In Name Only (9 page)

She looked at him curiously from afar when she returned to the bar. He was still wearing the double-breasted business suit in which he married her, the shirt still closed by the slim tie. When did he relax, she wondered, loosen his collar, come down to earth?

Yet when she approached the table, he stood up at once and smiled, as if genuinely pleased to see her.

"Everything okay?" he asked, planting a kiss on her cheek.

"Fine." She sat down next to him.

"Hungry?"

"No."

"Sure?"

She smiled. "I'm sure."

When at last they were seated aboard the Bolivian jet, Jill felt ready for sleep. Simon, on the other hand, had slipped his briefcase under the seat, and regarded her with smiling eyes. The plane leveled in its flight. "Now," he said, "I know everything about you. What can I tell you that would be interesting?"

Jill began to laugh, but when she looked at her husband's face, his deep-set eyes watching her earnestly, she stopped and drew her breath in quickly. She realized, astonishing herself, that there was nothing so interesting at that moment as the idea of his lips against hers. It startled her, and for a few seconds she continued to stare at him, amazed.

"Yes?" he asked.

"I didn't say a word," she murmured, feeling oddly free of the droning of the engine, the movement swirling about them, feeling as if somehow she floated in a vacuum.

As if he quite understood her message, Simon leaned forward and kissed her, barely touching her lips.

"More," she whispered, pressing her mouth full against his, her hands on his sleeves.

He pulled away abruptly, and Jill was aware of the flight attendant standing in the aisle, looking down at them, regarding them with a faint smile.

Simon gave a strange, half-strangled laugh, as if relieved at the interruption. He ordered some coffee for them both. Jill leaned back in her seat. More. What in the world could she have been thinking of?

"Oh, won't this trip ever end?" she groaned.

"It's hardly begun."

"Well, why don't you pull out that briefcase of yours and do some work," she snapped. "You don't want to waste a precious minute, do you?"

"Temperamental," Simon remarked, as if adding it to a list of her attributes.

"Not temperamental. Bored, tired, hungry."

"Hungry," Simon said. "The child doesn't eat and then complains that she's hungry. We'll have to watch that when we get home."

"Home," Jill exclaimed. "I don't even know where that is or what it is. Home. How can you talk about home when you won't tell me about it?" She paused, aware that she was both tired and feeling silly.

"Home is a big, rambling villa with a red tiled roof and more rooms than you can count," Simon told her patiently. "It's watched over by Senhora Cordero who will take you in hand at once and make certain you eat."

"And plump me out, no doubt. Where did my uncle live?"

"In a hotel. He planned to buy a villa when you came down. Our life styles were quite different. He wanted nothing but the clothes on his back, until he began getting paternal feelings as far as his niece was concerned. On the other hand, I purchased Las Flores in order to preserve an old bit of Manaus before the bulldozers got to it."

"Is it very old?"

"Turn of the century. It has all the lovely plumbing conveniences newly installed. You'll like it."

Jill regarded him curiously. "How did you and my uncle meet?"

"In the jungle to be precise. I worked for a construction company at the time. We were putting a road through a rough part of Amazonia. The Indians didn't want to give up a piece of it, and I don't blame them. Your uncle was a geologist searching for manganese deposits. He traveled light with a couple of Indian guides, but it was their territory. He was set upon one night; the guides disappeared, and when I came upon him he was running for his life. Just one of those lucky meetings. There I was in my jeep, and there he was. After that it was just a matter of time before we formed Carteret-Todd and went out to do a little mining of our own."

"Is the jungle still so dangerous?" Jill asked.

"The Indians are more peaceable now perhaps, but the frontier towns are rough, anyway. Camp Esmeralda, where we're digging for manganese is one of them. That's where your uncle was felled by the log."

"Why was he there, though? I mean, if Carteret-Todd is so successful, why wasn't he in a safer place, like an office or something?"

"Your uncle was a tough character. Dan liked a fight," Simon told her. "He liked to be where the action was. It wasn't enough for him to sit in an ivory tower. He felt he had to be in everything."

"And you?" Jill asked quietly, her heart in her mouth. "You don't just chase danger for the fun of it, do you?"

Simon turned to her and regarded her with an affectionate smile that surprised and pleased her, until he spoke. "I'm afraid, my young bride, that I do."

A light tapping on her arm woke Jill, blinking, unable for a moment to place herself in time or even space.

"We're here." Simon stirred in his seat, unfastening his seat belt buckle.

"Manaus?" Jill looked out the window and saw that the plane had stopped a short distance from a low, modern, brightly lit building. The ground was wet, and a light rain was falling. "So soon?" she asked, stretching luxuriously. She had fallen asleep at once, as soon as the plane had taken off from Caracas.

Simon draped his raincoat about her shoulders for the short run from the plane to the customs shed. The air, even with the rain, felt pleasant and cool and she welcomed it after the long plane ride with its stale, clinging odor of upholstery and food and cigarette smoke.

There had been few passengers on the early morning flight from Caracas, and their passage through customs went easily and with a minimum of fuss. Outside, a limousine with a sleepy looking driver waited for them.

"Is it a long ride?" Jill asked, stifling a yawn, and settling into the back seat.

"Forty-five minutes or so."

Staring into the black night, she discovered flat, open fields on either side of the limousine, rather than the jungle she anticipated.

"Where's the jungle?" she asked.

"I'm afraid that as Manaus spreads, the jungle recedes, but don't worry, there's plenty of it to go around. You just have to go farther to see it."

"Is the house right in the city?" Jill asked, unable to mask a growing excitement.

"Right in the city."

"Ah."

"I promise you won't be disappointed." His voice, disembodied, remote, had an edge of amusement to it.

She was silent. Disappointed about what? She had absolutely no notion about the way Simon lived, the way they would live. How could she? She had had scarcely enough time to catch her breath and she was married; literally swept off her feet by a handsome stranger, just like in the fairy stories she had read avidly as a child. Swept off, carried away to a distant kingdom by a knight in a double-breasted business suit. Two people suddenly brought together who had nothing in common but the memory of Daniel Carteret—and Daniel Carteret's fortune.

Hardly five days had passed since Simon Todd had walked into her life. Five days and a lifetime. Now they were racing through the dark toward a city she had thought was in a jungle—a jungle that had miraculously disappeared. What other tricks were in store for her?

A sudden light flashed in the car and she looked across at the man who had become her husband. He was lighting a cigarette, and for a second, his face, as still and immobile, and quite as cold as granite, was lit by the flame. Then, with only the red glow of the cigarette ash to place him, he was gone. She had skirted thinking about it seriously until now. This was their wedding night. It was still their wedding night. Was it possible that this cool stranger would take her in his arms and make love to her?

Did she want him to? She thought of his kisses, given freely as illustrations merely, illustrations for the sake of Jay Wilhelm and Mrs. Hughes. Illustrations to show the difference between romantic love and sex for the mere pleasure of it. Always illustrations. And the trouble was, she had thoroughly enjoyed every one of his lessons.

She wanted to talk to him about it, to lay it all on the line, but there was something forbidding in his silence that made her quite afraid. He was a man who would take what he wanted, how he wanted it, when he wanted it. You couldn't set out to conquer the jungle and have it any other way.

But I don't love you, Mr. Todd
. She remembered the way the words had burst out. He had laughed and teased her about romantic love, as if she were a simpleminded teenager. And she recalled his kiss, and how she had been unaccountably stirred as she had never been in a year of Derek's kisses. What was it? Merely the touch of lips to lips. That was all. Jill shifted uneasily in her seat. What in the world could she be thinking of? Simon Todd had made it quite clear that theirs was a marriage of convenience, and she had acquiesced. It was all a matter of money, and she mustn't forget it, mustn't forget it for a moment, because when she forgot it, she might have to think about her future, and that was forbidden territory. To think about a loveless future, a future without a real husband and children, all for the sake of a fortune, was unbearable.

She had married this stranger for money, her uncle's money. She had married him to get away from snow and Chicago, and a silly job in a city where no one wanted to hire a college graduate who could speak excellent Portuguese—and that was all.

Outside the window, the monotony of flat plains flashing by was broken by an occasional light in the distance. The rain continued and they seemed to be suspended in a dark space, the tunnel of love without love, lit only by headlights, making her feel as if she were traveling endlessly, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. Perhaps Manaus did not really exist except on the maps, and this mysterious man had kidnapped her.

"Simon?" She wanted to hear his voice, to know that everything was all right.

"Mmm."

"Where in the city?" She asked the question haphazardly, not expecting an answer, yet knowing somehow that he understood her.

"You'll see it soon enough."

She lapsed back into silence. They would live separate lives, perhaps in separate quarters. Simon might even have a woman somewhere, a woman whom he would turn to, a woman who would understand the kind of man he was, and how he had to marry to retain control of Carteret-Todd.

"You'll have to excuse me," she said. "I suppose I'm being impatient or tired or excited or something." Her voice faded off.

The cigarette ash glowed. Faint traces of smoke were blown into the air-conditioning ducts. Simon was so silent, that her awkward badinage seemed to hang in the space between them. A full five minutes might have passed before he bothered to answer her. The cigarette had been stubbed out, although he immediately lit another.

"We're both tired," he said, and lapsed into silence once again.

In the distance a row of soft-edged lights signaled the outskirts of Manaus, buildings on either side of the highway only dimly lit and ramshackle. It seemed, in the leveler of the night, to be nothing more than a seedy frontier town. Once an army outpost, the discovery of rubber, "black gold," had turned Manaus into the fabulous White City, sitting deep in the Amazonian heartland, where the turbulent Rio Negro joined the calm waters of the Amazon River, a full twelve hundred miles from the Atlantic Coast.