The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

kindergarten at the time.”

She inhaled sharply through her nose. “You know, McCall, I’m getting really tired of these little digs about my age. I’m twenty-eight years old. And you’re what…thirty-five?”

“Forty,” he admitted gloomily.

She let a couple of long, slow beats go by while her eyes shimmered into his and a sweet flush ripened under her freckles. He felt his own eyes burn and heat crawl beneath his skin, as if he’d been out in the sun too long.

“I don’t know very many twelve-year-old fathers,” she said in a soft-rough voice like a kitten’s purr. Then she turned a shoulder toward him and walked away up the graveled path.

As he seemed to find himself doing so often, he stood there and just watched her, watched her going away from him, looking, in her shorts, T-shirt and Nikes, every inch the teenager he knew she wasn’t. She was a full- grown woman with a strong will and a mind of her own-bull-headed and lion-hearted, a terrifying combination-a fact he’d known all along, he now realized. He knew, too, with a frightening little sense of loneliness and loss, that he’d tried so hard to convince himself otherwise in order to make it easier to accept that he couldn’t have her. Now here he was, thrown into forced intimacy with her, and only his conscience and a moral code she didn’t seem to share to keep him from doing something shameful.

To keep him from doing…what? Seducing her?

The fear inside him grew as he acknowledged the thought, and realized it had been there in his mind for a while now. Disgraceful, but…what if he could? Married or not-and how could he know or judge what kind of marriage hers was?-she was susceptible to him in that particular way. He knew it. He could feel it.

The fact was, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand she seemed hell-bent on committing God knew how many felonies and dragging him right along with her. And for the life of him he couldn’t figure out a way to stop her. He knew for darn sure he wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it, and if he pulled out she was just going to go ahead on her own, and how was he going to live with himself if something happened to her? Physical force might work-hog-tying her, maybe, or locking her in a closet-but then what? What proof did he have that he was doing it for her own good? He could very well wind up in jail himself, on kidnapping charges, no less.

Seduce her? It seemed a long shot, at best, but maybe…just maybe, if he could get her all soft and vulnerable and acquiescent in his bed, he might be able to talk some sense into her…get her to listen to reason. Get her to listen to him, and forget that absent husband of hers and this crazy suicidal plan he’d gotten her mixed up in. It could work…couldn’t it?

Forget it, McCall. All you’re trying to do is justify doing what you want to do anyhow. But it’s still not right. And it’s not who you are. Forget about it.

But as he hitched his load and set off after her, all his senses were still on red alert and tuned to her wavelength, and his body was humming in ways it hadn’t in…so many years, aching and tingling like long-frozen tissues coming back to life.

Chapter 8

“Are you sure you want to do this?” McCall asked. They were standing together on the veranda. Twilight was coming down and he’d just finished putting up the hammock and was testing the tension in the anchor rope, plucking it like a guitar string. “Look,” he heard himself gruffly say, “why don’t you take the bed? I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“What about those lizards and scorpions?” Ellie gave him a solemn look that had laughter lurking in it.

He rejected the laughter with an angry gesture. “The chair, then.”

“No-really, I’m looking forward to this. Unless you-” she hurriedly and politely added, lifting her eyebrows and making an offering gesture with her spread hands.

He shook his head and shuddered. “Damn things remind me of giant spiderwebs.”

“I used to love playing in one of these when I was a kid,” she said musingly, setting the hammock to swaying, gazing at it but obviously seeing something else. Something long ago and far away. “In the summertime we had one strung between these two big trees in our yard. The one we had was different, though, not woven like this. It was canvas-green and white stripes-and really tippy. You had to be careful getting in and out, and you had to get balanced just so or it would dump you. My brother Eric and I used to play this game, sort of King of the Mountain only it was King of the Hammock. We’d play Rock-Paper-Scissors to see who’d get to be in the hammock first, and then the other person would try to dump him out and claim it for himself. It could get pretty rough-about the only thing that wasn’t allowed was the garden hose-squirting with water, I mean. Or mud-throwing-that was a big no-no.” She gave McCall a sideways look and a wicked little smile that let him know how well she’d stuck to those rules.

He smiled back, trying, as he had all through dinner, as she’d talked about her family and her childhood on the farm, to see her the way she must have been back then. Trying now to see her as a laughing, squealing little girl roughhousing on a farmhouse lawn on a hot Iowa summer day, with bits of grass and mud in her hair. But the image wouldn’t come. The top half of her was covered by a tank-type bathing suit in an unbecoming dark shade of blue, some silky fabric that molded itself to her body like paint, and from waist to six inches above the knees by that wraparound shorts or skirt thing she’d worn before, with no regard whatsoever for color compatibility. A soft breeze was blowing and the humid air smelled sweet, a heady mix of flowers and foliage and the distant sea. The last of the sunset colors were fading from a sky full of billowing thunderheads, darkness was folding itself like a warm embrace around one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and all he could think about was how the woman beside him smelled like the night, and how warm her body would be, and how much he wanted to put his arms around her and breathe in the sweet scent of her hair.

“You know what I really loved most, though?” Her voice was soft as the air, and almost lost in the awakening chorus of frog song and insect hum. “The times when I was all by myself, with my book, maybe an apple. And I’d lie there and be really, really quiet…and after a while the birds and animals would forget I was there. Birds would be sitting and singing right above my head, sometimes even on the hammock’s strings, close enough to touch. Squirrels would be digging in the grass for acorns right underneath me. One time this rabbit came hopping onto the grass with three of her babies, and they just sat there, munching away, not even seeing me…”

Right then McCall thought he knew how she must have felt. She’s so close to me, he thought. If I move just slightly, if I even draw a deep breath, I’d be touching her…

And so, carefully not breathing, he said in a tight, airless voice, “So, you’ve always had a thing for animals, then.”

“Oh yes…for as long as I can remember.”

“Did you always think you’d have a pet shop someday?”

She threw him one of those quick, mysteriously guilty looks, then laughed-a low, husky chuckle that stirred like a stroking hand across his already sensitized nerves. “Oh no-I always thought I’d be a vet. Farm animals, you know? I never imagined I’d ever leave Iowa.”

Sister, you’re a long way from Iowa now, he thought, helpless frustration a pressure inside him, squeezing his heart. Aloud he said softly, “What happened to change your mind?”

He felt her shrug, then turn to face him. “College happened, I guess. I found out there was a big world out there, and a lot of things in it-a lot of causes-that needed me more than my mom’s cattle and hogs did.”

Causes? My God, thought McCall, what happened to you? How could you go from “causes” to wildlife smuggling for profit and not even bat an eye? He wanted to grab her by the arms and shake some sense into her…

He wanted to take her by the arms and kiss some sense into her.

To keep himself from it, he folded his arms across his chest and tucked his hands against his sides and held himself so tightly in his own embrace that his body quivered with the strain.

He didn’t have anything to say to her. He stood there looking down at her and she looked back at him, and messages flew back and forth between them as night swallowed up their features, leaving faces like pale blank places in the darkness. Anonymous, covering darkness. It would be so easy to forget who she was…who he was.