Something Different/Pepper's Way (19 page)

After a rather desperate look at Gypsy, Chase produced a winning smile. “Hello, Amy. It’s nice to meet you finally, after—”

“You have a last name?” Amy demanded tersely, never one to possess scruples about interrupting other people in the middle of their sentences.

“Mitchell,” Chase supplied in a failing voice.

Gypsy was coming unglued.

Amy was six feet tall in flat shoes (which she normally wore) and built like a fullback. She had long hair worn in a no-nonsense bun and as red as a fire engine, snapping blue eyes, and the kind of face artists drew on Vikings. That face had character; it also had the trick of looking like a scientist’s face in the act of dispassionately studying the latest bug under a microscope.

She might have been any age between forty-five and sixty-five, and looked about as capable as a human being could look without resembling a computer. She had no waist, and there was more of her going than coming, all of it tightly bound in gasping blue jeans and a peasant blouse. And her voice would easily wither a Bengal tiger in his tracks.

“So you’re Mitchell. Rebecca told me about you.” She looked Chase up and down with cold suspicion.

Recovering from that inspection—when Amy looked at you, he decided, your bones felt scoured—Chase hastily decided on a strategy. Exposure to Gypsy and her parents had taught him nothing if not that unpredictability was “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” So he decided on a fast charge through forward enemy positions.

Stepping forward, he caught Amy around her nonexistent
waist with both arms, planted a kiss squarely on her compressed lips, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “You’ll have to excuse us for a while, Amy; Gypsy and I are going to negotiate in a Jacuzzi.”

He released her and turned to pick up a laughing Gypsy and toss her lightly over his shoulder. When he turned back, he saw that Amy’s face had altered slightly. There was the faintest hint of a possibility that there
might
have been a twitch of her lips which an optimistic man would have called the beginnings of a smile.

“Negotiate what?” she asked. (Mildly for her, Chase decided, although a grizzly bear would have happily claimed it as a lethal growl.)

“Important things,” Chase told her solemnly. “Like the number of children, and names for same … and cabbages and kings. You will excuse us?” he added politely.

“Certainly.” Her voice was as polite as his, and her deadpan expression would have moved a marble statue to tears. “Supper’s at seven—don’t be late.”

“We wouldn’t think of it,” Chase assured her, carrying his future bride over his shoulder and striding toward the deck at the rear of his house.

As he went up the steps to the deck Chase swatted a conveniently placed derriere, and said despairingly, “I was expecting a
motherly
sort of woman!”

“I know you were!” Gypsy was laughing so hard, she could barely speak. “Oh, God! Your expression was priceless!”

“Why didn’t you warn me, you heartless little witch?” he demanded, setting her on her feet beside the Jacuzzi. The gleam in his eyes belied his fierce frown.

“And miss that little scene?” Gypsy choked. “I wish Poppy could have seen it; he’d have dined out on that for a month! Oh, darling, you were perfect—Amy loves you already.”

“How could you tell?” Chase asked wryly, and then a sudden thought apparently occurred to him. “Gypsy… is Amy going to live with us?”

“Of course she is, darling,” his future bride told him serenely.

Chase raised his eyes toward heaven with the look of a man whose cup was full. More than full. Running over.

“Don’t worry.” Gypsy patted his cheek gently. “If you’re good, she’ll only come after you with her broom once a week or so.”

“Gypsy?”

“What is it, darling?”

“You’re kidding?”

“No, darling.”

“Gypsy?”

“Yes, darling?”

“I’ll never survive it.”

“Of course you will, darling.” She smiled up at him sunnily. “My hero can adapt to anything. That’s one of the reasons I love him.”

“News for you, sweetheart,” he murmured, kissing her nose. “Your hero has feet of clay.”

Gypsy smiled very tenderly. “That’s another of the reasons I love him.”

“My Gypsy,” he whispered. “My love.”

They were late for supper. But Amy didn’t fuss.

ten

THE SHRILL DEMAND OF THE TELEPHONE
finally roused Gypsy, and she felt a distinct inclination to swear sleepily. They’d flown half around the world the day before, from Geneva, Switzerland, to Portland, Oregon, with only brief layovers. Gypsy wasn’t even sure what
month
it was— never mind the day. She was suffering from lack of sleep, a horrendous jet lag, and the irritating conviction that she’d forgotten
something
in Geneva.

And now the phone. It was only a little after eight A.M.— the birds weren’t even up, for Pete’s sake!

Gypsy half climbed over Chase to reach the phone; he was dead to the world and didn’t move. She fumbled for the receiver and managed finally to lift it to her ear, murmuring, “What?”

“You’ve been gone,” a soft, muffled masculine voice told her sadly. “For weeks … and you didn’t tell me….”

Gypsy slammed the receiver down and sat bolt upright in bed, staring at the phone as if it had just this moment come to life. Now,
that
was a hell of a thing to wake up to in her condition! She had to ask Chase. She had to know.

Chase stirred and looked up at her with sleep-blurred eyes.

“You look like a house fell on you,” he observed, muffling a yawn with one hand. “Who was that on the phone?”

Shock tactics, she decided, might have some effect.

She snatched the sheet up to cover her breasts and stared at Chase in patent horror. “We have to get a divorce. Immediately,” she announced in a very firm voice.

Chase raised himself on his elbow and stared at her with sleepy courtesy. “We just got
married
a few weeks ago,” he pointed out patiently. “Are you tired of me already?”

Gypsy struggled hard to maintain her expression of shocked indignation. “I’ve married the wrong man! I fell in love with a voice over the telephone, and now I find out that it wasn’t you at all. Get out of my bed!”

Chase was soothing. “You probably had a bad dream. Jet lag will do that to you. Lie down, sweetheart.”

“I want a divorce.”

“I won’t let you divorce me. I like being married. Besides, my father would stand me in front of a firing squad if I lost you. He’s telling half of Geneva about his daughter-in-law, the famous writer.”

“Well, if that’s the only reason you want to hang on to me, I’ll go and see a lawyer today!”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Is it? Monday, then.”

Chase pulled her down beside him and arranged them both comfortably. “Not a chance. Amy loves me. And Corsair’s coming around. You’d never find anyone as adaptable as me. Besides, we’ve already arranged to house-sit in Richmond for the winter.”

With an inward sigh Gypsy abandoned her ploy to find out if Chase was really her “night lover.” “Did we say hello to Jake and Sarah last night?” she asked suddenly. “I seem to remember something about it.”

Chase laughed. “Well, sort of. I was carrying you, and you waved at them and asked how they liked my Jacuzzi. I think you were sound asleep at the time.”

Gypsy frowned. “Were they over here, then? Shouldn’t they have been at your place?”

“Our place,” Chase corrected. “And they were over here keeping Amy company until we arrived. Jake’s determined to win her over,” he added with a chuckle. “He says he wants the friendship of any woman who can defeat him at arm wrestling.”

Gypsy accepted this information without a blink. “Oh.” She yawned suddenly and changed the subject again. In an injured tone she said, “It’s inhuman to drag a person halfway around the world. If man had been meant to fly—”

“He’d have wings?” Chase finished politely.

“No. He’d have a cushion tied to his rump to make up for airport lounges,” she corrected disgustedly. “I seem to have spent eons in them, and my rump
hurts!”

Chase patted it consolingly. “You’ll recover. And, besides, whose fault was it that we made the trip in one fell swoop?”

“Mine, and don’t rub it in.” Gypsy sighed. “Can I help it if I wanted to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible?”

“No, but you could have warned me before we went over that you had a phobia about flying.”

“It isn’t a phobia, it’s just an uneasiness,” she defended stoutly.

“Uh-huh.” Chase grinned at her. “Tell me what the Swiss Alps look like from the air.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not, sweetheart?”

“Because I had my eyes closed, and you know it, dammit!”

Chase laughed at her expression. “Seriously, honey, we
should have taken Dad’s suggestion: gone overland to Bordeaux and then taken a ship.”

“Across the Atlantic?” Her tone was horrified.

They’d had this same discussion in Geneva, and Chase laughed as much now as he had then. “It beats me how you’re willing to fly over an ocean, although you hate flying—but you aren’t willing to sail across an ocean, although you love swimming.”

“A plane’s faster,” Gypsy said definitely.

“So?”

“So don’t make me explain my little irrational fears. I warned you long ago that I was no bargain, but you just wouldn’t listen. So now you have an irrational wife.”

“I have a wonderful wife,” Chase corrected comfortably. “And I have Dad’s stamp of approval to verify it. I thought he was going to cry when you hugged him that last time at the airport. You definitely made a conquest there.”

Gypsy smiled. “I love your dad. He reminds me of Poppy—very quiet, but with a deadly sense of humor.”

“Mmmm. I think you’ve about got him talked into settling in Portland when he retires. You can work on him some more when he comes over for Christmas.”

“It’d be nice to have both families nearby,” she agreed, then frowned as part of his remark set up a train of thought. “Christmas. That reminds me—before we left for Geneva, I saw you and Mother come in here with a package all wrapped up. It looked like a painting. Somehow or another, I forgot to ask you about it.”

Chase laughed silently. “That’s my Gypsy—give her enough time, and she’ll get around to it eventually!”

Gypsy raised up on an elbow and stared down at him severely. “Stop avoiding the subject. What have you and my mother been up to?”

“That question sounds vaguely indecent,” he murmured.

“Chase!”

“I have a shrewish wife,” he told the ceiling, then relented as the gleam in her eyes threatened grievous bodily harm. “Take a look behind you, shrew,” he invited. “On the wall— where you were too much asleep last night to notice it.”

Gypsy twisted around to look. Then she sat up and looked a while longer. Then she looked at Chase as he sat up beside her.

He smiled. “Rebecca painted it for me. Although she said she didn’t know why I wanted it—since I was bound to end up with the original. I asked her to paint it that Sunday I invited them for lunch. And we left it here because I knew we’d spend our first night back in this room.”

After a moment he added softly, “I didn’t know she’d put me in it.”

Gypsy looked at the painting again. Her first thought was that Rebecca must have seen the seascapes in Chase’s bedroom and, with her usual perception, decided to paint another seascape which would blend in… and yet stand out. Because this painting wasn’t bleak or lonely.

The central figure was Gypsy. She was wearing the silk nightgown and leaning back against the rock jutting up behind her, staring out to sea. Above her were storm clouds, curiously shaped, as if Nature had been in a teasing mood that day, bent on luring mortals out to sea. The clouds were wispy, insubstantial; their dreamy visions seen only by those who cared to see. There was a unicorn leaping from one cloud, a castle topped another; a rainbow cast its hazy colors over the ghost-ship sailing beneath it, a ghostly pirate at its wheel. There was Apollo, driving his sun behind dark clouds; there was a masked figure on a white steed; there was a knight climbing toward his cloud-castle.

And there was Chase—real, substantial. The view caught him from the waist up, half hidden by the rock Gypsy was leaning against. And Chase wasn’t looking out to sea at the siren-visions of clouds. He was looking at Gypsy, and his face was soft with yearning.

Gypsy took a deep breath, realizing only then that she’d suspended breathing for what seemed like eternal seconds. “I never stop wondering at Mother’s perception,” she murmured almost inaudibly She looked again at the cloud-heroes, seeing in each one an elusive resemblance to Chase.

“She saw it, Chase—she saw it all. I was looking at visions of heroes and seeing you without realizing it.”

“And I was looking at you,” Chase murmured, bending his head to kiss her bare shoulder.

“I’m so glad you’re a patient hero,” she whispered, smiling up at him as he lowered them both back to the comfortable pillows.

Chase grinned faintly. “An original hero, anyway. What other man would have scoured Geneva—of all places!—to find a Buddha with a clock in his middle?”