say. And suddenly, inexplicably, there were tears welling up in her eyes-where had they come from? Rose Ellen Lanagan was not and never had been a crybaby! But she’d never felt this overwhelming sense of loss and loneliness, either-an intense longing for something she couldn’t even put a name to, but which she knew for certain did not involve lies.
“Your turn,” McCall said softly.
“I beg your pardon?” Ellie mumbled. Had he asked her a question? She’d no idea what.
“Your husband. You told me his name-my name now, I suppose-is Ken.”
“Right,” said Ellie, trying surreptitiously to stop her nose from running without resorting to a telltale sniff. “Ken Burnside.”
“And that the two of you own a pet shop in Portland, Oregon.” There was a pause. “So…if you grew up on a farm in Iowa, how did you two meet?”
“At a ‘Save the Whales’ rally,” Ellie returned instantly-defiantly. Well, it could have been true, dammit!
She heard him mutter, laughing, under his breath. Something that sounded like “Goody Two-Shoes,” and then, “Figures…”
Goody Two-Shoes? Why did he always say that? She sucked in a breath, feeling vaguely insulted and gravely misunderstood. But after holding the breath for a half-dozen or so pulse-pounding beats, she let it out without a sound. What did it matter what he thought of her? The man obviously had no interest in knowing who she really was-even if she’d been free to tell him. She’d bent over backward to be friendly, and he didn’t seem to want to meet her even halfway-which was particularly hard for her to swallow, since she’d always been the kind of person who made friends easily wherever she went. People just naturally liked Ellie Lanagan. Most people. Apparently not this person. Was that why it bothered her so much? Some perversity in her nature, some contrary streak that caused her to be attracted to the one person seemingly immune to her charms?
There. I said it: I am attracted to him. I’m fiercely attracted to a scruffy and somewhat mysterious beach-bum-slash-artist-slash-social-dropout I know only as McCall.
It was almost a relief to admit it. She felt better immediately, though perhaps a little shaky-rather as if she’d finally pulled out a painfully inflamed splinter.
That’s all it is, she thought. Just an attraction. I’ve had them before, though probably never one as dumb as this. Now I can laugh at myself and put it aside. Concentrate on the job ahead of me. Keep my wits about me. Now I can sleep.
“Well,” she said abruptly, “I believe I’ll give that couch another try. Good night, McCall.”
She heard a click, a faint hiss and crackle, and then a soft and ironic, “Good night…Mrs. Burnside.”
After she’d gone back inside, McCall sat for a long time on his bedroom windowsill, smoking and watching the moon rise out of Tropical Storm Paulette’s cloudy veil, contemplating the nature of lust and sin. And, like most people confronted with their own guilt, trying as hard as he could to rationalize it.
Well, hell, he told himself, how was he supposed to remember she was a married woman when she kept forgetting to act like one? Not that she’d openly flirted with him, or done anything overtly improper-besides kissing him, of course, and there’d been extenuating circumstances for that. No, it wasn’t so much what she’d done, as what she didn’t do. She didn’t talk about her husband, for one thing. Every married woman he’d ever met, happy or unhappy, it seemed like they couldn’t seem to get a complete sentence out without mentioning hubby one way or another. It was, “my husband says this,” or “my husband does that.” This woman almost never brought up her husband’s name, unless McCall did so first, and when he did, she’d blush. And that was another thing. It was true that, in McCall’s experience at least, women in love generally tended to light up when speaking of their beloved. But with sort of a happy glow, not going all flustered like this woman did, as if she were embarrassed by even the suggestion of such intimacy.
No, he thought, there was definitely something not quite right with the Burnsides.
Not that it was any of McCall’s business. Happy or unhappy, right or not right, he didn’t get involved with married women. End of story.
Which brought him back to his internal debate on the nature of lust and of sin. For various reasons, McCall wasn’t big on religion, but he did believe wholeheartedly in the concept of sin. Hey, there was right, and there was wrong, no getting around that. And no matter how hard a man might try to get around it, in his heart he mostly always knew the difference. Which was why, at the moment, he was having a little argument with himself over whether lusting after a married woman in his heart was actually a sin. Oh, sure, according to the gospel and Jimmy Carter, thinking was supposed to be the same as doing, but given the nature of human beings, McCall was pretty sure there’d be quite a bit of slack involved there. He figured a man was in the clear as long as he didn’t do anything about his thoughts. Okay, there was that commandment-he couldn’t remember which number-the one about not coveting thy neighbor’s wife. But he felt certain he was okay on that score, too, because the way he understood it, covet meant wanting to have for himself, and the last thing McCall wanted was to have any woman for himself-married or otherwise.
For the past seven years he’d been careful to keep his liaisons with women uncomplicated and hassle-free- “safe sex” being a concept he took very seriously, in more ways than one. And if there was anything he was certain of right now it was that this woman-whether she went by Ellie Lanagan, Mrs. Ken Burnside or Cinnamon, as she would always be to McCall-could complicate his life in ways he hadn’t even thought of yet.
He tossed away his cigarette, but instead of reaching immediately for another, sat very still for a while, listening to the sounds of the night: the singing of insects and of frogs, wind rustling through palm trees, the disconcerting crunching noises Inky was making somewhere in the dark bedroom behind him. The small voice inside him that kept saying, Fool, she’s already complicated your life, don’t you know that?
Oh, yeah. Forget about the perky little breasts, smooth, tan legs, cinnamon freckles, ratchety voice and killer smile. There was still the small fact that, as of this moment, he was guilty of aiding and abetting her in the commission of a felony. What was he going to do about that?
He had until tomorrow to think of something.
From the crossroads town of Tulum, the highway left the coast and angled abruptly inland. Ellie, who’d been dividing her attention between the view from the VW’s windows and the map spread across her lap, rubbernecked so avidly when they passed the marked turnoffs to the Mayan ruins at Coba on the right, and the Punta Allen peninsula on the left, that McCall asked her about it.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, but with a wistful sigh. “I was just wishing-”
“Say the word,” he said roughly. “If you want to change your mind about going through with this-”
“No, no-I’d just like to see the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve someday, that’s all.”
McCall gave her a quick, hard look. “Not the ruins? That’s where most tourists wind up-unless you’re into reef diving.”
Ellie shrugged. “I’m not much into ruins. It’s the wildlife that interests me-you know, the birds, the animals.”
“Ah,” said McCall. “Of course.” From Ellie’s angle his smile looked wry, and without much humor.
“Well, have you ever been there?”
He threw her a glance. “To the Reserve? Nah-been down the peninsula, though, many times. Diving.”
“What’s it like?”
He gave her the same crooked smile, but it seemed easier, now. She could see
the creases at the corner of his eye. “It’s a great place to go if you want to get away from the world. And don’t mind a few inconveniences.”
“Well,” said Ellie dryly, “I can see why you’d love it.” And she was pleased beyond proportion when he laughed.
It didn’t take much encouragement, then, for him to tell her about his travels on the peninsula, and his adventures diving the reefs along the coast there. She listened to him talk, shivering with a strange happiness, marveling at how articulate he was, how comfortable with himself and with words when the subject wasn’t his personal or past life. Questions rushed into her mind like an unexpected gust of wind, leaving her breathless, unsettled, off-balance.
What must he have been in his former life-a lawyer? Teacher? Used-car salesman? CEO? He was good with people, once. He had a wife. Money, too-he said so. What could have happened, to make him give it all up? What was it that brought him here?
For once, wisely, she kept her curiosity to herself, and instead opened her mind and allowed it to wander through the worries and uncertainty she’d been ruthlessly trying-without much luck-to squelch.
Who is this man? Can I really trust him? Just because he has kind eyes, and a kinkajou… Am I out of my mind to be doing this?
At the time, of course, back there in that cantina, she’d felt as though she’d had no choice. She’d been scared, at a loss, and he’d walked in. And later, it had seemed unthinkable to let it all fall through, with the money paid, the arrangements in place…all the months of preparation…to let it all be for nothing. Now…oh, it seemed so clear to her now…she knew that what she should have done was inform General Reyes and let him break the news to the USFWS and let them figure out what to do about it.
She could still do that. It wasn’t too late. I can call the whole thing off.
The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes Page 10
