Cry Uncle (2 page)

“
What does she look like?”
he asked, recalling with some shame his immediate response to the
frizzy-haired woman who’d come in.

“
What do you mean, what does
she look like?” Kitty arranged the frosty drinks on her tray and
grinned slyly. “She’s nowhere near as pretty as me, of course. But
you could do worse. As a matter of fact—” she lifted the tray into
its one-handed perch “—you
have
done worse.”

“
Thanks.” He watched Kitty
saunter back into the crowd, then rinsed out the blender. His gaze
strayed to the clock on the back wall. It resembled a ship’s wheel,
with thick wooden bars radiating out from a hub. It was actually
quite tacky, which was why he’d bought it for the Shipwreck. Tacky
was the ambiance he was aiming for.

Right now the clock wasn’t just tacky; it was
annoying. It read nine-fifty-three. If this lady friend of Kitty’s
couldn’t get her butt down to the bar at a reasonable hour, when
the subject was as momentous as her potential marriage to Joe, she
wasn’t going to work out. Joe was used to night owls, but he
doubted a night-owl woman would make a wife decent and demure and
proper enough to persuade a judge to let Joe keep Lizard.

Brick arrived through the back door. Joe
called a greeting to his second-in-command, and Brick grunted in
response. Grunting was about the limit of Brick’s communication
skills, but he made the best tequila sunrises on the island, and at
the Shipwreck such a talent was considered far more important than
eloquence.

A trio of women entered the bar. Joe knew
them all. He’d dated them all. One of them waved to him as the
threesome worked their way through the room, looking for a
table.

“
Two shots of Cutty,
neat!”

“
I need a Stinger, a Boxcar
and a Gimlet!”

“
Three rum-and-Cokes, hold
the Coke!”

“
A glass of
chardonnay.”

The noise level had increased as the
ship’s-wheel clock rounded ten p.m., and Joe’s skull was starting
to echo. All the stools along the bar were occupied; dozens of
customers loomed behind those seated, waiting for someone to stand
and free up a stool. On the juke box the whining woman was replaced
by real music—Van Morrison—and the temperature in the crowded room
ratcheted up a few degrees.

Kitty stood at the pick-up station, smiling
mysteriously. “I said, a glass of chardonnay.”

“
Who in this joint would
order white wine?” Joe grumbled, rummaging through one of the
refrigerators below the bar for a bottle of the stuff.

“
Your fiancée,” Kitty
answered.

Joe bolted upright, the chilled bottle
clutched in his hand. His heart did a tap dance against his ribs
and his throat momentarily squeezed shut. He hated to admit how
anxious he was. If this neighbor of Kitty’s didn’t work out, he was
going to have to go shopping for a wife on the mainland. Things
were getting tight.

Not desperate, though. He wasn’t going to let
on—to Kitty or anyone else—that he was close to desperation.

“
A white-wine sipper, huh?”
he murmured, sliding a goblet from the overhead rack and standing
it on Kitty’s tray. “Where is she?”

“
Over near the front door.
In case she wants to make a quick escape, I guess.”

He peered through the mob of bodies in the
dimly lit room, but he couldn’t tell which one she might be. “I’ll
bring her drink to her. What’s she wearing?”

“
A white dress.”

“
What’s her name
again?”

“
Pamela.”

“
Pamela what?”

“
How the hell should I know?
I asked her if she’d consider marrying you, not what her last name
was.”

“
Okay. Brick? Give me ten,”
he called to his assistant once he’d poured a hefty dose of wine
into the goblet.

Brick grunted.

Joe managed a smile of thanks for Kitty,
although he was feeling uncharacteristically nervous. It wasn’t
like him to get twisted in knots over a woman—or over anything, for
that matter. Crises came and went, and when they were truly awful,
he indulged in some intense moping. But then he got over it.
Rolling with the punches was his preferred modus operandi.

But this was different. This was
wife-hunting. Joe had never proposed to a woman before, and here he
was, about to propose to a total stranger.

Not really propose, he reassured himself,
sauntering around the end of the bar and working his way through
the throng, barely pausing to acknowledge the greetings the
regulars hurled at him. What he was offering the woman was less a
proposal than a proposition.

Scratch that. If she was a white-wine sipper
in a white dress—already dressed for her wedding, apparently—she
wasn’t the sort to be propositioned. He had to approach her in a
classy way.

And he didn’t even know her last name, damn
it.

“
Hey, Joey!” a burly voice
reached him from behind. He smiled and waved vaguely, but his gaze
was riveted toward the screened front door that opened onto
Southard Street. Standing next to it, looking incredibly out of
place, was a woman in a white dress.

Not bad, he thought, one set of apprehensions
fading and another set kicking in. The white dress she had on
resembled a tank shirt that fell to mid-calf, the hem notched a few
inches on the side seams. The way the cotton cloth draped her body
indicated that she was somewhat lacking in the curves department.
Her arms were slim, her shoulders bony. Her feet were strapped into
flat leather sandals. Her long, graceful neck was framed in
ash-blond hair that fell to her shoulders with barely a ripple.
Gold button earrings glinted through the silky locks. A matching
gold bangle circled one slender wrist.

Her face was as angular as the rest of her,
her nose and chin narrow, her cheeks hollow. Her eyes were a pale
silver gray. In fact, all of her had a pale, silver-gray quality.
Obviously she was a recent arrival on the island. No one who’d been
on Key West for any length of time could stay that pale.

A little washed-out, but definitely an
interesting face. Not quite pretty, but intriguing. It was the sort
of face a man could look at for a long time without growing tired
of it.

Her expression was cautious. Maybe a touch
skeptical. Haunted. Those eyes, so large and pale, seemed
troubled.

The notion of marriage troubled him more than
a little, too. But the alternative—losing Lizard—was far worse.

He took a step closer to her, and another
step. In her search of the room, she stared at him, past him, and
then at him again. Noticing the wine glass in his hand, she
straightened up and eyed him warily. She bit her lip. Her teeth
were as white as her dress.

“
Hi,” he said, sounding a
hell of a lot more confident than he felt. “You must be Pamela. I’m
the guy who wants to marry you.”

***

OH, GOD. He looked like a bum.

The door-frame dug into her spine as she
backed away from him. Okay, she consoled herself, things could be
worse. She hadn’t agreed to anything yet. She’d made no
commitments, no promises. And honestly, any danger this man posed
couldn’t be as bad as what she’d left behind when she’d escaped to
Key West.

As bums went, she had to admit, the guy
extending the glass of wine toward her was actually kind of
handsome. Unfortunately, he was also scruffy and grungy, with a
stubble of beard and hair that clearly hadn’t had a close encounter
with a scissors in some time, and a shapeless shirt, and jeans
faded to a powdery blue, the fabric split like a fraying grin
across one knee. And that earring...oh, God. An earring.

She ordered herself to remain calm.
Experience had taught her that just because a man was impeccably
dressed didn’t mean he was safe. And really, this man—Joe, her
neighbor Kitty had told her... Beneath the baggy shirt and the
decrepit jeans she discerned a lithe, lean body. Behind the stubble
of whisker and the shaggy auburn hair he had a lively face, his
smile producing a dimple on one side, his nose long and straight
and his eyes as blue as a summer sky, two lovely spots of light in
the gloom of his low-rent bar.

The Shipwreck, she recalled, glancing away
from Joe long enough to remind herself of where she was. It was an
apt name for the place. The rowdy, motley customers might well have
washed ashore from some disaster.

In a very real sense, so had Pamela.

He continued to hold out the wine glass. If
she took it, she might be tempted to consume its contents in one
gulp—assuming the glass didn’t slip from her hand and shatter on
the floor. That was a strong possibility, given how slick with
sweat her palms were.

His smile widened. It really was a charming
smile, despite his rumpled appearance. Either that or she was
rationalizing, trying to find a way to like this man.

She didn’t have much choice. He was offering
her exactly what she needed: some wine and a new identity. She
might as well make the best of it.

“
Hello,” she said,
discreetly wiping her hands on her dress.

He shot a quick look over his shoulder, then
shrugged. “It’s kind of crowded in here. If you’d like, we could go
into my office to talk, or I could drag a couple of chairs outside.
There’s a little yard behind the building.”

“
It might be more pleasant
outside.” She wasn’t sure she was ready to shut herself up inside
an office with him.

He reached out and took her hand. Forget
about being shut up with him in an office—she wasn’t ready to be
touched by him. Yet she couldn’t very well make a fuss simply
because he wanted to hold hands with his future wife.

Besides, there was nothing threatening in his
touch. His hand was as dry as hers was clammy, and his grip was
warm and strong. If only he were barbered and well-tailored and
didn’t have a silver hoop linked through his earlobe—and if only
her life weren’t completely out of kilter—she might have responded
positively to the smooth, leathery surface of his palm, the thick
bones of his fingers. She might have liked the deft way he
navigated through the crowd, smiling innocuously at people who
greeted him, ignoring one creep who gave him a salacious wink.

Pamela wished she could ignore the creep,
too, but she couldn’t. She was too tense, too conscious of how
ludicrous this whole idea seemed.

Joe ushered her to the rear of the barroom
and down a hall, past the men’s and ladies’ rooms to a door crowned
by a glowing red “exit” sign. He released her hand so he could grab
two chairs from a nearby stack. Then he jammed his hip against the
door, and it swung open.

The outdoor air was nearly as dense and hot
as the indoor air, but at least it wasn’t stagnant. Instead of the
acrid aromas of cigarettes and beer, it smelled of the ocean, rich
and briny. Gravel and crushed sea shells crunched beneath her
sandals as she followed Joe into a small lot bounded by a
ramshackle fence that backed onto the buildings in the next block.
A bright spotlight fastened to the rear wall of the bar glared down
upon the yard, brighter than the moon.

She filled her lungs with the salty air, then
attempted a smile for Joe, who was positioning the chairs he’d
dragged outside so they faced each other a safe distance apart. He
gestured toward one of the chairs and she lowered herself to sit.
Settling into the other chair, he handed her the wine.

For a man dressed as disreputably as he, he
had good manners, at least. And that smile, and those amazing blue
eyes...

And that earring. She took a long sip of
chardonnay and lowered the glass. And zeroed in once more on the
earring. She wondered if it was genuine sterling silver. She
wondered how he’d felt marching into a jewelry store and standing
in line for ear-piercing with a bunch of prepubescent girls. Maybe
he hadn’t gone to a jeweler. Maybe he’d done it himself—plunged a
needle into the heart of a flame and then into his own flesh.

Maybe a former lover had
done it. Maybe a
present
lover had. This evening’s discussion was about
marriage, not about lovers past and present, or monogamy, or
fidelity, or anything like that.

All right, so Joe had an earring and, for all
Pamela knew, hundreds of girlfriends. So he dressed like a bum. So
he wasn’t her style. Nothing about this encounter was her style.
For that matter, nothing about the recent progression of her life
was her style.

Things had gotten out of control. She didn’t
have many options left. The essential thing was to stay alive. If
marrying a man with devastating blue eyes and a dimple and an
earring would provide the protection she needed, she’d be a fool
not to give his offer a fair hearing.

“
So,” he said, his smile
flagging slightly as he studied her in the pool of white
light.

It occurred to Pamela that he could be
judging her as harshly as she’d judged him. Perhaps he found her
wanting. Kitty had said he was desperate for a wife, but she hadn’t
said he was desperate enough to settle for a skinny, panic-stricken
architect from Seattle.

He spread his legs, rested his elbows on his
knees and tapped his fingertips together. “I guess you’re wondering
why I called you all here tonight,” he joked, then flashed her a
smile that, for all its edginess, she found comforting. If nothing
else, they had their anxiety in common.

The least she could do was help him out by
contributing to the conversation. “Kitty told me you need to get
married,” she said.

He shrugged modestly. “That about sums it
up.”