The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

Chapter 12

“We can’t go back to the hotel,” said McCall. “That’s the first place they’ll look for us.”

“I know. I know.”

He glanced over at Ellie. She was sitting upright in her seat, eyes riveted on the headlights’ narrow path beyond the windshield, tense as a bird dog on point.

“Hey-we’ve got a good head start,” he said gently. “They can’t come after us in this. We’ve got some time.”

She threw him a look, but didn’t relax. “Not necessarily. Don’t forget, General Reyes is a pretty big cheese in Mexican law enforcement. All he needs to do is make one phone call. There won’t be anyplace in this country where we can hide.”

McCall ducked his head to peer upward into the wind-driven rain. “With any luck this storm will have knocked out his satellite hookup. If we can make it to Chetumal we’ll be okay. I’ve got a diving buddy there-he has a private plane. He can fly us to Merida. If we can get to the American consulate there we’ll be safe.”

“With any luck,” she muttered darkly. But she did sit back in her seat, at last, with an exhausted-sounding sigh.

They were on the main highway, heading east, according to Ellie’s wristwatch, which had turned out to be a compass, too, as he’d suspected it might. They’d stopped to change the tire as soon as they hit paved road, Ellie doing her best to convince him that since he was injured, she ought to be the one to do the job.

Now…McCall was well aware that the world had changed a lot since the 1950s, and that he’d traveled a long road from his dad’s garage in Bakersfield, California, and that women in this century were a whole lot different than his mother had been, with her soft white hands and red nail polish that had never so much as touched a dip-stick. But in his book, there were just some things a decent man didn’t do, and standing around holding a flashlight while a little tiny bit of a woman changed a tire for him was definitely one of them. Anyway, the wound in his arm had stopped bleeding, and even though it did still throb a bit, it was a long way from keeping him from being able to twirl a lug wrench.

Since then, the little VW had been churning slowly but steadily through the downpour, sending up wings of water on both sides of the car, occasionally sputtering a little, but otherwise hanging in there.

Which was about as much as could be said for her driver and passenger. Hangin’ in there.

“Luck’s been with us so far,” he said softly, looking over at the woman beside him. Looking at the curling tips of her wet hair, dark and somehow childlike against her pale forehead, at her tense profile and slumping shoulders. Wishing she’d just put her head back and sleep. Wishing he could gather her into his arms and hold her while she slept.

Instead, unexpectedly, she straightened up and laughed. “Providence…” she murmured. “That’s what my Aunt Gwen called it. And you know what? Knowing Gwen, I don’t think she’d be surprised to find out Providence has such a sense of humor.”

McCall snorted. “Sense of humor?” Personally, he was having a hard time finding much about the last couple of days that was funny.

She shifted in her seat, half facing him. “Ever since I got to this country I’ve been feeling kind of like Alice-in-Wonderland, you know? Everything flip-flopped, nothing like it was supposed to be. Now I’m thinking maybe all the time it was just Providence having this huge joke on me.”

“Some joke-damn near getting us both killed.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think it’s funny? I thought you couldn’t be trusted, you thought I was totally bad news, and all the time, we’re the good guys. Meanwhile, the head good guy, the man I’m supposed to trust, he turns out to be the head bad guy.”

“Hilarious,” he muttered under his breath. But he was beginning to see her point. He’d been wondering himself how his Goody Two-Shoes had turned into Indiana Jones.

“And then,” she went on, really warming to it, “you go and sacrifice your cigarettes so we can find our way back to the car, and I try to follow my family tradition and start a fire as a distraction so we can escape, and the rain completely ruins both our plans. But as it turns out, the rain is what saves us. See what I mean? Providence.”

McCall shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said with gravel in his voice. “You are what saved us, sister.”

She stared at him. “I’m what got us into this mess.”

“That may be true, but you’re also what got us out of it.” He cleared his throat and tried for a lighter tone. “You know, for a Goody Two-Shoes you’re pretty damn good at this cops-and-robbers stuff.”

There was a pause before she said, with a curious lilt in her voice, “For an artist-slash-beach bum, so are you…”

He looked at her and saw that she was smiling that glorious Cinnamon Girl smile. And when he remembered to look at the road again, he could see lights up ahead in the distance. They were coming into the outskirts of Chetumal.

Providence? He thought maybe that was as good a name for it as any.

Ellie sat shivering in the dark VW and watched McCall turn away from the pay phone, no longer even bothering to hunch up his shoulders when the deluge hit him, just letting it sluice down over him like a shower bath.

“Are the lines down?” she asked when he opened the door and she got a good look at his face.

“Nah.” He pulled the door shut with a jerk, sending water droplets flying everywhere in a way that reminded Ellie of a big wet dog. “I actually got through to him-his answering machine, anyway. He’s away on a dive. Says he’ll be back on the second.” His voice was strangely neutral, almost completely devoid of expression.

“That’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Or today-” she held her watch up close to her face and pressed the button to illuminate the numbers “-almost.”

“The Day of the Dead…” They sat in silence, McCall staring through the windshield at the grocery-store windows behind the pay phone, all boarded up against the hurricane Paulette never had quite become, Ellie staring at him. “So,” he said at last, glancing over at her with a look of apology. The fatigue in his face made her heart ache. She thought about his wounded arm, wondered again how bad it was and how much blood he’d lost. “That’s it, I guess. No help there.”

“Then let’s just get a motel room for tonight. If he’s going to be home tomorrow-”

“You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“What do we do for money? We left everything back in the hotel at Lago Bacalar.”

“Not…everything.” Ellie was already fishing around inside the beach bag. A moment later she gave a little grunt of triumph and held up the slender wallet containing her “cover” documents. “I still have Mrs. Burnside’s credit card-U.S. Government issue.”

He reached for her, took her face between his hands and gave her a swift hard kiss-an impulse born of joy he might have bestowed on just about anyone, but her heart gave a fiery little leap anyway. Already shaky with fatigue, she now felt a new kind of trembling, a strange pulsing vibration deep, deep inside.

“We’re in business,” he said huskily. “Now, if we can just find a hotel clerk awake at this hour…”

McCall knew Chetumal fairly well. Even in the darkness and pouring rain he didn’t have much trouble finding the place he’d had in mind. It was well away from the modern Holiday Inn-type hotels in the center of town, down near the docks-a fairly scruffy area, but the hotel had rooms that opened onto a central courtyard so at least they wouldn’t have to trek through a lighted lobby looking like drowned rats.

He parked the VW in a narrow side street and left Ellie there to wait for him while he went to try to rouse a hotel clerk. It took him a while, pounding on the door and the boarded-up windows of the lobby, but eventually, after he’d almost given up, a short stocky man came out of a door at the back of the office and shambled up to the night window, bleary-eyed and unshaven, scratching at the sleeveless white undershirt that covered his round belly. Though at first obviously not pleased to see a customer so late, especially one who must have looked as though he’d just come out second-best in a back-alley brawl, he perked up considerably when McCall showed him the credit card and offered to pay him double the going rate for what was left of the night.

With the room key in his pocket, he splashed his way back to the Volkswagen to find Ellie crouched down like a frightened rabbit with her head between the steering wheel and the back of the driver’s seat.

“I saw a car go by…out there, on the main street,” she explained in a croaking, slightly embarrassed whisper. “I thought…you know, just in case it might be-”

“Wouldn’t do you much good to hide,” he said mildly as he edged in behind the wheel. “It’s the car they’re going to be looking for.” She made a small, rueful sound and put a hand over her eyes. He threw her a glance. “If it makes you feel better, we can park it in the back, out of sight. But I don’t think they’d be after us yet. Not in this.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t had much to say for a while now-stress and fatigue wearing on her, he supposed. Only natural she’d be coming to the end of her rope, after everything she’d been through.

Except that there was something vibrant, almost electric about her silence, a strange kind of subaudible humming that seemed to reach out and touch him in the darkness and make his skin tingle and his heartbeat accelerate in response. In response to what, exactly, he didn’t know. Fear, he thought-uneasiness at being still in danger, still so vulnerable-that would make sense. Except that his own responses didn’t feel like fear. He wasn’t an adrenaline junkie and never had found fear a particularly enjoyable sensation, but right now what he felt like more than anything was a kid waiting in line to get on a really wild and scary roller-coaster ride.

He started the VW, rolled it slowly, almost silently down the narrow street and turned into the even narrower alley that ran behind the hotel. He parked, not bothering to lock it up. There was one more dash through the downpour, through water that ran ankle-deep in places, a brief struggle with a balky lock and an old key, and then they were inside, surrounded by walls and darkness and silence and, for the moment at least, safety.

It was humid and musty in the little hotel room, as it usually was in the tropics, with or without air conditioning. Without much hope, McCall flipped a switch near the door. Miraculously, light flooded the room and a ceiling fan reluctantly began circling.

“Power’s on, at least,” he muttered; it was by no means a given in that part of the Yucatan, even without a tropical storm.

He carefully avoided looking at the single bed in the room, which looked even smaller than the one in the “honeymoon suite” at Lago Bacalar in which he’d spent a mostly sleepless night-had it only been last night, twenty-four hours ago? It seemed like a month. He thought about how they’d discussed it then, who would sleep where, just as a matter of course. Why was it that now he couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t seem fraught with pitfalls, with infinite possibilities for misunderstanding?

He looked instead at Ellie, who had lowered the beach bag to the floor beside the dresser and was slowly taking off her sun visor.

“We should be safe here, for the time being, anyway,” he said gruffly. “At least until the storm moves on. Even with all his resources, there’s not much the general can do while it’s raining like this.”

Ellie nodded. She took off her wristwatch and placed it beside the sun visor. And still she hadn’t spoken.

“You can have first crack at the shower, if you want…”

Her body gave a little jerk, face turned away from him, and he heard a soft, ironic laugh. “Right now what I’d give almost anything for is just to be dry.”

He’d have liked to have laughed with her, but all he could come up with was a snort. “Best we can do is rinse our clothes out in the shower, wring ’em out good and hang ’em up for what’s left of the night-don’t think they’ll do much drying in all this humidity, but in the meantime we can share-I mean, each take part of the bedclothes…” Damn.

It didn’t help matters, the way she was looking at him now, arms raised, fingers combing her wet hair back from her face. The room light, under a parchment shade, gave her skin a warm, buttery glow. The freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks looked like a sprinkle of cinnamon. His mouth began to water. Then he happened to glance down, and it went dry instead. Under the clinging T-shirt, her small round breasts stood out in perfectly defined relief, nipples dark and-there was that word again-pert.

“Yeah,” she said softly, “we could do that.” She gave her head a little shake, then went on looking at him…her face so open, so honest, he wondered how he could ever have been so stupid as to believe her capable of committing a crime…or an infidelity. Even lying, he remembered, had made her blush. He remembered that he’d called her Goody Two-Shoes and wondered if that was why.

“McCall,” she said, tilting her head slightly to one side, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Shoot,” he said, a sound raspy as a snarl.

Her chin came up a notch, the only sign she gave of nervousness or that she might not be quite as confident as she seemed. “I know you don’t like personal questions, but I thought, since we’re about to make love, it would be really nice if I knew your name.”

It was a moment or two before he could speak at all, and in those moments he watched a blush creep across her face-not the bright hot lying flush he’d come to know, but the sweet shy pink of wild roses.

“Are we? Going to make love?” he asked gently.

She nodded. “Yeah, we are. Now that you know I’m not married, and I’ve proven I’m not too young for you, and after…everything we’ve been through, I think it’s high time. Though I realize that I’m probably going to have to seduce you. With your exalted sense of honor, you’ll probably say I’m not thinking rationally, or I’m too tired or too upset after everything that’s happened, and refuse to take advantage.” She gave an exasperated little sigh. “And you call me Goody Two-Shoes?”

Again for a few moments he could only gaze at her. He felt as though his body had been plugged into a powerful electrical circuit, temporarily shorting out his brain. Only for a moment, but apparently long enough for her to lose the tenuous grip she’d had on her self-confidence. As he watched, her face seemed to blur around the edges. She suddenly seemed almost unbearably young…achingly vulnerable.

“Unless, of course,” she said, her voice gone thick and ratchety and much deeper than usual, “you really don’t want to. If your arm hurts too much or if you’re too tired. I wouldn’t-”

He was across the room in less time than it took her to draw a breath in preparation, and took her face between his hands and stopped her words with his mouth. Stopped them right there. And while he was kissing her he thought of all the ways he’d kissed her before-or she’d kissed him. The first, desperate make-believe-wife’s kiss, then the little thank-you peck on the cheek, standing on tippy toes like a little child, that had made his sleeping heart stir and awaken to remembered pain. Then his own charade back there in the jungle, holding her close in his arms and nuzzling her ear, pretending to be drunk so he could tell her what he needed her to know. And the one after that…like water in the desert, like manna for the wandering pilgrim, the one that had made him believe in miracles again.

He wanted to erase them all. He wished with all his heart for this to be the first, their very first moment together…ground zero, the birthday of a brand-new life. But since he’d never been in on a birth before, anyway not one he remembered, he tried to make light of the awe he felt, did his best to deny the overwhelming joy.

Drawing back from her only a little, he said in his customary growl, “My arm doesn’t hurt and I’m not too tired. Quit fussing over me, woman.” Then he gave her a Snidely Whiplash smile, all the while quivering inside with a giddiness that was more like Little Nell. “Have to say, though, I rather like the notion of you seducing me. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, for starters-” and he could feel her body trembling, too “-I thought we could share the shower. Save hot water-”

“Overkill,” he rasped. And her laughter sang across his lips and danced on his tongue.

He tasted rain and orange blossoms. She smelled of hot cinnamon and brown earth. Her warm body was the Sunday-morning kitchens of his childhood, and the ache inside him the wistful yearnings he remembered from back then, hearing his parents laughing and whispering together behind the closed door of their bedroom. Longing overtook him, so intense he felt a chill of panic, like a gusty little wind through his soul.

He withdrew from her mouth again and stared down into her face, holding it between his two hands like a treasure he’d found, brushing his thumbs across the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. Her eyes gazed back at him, shimmering with a soft golden light. “So, seduce me,” he said in a ragged, breaking whisper. “Give it your best shot.”

The only reply she could manage was a tiny whimpering laugh; her lips were hot and swollen, useless for forming words, though ideally suited, she supposed, for seduction. Give it your best shot… If only she knew what that might be! She wasn’t a virgin-she’d ceased to be one much earlier and more foolishly than she’d intended, and hadn’t always been Miss Goody Two-Shoes in the years since-but…seduction? In spite of the brashness of her opening gambit, she wasn’t at all sure how she should proceed. Would it be better to take off his shirt first, she wondered, or her own?

His hands were on her neck, now, so warm and rough…callused and gentle. She wanted to lean and round herself into them, like a kitten; she could feel herself vibrating inside with a deep inner current, like purring. Her eyelids wanted to close.

“I’m not sure…” she licked her lips and felt his lips, his tongue…their moisture blend with hers “…what I should do.”

“Silly girl…you don’t have to do anything, don’t you know that? Just be.”

She looked at him then, really looked at him, her passion-fogged eyes struggling to focus on his familiar beard-stubbly face. And all at once, as if the fog had suddenly lifted, she felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. Oh yes, there was the openness and honesty she’d seen there before, the character and strength and compassion. But now, for the first time she saw loneliness and longing, and realized that they’d been there all the time. And something else, now, too, lurking like a wild thing behind the challenge in his eyes…a hunger so intense and so agonizing, her loving, giving soul cried out in instinctive rejection of it-though all she let him hear of that was a tiny sound that might easily have been mistaken for a laugh.

Confidence flooded her. Her heart felt certain and strong-in bewildering contradiction to the trembling weakness in other parts of her. “Take my shirt off,” she ordered in a shaking whisper.

She heard a low growl of warning that seemed to come from deep inside his chest, and then his hands were on her shoulders, clutching, pulling…gathering the cold clinging material of her T-shirt and peeling it up and off her like an old skin. The growl deepened in intensity when she reached for him, meaning to return the favor, and he put his hands up like a barricade, holding hers at bay while he looked. Just…looked. Her heart flip-flopped. A great shiver tore through her.

Instantly, he reached for her, offering her his warmth, a sigh of compassion on his lips. But now it was she who held him off, with a scolding cluck and a murmured, “Uh-uh-me…”

Then she divested him of his shirt, though not nearly as quickly and cleanly as he had hers. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons, and she had to fight a childish urge to rip them apart. She was whimpering, barely realizing it, by the time she’d managed to pull the two halves of the shirt apart; her breathing ceased…her heart hammered as she pushed them back over his shoulders and down.

And just like that the game of seduction they’d been playing collapsed. A shudder rocked her. She gave a horrified cry and dropped the shirt to the floor. “Oh God- McCall, your arm,” she cried as she reached instinctively toward the ugly, dark-crusted slash across the fleshy part of his shoulder. “Oh Lord-I forgot-we should have-here, let me-”

Again, the sound he made was much like a growl. “Sister,” he warned, “don’t you dare stop now.”

His arms came around her, and she gasped when his cold skin met hers. He trapped her gasp with his mouth and gave it back to her, and then her hungry little cries and deep rasping breaths and thundering heartbeats were blending with his in a duet as old as passion and compelling as drums on a hot and sultry night. She no longer heard the rain…forgot she’d ever been chased through a jungle and shot at in a Mayan ruin. Forgot about the fact that there were men who wanted to kill her, and McCall, too. Only one thing mattered, and that was the man in her arms…and the fact that she was in his arms…and the fact that she loved him.

There was no more talking, no more playing at seduction; the rest of their clothing came off…somehow; neither of them remembered how, exactly, or cared. Then he was bearing her down onto a hasty tumble of bedclothes, and his careless and sensitive fingers were urging her body into quivering compliance, molding it to his wishes like a master sculptor. Sighing, she closed her eyes and let his touch paint her world with the colors of joy…primary colors…sunshine colors…like a child’s box of crayons. Then, with the warmth and generosity of spirit that was her nature, she gave the joy back to him.

Poised on the brink of accepting what she so eagerly offered him, he pulled back, his weight braced on his arms. She gave a soft, inquiring cry; she could feel him trembling, all his muscles taut with self-control. And when he spoke, his voice was guttural with strain.

“It’s Quinn,” he said.

A smile broke like a sunrise across her face. “Quinn…” she softly sighed, and wrapped him in that warmth and brought him home.

Exhausted, McCall lay awake, listening to the rhythms of wind and rain and watching the ceiling fan stir sluggishly in the sultry air. Just below his chin and near enough to brush with his lips if he only tilted his head the slightest bit, Ellie’s cinnamon head rose and fell gently, like a boat riding a swell.

He didn’t wonder about the ache of sadness deep inside his own chest, just beneath that tender weight, when such a short time ago he’d known happiness more intense than anything he’d ever imagined. The course of his life so far had taught him that the flip side of such happiness could only be despair.

What had he been thinking of? How had he fallen so short of his own moral code? Not, “Live and let live,” but the code that had dogged him so quietly and insistently all his life, in spite of all his efforts on certain occasions to drown its implacable voice. He’d never been one to act so precipitously, without considering the far-reaching consequences of his actions.

Very short-term, the woman sleeping in his arms was pleasure, the most incredible pleasure he’d ever known. Long-term, she was pain, pain such as he’d promised himself he’d never allow himself to know again. She was that ultimate cruelty-a glimpse of the heaven he couldn’t have. He thought he knew, now, how Moses must have felt, gazing across at that Promised Land.

Short-term, she was sugar and spice, warmth and generosity and laughter and common sense-all the woman a man could ever dream of, wrapped up in one pert and sexy little package. Long-term…there was no way in hell she’d ever want to stay with him. No way in hell.

His heart gave a lurch as the tender weight on his chest lifted. He propped his head on his uninjured arm so he could meet the eyes that gazed sleepily at him, luminous in the lamplight and wondering as a baby’s.

“Hi,” he said, and waited for the miracle of her smile.

“Hi, yourself.” Her voice was rusty with the aftereffects of sex, stimulating recently awakened responses in him. Pain twisted in his belly as he watched the smile break across her face. It’s beginning, he thought. Already.

“Quinn…” she said, testing its sound like a child learning a new word. “Quinn.” She said it again, liking the crisp, clean sound of it. How like him it is, she thought. A little unusual, but simple…uncomplicated. Honest. She stretched to kiss him. “Nice to know you. Nice to know…who I’m kissing.”

“You don’t know me.” His voice was harsh, and she froze in wary surprise, watching him. “You don’t know anything about me, remember?”

She said nothing for several heartbeats, her gaze relentless, so searching, so intent he couldn’t bear it, finally, and looked away. When he felt her small hands on his jaw, firmly pulling him back to her, his chest contracted with the pain of a strange guilty happiness.

“I know enough,” she said softly…stubbornly. “I know everything I need to know.”

Enough for what? he wanted to know. Enough for this? For a few hours of pleasure snatched from a nightmare day? For a few days or weeks out of the rest of his life? He was dismayed to discover that “this” wasn’t enough for him anymore-if indeed it ever had been. That after tonight the “live and let live” numero uno solamente existance he’d nurtured and guarded so carefully for so many years wasn’t ever going to be enough for him again.

He made a wordless sound of denial, of rejection, not of her but of the pain that overwhelmed him when he looked at her, trying to pull himself away, turn away from that piercing golden glare.

“You don’t-” he began.

She stretched up and pressed her lips against his, stopping him there. “I do,” she insisted in her funny, raspy little growl. “I know who you are, Quinn McCall. I know what you are. It took me a while to realize it, I know, but I do. You’re kind-” embarrassed, he made a sound of denial, which she silenced in her usual way “-and decent and honorable. Honest. And caring. You’re brave and clever and resourceful…” She paused, finally, eyes glowing, her lips bringing her smile close enough for him to taste it. “And…you’re one damn fine kisser, McCall.”

He laughed with her, then, but reluctantly, opening the purse strings that held his happiness and letting a small measure trickle into his heart like a miser relinquishing his gold. Let this be enough, he thought, filling his arms and hands and senses with her, trying to drink in the very essence of her the way he once had the orange blossoms of his childhood.

Thinking that maybe, if he could somehow make her a part of himself, he wouldn’t have to let her go.

Ellie dreamed that she and McCall were riding horseback on her parents’ farm back in Iowa. She was riding Belle, her first gentle mare, and McCall was riding Rocky, Belle’s far more rambunctious colt. They were happy, carefree, laughing like children as they galloped down the dirt lane between lush green fields, with the sunshine hot on their shoulders and a sweet summer wind lifting their hair and rustling through the leaves and stalks of corn.

Then suddenly, in her dream the world darkened. The wind turned fierce and gusty, and carried with it a strange, evil smell. Looking over her shoulder, Ellie saw the sky had turned that terrible color all midwesterners know and dread-the thick yellowish-purple of old bruises. The very air around her felt heavy and menacing.

“Tornado!” she screamed. She couldn’t see it in the gathering darkness, but she could feel it, feel it like a massive and evil presence, coming deliberately and with purpose, straight for them. “Run!”

Then somehow the horses were gone and she and McCall were running, running hand-in-hand through the cornfields, chests straining and breath like fire in their lungs, afraid to look back, but knowing the tornado was there, coming after them, gaining on them, that strange, evil smell growing stronger and stronger, the aura of menace becoming thicker and heavier, suffocating her…

She woke up in cold vibrating terror. The strange evil smell was still with her, only now she knew what it was. Cigars. And she knew, too, that the menace was real, and that it was there in the room with her.