Cry Uncle (29 page)

She skimmed her hands up his back and into
his hair, and pulled him down to her. His lips crushed hers,
placated hers, teased and coaxed and then abandoned hers to trail
down her chin to her throat, to the satin shoulder strap of her
bra. He wedged his hands beneath her to pluck open the clasp, then
pulled the undergarment off and let it fall to the floor with their
shirts. He continued grazing downward, pausing to suckle one breast
and then the other. She dug her fingers deep into his hair, holding
him to her, wanting his kisses never to end.

He nestled one leg between hers, and she rose
instinctively, undulating against his thigh. She heard him groan,
heard herself sigh as ripples of longing coursed down from her
breasts to her hips. He rose to strip off her shorts and his
trousers, and then settled back into her embrace, warm and naked
and aroused.

Her hands roamed along his back, learning its
supple contours. Her fingers skimmed the firm curve of his bottom,
the lightly haired skin of his thighs. He sat back on his haunches,
allowing her to touch him, and she did, stroking the steel-hard
length of him and smiling as he closed his eyes and gasped and
surged against her palms. Control, she thought, curling her fingers
tighter. She loved being in control, exciting him until he seemed
ready to burst.

But she had little time to enjoy her mastery
over him. With a final shudder, he pulled her hands from him and
pinned them to the cushions. Then he kissed her again, traced a
line with his tongue along her midriff, across her belly and down
to the points of her hipbones, to the tops of her thighs, to the
soft curls of hair between her legs. His breath danced over her,
his lips, his tongue, and her body lurched, hot, desperate, melting
for him, for Jonas, her husband, her lover.

He slid back up her body, pulling her legs
around him, and planted a fierce, fiery kiss on her lips as he
plunged into her. She returned his kiss with the same ferocity, her
hands tight around his shoulders, her body moving in rhythm with
his. His thrusts urged her onward, ahead of himself, closer and
closer to the edge. She felt her control slipping, snapping,
shattering. With a soft cry, she let go, soaring, falling, lost in
the ecstasy Joe had given her.

After a long moment he sank onto her, spent
and weary. His breath was harsh, his skin slick with sweat. She
closed her arms loosely around him, savoring the pleasant heaviness
of his body and her own exhaustion.

Another long moment, and he eased onto his
side, wrapping her in his arms and looping one leg around hers. She
hadn’t realized how narrow the sofa was, how much she needed him to
keep her from tumbling onto the floor.

Her head rested snugly against his shoulder,
her lips less than an inch from his collarbone. Her arms were
folded between their bodies; her hips stayed against his, even as
he softened and slid from her.

Slowly, agonizingly, her consciousness
returned. She heard the screech of the crickets, felt a humid,
tropically scented breeze wrap around her body, remembered who she
was, who Joe was and what they’d agreed to when they’d gotten
married a month ago.

This wasn’t love, she told herself. She
didn’t love him, she couldn’t love him. He was a bartender, his
life rooted in this hot, muggy island. She was an architect from
the cool, misty Northwest.

A total mismatch.

His voice reached her from above, muffled by
her hair: “Any chance you’ll consider moving down the hall to my
bedroom?”

“
No.” Her answer popped out
before she could give much thought to his request, and she decided
to stick with it. She needed to rely on her self-protective
reflexes, and they were warning her that if she moved into Joe’s
bedroom, into his bed, she would make love with him every night,
whenever she could. No man had ever made her feel what he’d made
her feel just now—even if it was only physical, even if he wasn’t
her type, even if she didn’t like his earring, even
if...

“
You didn’t have to think
long about it, did you,” he muttered, although she detected an
undercurrent of wry amusement in his tone.

She couldn’t let herself think long about it.
If she thought at all, she would think about how good it felt to
lie in Joe’s enveloping arms, his glorious body sheltering hers.
She would think about how she’d never in her life indulged in
casual sex, and this certainly hadn’t been casual. Its very
seriousness made it dangerous to her.

She would think about how Joe’s lovemaking
had eradicated her rationality, obliterated her composure,
stampeded her self-control. Good God, she hadn’t even stopped to
ask him to use protection. She’d been too transported to care.

It simply couldn’t happen again. Once his
crisis and hers were resolved, she was going to be leaving him.
That was the deal they’d agreed to.

“
Joe.” She sighed, wishing
it didn’t feel so downright comfortable to snuggle this way with
him. “You know we haven’t got a real marriage.”

“
I recall signing a legal
piece of paper. Don’t you?” Again she discerned the mixture of
amusement and solemnity in his voice. “But what the hell. I’m not
talking about marriage. I’m talking about sex.”

And I can’t talk about sex
without thinking about love
, she almost
retorted. She forced herself to wriggle out of his embrace. Sitting
up, she felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air
temperature and everything to do with not having Joe’s arms around
her anymore.

He rolled onto his back and gazed up at her.
His eyes were lucid, cutting through the midnight gloom like twin
blue lasers. They seemed to slice right through her, penetrating
all her defensive layers and burning into her soul.

“
Jonas,” she said sternly,
trying but failing to disguise her exasperation, “you can’t just
barge into my life after ignoring me and Lizard for days and days,
and expect me to welcome you with open arms.”

“
But you
did
welcome me with open arms,” he
pointed out with infuriating logic. He undercut his words by
gathering her hand in his and touching his mouth to her palm in a
tender kiss. “Not that I’m complaining. This was great.”

“
It doesn’t matter how great
it was,” she argued, withdrawing her hand. “And it doesn’t matter
that we signed a legal document. We’re practically
strangers.”

He contemplated her charge and shrugged.
“That could change,” he said.

Only if he changed it, she pondered. Only if
he decided to participate in Lizard and Pamela’s world. Only if he
joined them on outings to the beach, and helped them with Birdie’s
house, and talked to them instead of hiding behind the newspaper at
the breakfast table.

But if the change occurred, if he worked his
way into their life...how would Pamela keep herself from making
love with him again? How would she keep him from eroding her
control? How would she keep herself from falling in love with
him?

She swung her legs off the sofa and gathered
up her clothes. Maybe she and Joe were a total mismatch—but right
now, the worst mismatch she could think of was her head and her
heart—her head warning her to keep her distance from Jonas Brenner,
and her heart aching to love the man she’d married.

Chapter Thirteen

LONG AFTER SHE’D LEFT the porch he was still
sprawled out on the couch, enveloped in the wee-hours darkness. His
body was spent but his mind was on red-alert, transmitting all
sorts of scrambled signals. Fortunately, he was a night owl.
Decoding those signals might have been impossible for most people
at that time of night, but not for Joe.

The signals, once he
translated them, were telling him how wrong Pamela was for him.
From the instant he’d seen her, he’d understood that she was too
straitlaced, too prim and proper, too
everything
that had always turned him
off in a woman—which was what had made her a perfect wife for his
particular needs. And yet... In spite of it all,
wrong
just didn’t seem to
be the operative term at the moment.

Right
didn’t fit the bill, either. She was too skinny for his taste.
She had hardly any upholstery on her. He’d been too conscious of
the angles of her knees, the sculpture of her shoulders, the
delicate protrusions of her ankle bones. Her breasts had flattened
into nearly nothing when she’d been lying on her back, just two
slight swells peaked with round, red, alluring nipples that begged
to be kissed...

Start
again
, he admonished himself.

Too skinny and too pale, even after her day
at the beach. Her complexion reminded him of milk. Or maybe cream.
Then, too, her face had flushed a delicate pink when she’d been
aroused, and her lips had turned crimson from his kisses, and those
gloriously enticing nipples of hers had been the color of ripe
berries and just as sweet, and her skin, that pale, pale skin had
felt like white silk against his hands, and she’d felt even more
like silk around him, a hot, tight sheath of silk when he’d plunged
into her...

Damn. He was hard again. And she was planning
to spend the night in her own room, in her own bed. Probably with
the door locked and a chair wedged under the knob, just in
case.

Get back to right and wrong.

Okay. She’d been absolutely right to decline
his invitation to spend the night with him. The agreement they’d
cobbled together didn’t include sex. And even if it had, Joe didn’t
have any rights when it came to making love with her, not after
he’d treated her so coldly. If he’d wanted her to get friendly, he
should have gone to the beach with her and Lizard today, should
have made more of an effort to overcome his skepticism about her
hit-man story, should have been an a-number-one first-class hubby
to her. Signing that legal piece of paper didn’t give him special
privileges. He’d signed it only because he had to have a woman like
Pamela in his home, the way you had to have a refrigerator or
dependable plumbing.

Requiring her services as if she were a
household fixture guaranteed him nothing in the way of bedroom
activity. What had happened on the porch just minutes ago had been
a fluke. It wouldn’t happen again.

What a tragic prospect. To hell with that
stupid notion that Pamela wasn’t his type. She’d definitely been
his type when he’d kissed her, and touched her, and taken her body
with his. Thinking about her now, running up a list of all her
shortcomings and finding himself getting more and more aroused with
each addition to the list, indicated that she was as much his type
as any woman had ever been.

You know we haven’t got a
real marriage
, she’d said. A real marriage,
he conceded as he pulled himself languorously off the sofa and
tugged on his jeans, would obligate him to make a commitment. It
would mean accepting as fact everything she’d told him about Mickey
Mouse, or whatever the hit man’s name was, and including himself in
her life in all sorts of ways. It would require him to show up,
every day, no excuses.

He could do it. For another chance to
experience the most incredible sex he’d ever had, sure, he could
turn this thing into a real marriage—as long as Pamela gave him a
chance.

And if the sex had been even half as good for
her as it had been for him, the odds were pretty decent that she
would.

***

“
I’M GOING TO HELP YOU at
Birdie’s today,” he announced over breakfast the next
morning.

“
Oh?” Pamela flickered a
brief glance at him, then drank some coffee, hiding behind the mug.
For the first time in the month they’d been married, she had
monopolized the newspaper. Joe had come downstairs to find her
immersed in the paper, devouring news of foreign insurrections and
international politics along with a slice of whole-wheat toast and
an orange sliced into wedges.

Lizard was on the screened porch,
constructing her version of the Taj Mahal out of modeling clay—or
maybe it was supposed to be a hippopotamus. Joe couldn’t tell, and
he was too tactful to ask. As it was, he didn’t even want to
acknowledge that his adorable little niece was creating an innocent
clay sculpture just a few feet from where, last night, he and
Pamela had created the beast with two backs.

Nor did he want to think about the fact that
one half of the two-backed beast was right that minute facing him
across the breakfast table—or would be facing him if she ever
lifted her nose out of the damned paper.

She seemed to be laboring hard to avoid eye
contact with him. Her effort not to look at him allowed him an
unabashed view of her. He could stare at her for as long as she
refused to acknowledge his staring. As he sipped his coffee, he
took in the straight blond fringe of her hair, her elusive eyes,
the tension in her pursed lips, the taut line of her throat.

Had he actually considered her too skinny?
Too pale? Not his type?

“
The way I figure,” he
continued, after her silence extended beyond a minute, “is that if
you’re really tearing down Birdie’s walls, you could probably use a
little help.”

“
We’re doing all right
without you,” Pamela said tersely.

“
Since when is
all right
good
enough?”

She flashed a silver-eyed look his way. She
seemed to be framing her reply, contemplating it, discarding it and
framing another reply. “Is that a rhetorical question, Joe, or do
you really want to help us?”