The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

Don’t do it, McCall. It’s not who you are. Don’t do it.

“I’m going for a swim in the lake,” she announced, hurling herself away from him in a jerky pirouette. “There are lights on the hotel’s dock. Coming?”

She fled from him without waiting for his answer, on legs that had suddenly become unreliable-like so many other parts of her. Her mind and body seemed bent on betraying her lately, and she couldn’t find a way to stop it. Coming? Why had she asked him that? It was the last thing she wanted. The last thing she needed. What she desperately needed was to get away from him, to clear her mind and cool her overheated body in the fresh cold waters of a tropical lake fed, according to the guidebooks, by underground streams.

Oh, but, be honest-there was a part of her that just as desperately wanted him to come after her. And try as she would to block them, the images came to her of two bodies coming together in the soft purple night, meeting and touching with the water like cool silk between them…then slowly warming, melting together, heat soaking through skin and muscle and deep into their very core… She ran faster, fleeing in vain from the images, and felt frightened and frustrated and filled again with that unfamiliar urge to cry.

Why are you doing this to me? Ellie asked of God-knows-who, breathing hard in silent fury as she dropped shorts and sandals on the end of the dock and knifed into the air in a clean, sure arc.

The water’s embrace was a sweet, exhilarating shock, like stepping from a hot sultry day into a cool shower. She swam hard for a few minutes with her mind a blessed blank, concentrating on things that usually took no thought at all-like the rhythm of muscles, and breathing and heartbeat. When she paused at last, winded, and turned to float languidly on the gentle wake of her own making and gaze up at the vastness of sky and stars, her mind felt calmer, if no less concerned.

This isn’t the real thing, she told herself. It can’t be. But, she told herself, it’s probably normal-certainly understandable. A combination of circumstances. A tropical setting as romantic and beautiful as anything she could possibly have dreamed…a man who kept showing up on her radar screen as her white, if somewhat tarnished, knight. Who knows, maybe some sort of biological clock kicking in, though well ahead of schedule, as far as she was concerned. Normal. Understandable.

Oh, but why now? Why did such a thing have to happen to her now, distracting her mind when she so needed all her wits about her, undermining her self-confidence just when she needed it most?

She swam back to the dock with slow, measured strokes, concentrating once again on breathing and rhythm, on relaxing her body and clearing her mind. All for nothing, as it turned out. A familiar form was standing on the end of the dock, haloed by the strings of lights overhead, looking somehow incongruous in cutoffs, tropical-print shirt and the Panama hat she was beginning to think of as his trademark-rather like Indiana Jones’s stained fedora. Just short of the ladder she pulled up, treading water, and heat rose to her head like magma, and her heart was pounding beyond all reason.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she glided over to the ladder through water that had become as viscous as honey. She kept her voice light, breathless, but no more so than normal for someone who’d just completed a vigorous swim; he would never know how her heart was banging against her ribs.

“Brought you a towel,” he said, strolling unhurriedly toward her. “I noticed you forgot to take one with you.”

“Didn’t think I needed one.” She pulled herself up the ladder, ignoring the hand he offered, and straightened bravely and defiantly before him, smoothing her wet hair back with both hands. “It’s a warm night.”

“Then why are you shivering?”

She said nothing for a moment, but aimed a hard, meaningful look straight into his eyes. Then… “It’ll pass,” she snapped. “It’s no big deal. Nothing I can’t handle.”

His chuckle stirred like a breeze over her already shivered skin. “Yeah, I know. There’s not much you can’t handle.”

She turned her back to him in rejection, then closed her eyes as she felt the towel embrace her anyway. Her throat ached and tears burned behind her eyelids. Through the thick and slightly scratchy toweling she felt the warmth and weight of his hands on her shoulders.

“Besides…” he growled the words close to her ear “…what if someone’s watching? We’re supposed to be honeymooners. How’s it gonna look, you out here swimming all alone?” He gave her shoulders a little shake and a squeeze, and she thought if her heart beat any louder he would surely have to hear it.

Oh, she thought, if I were to lean only a little…hardly at all…that would be it. That’s all it would take.

Yes, and then what?

What was she thinking? She barely knew this man. She was in the middle of a mission. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?

She stood utterly still, frozen inside, holding the towel together with a fist so tightly clenched it hurt. “The water’s nice,” she said with barely a hint of a tremor in her voice. “You should try it.”

He gave his patented snort, soft and wry. “Maybe after all this is over. If I’m still alive…”

They had started walking together, McCall with his arm still draped across her shoulders in what must appear to be a casual, comfortable intimacy. To Ellie it seemed an impossible weight. “Don’t do that,” she said in a choked voice.

“Do what?” He sounded truly puzzled.

“Put your arm around me.”

The weight of his arm slipped away, but the warmth, the feel of it remained, a tingling awareness in her muscles, a cringing in her spine. “Solely for appearances’ sake, I assure you,” he said dryly, taking cigarettes and lighter from his shirt pocket.

“Do you really think it’s necessary? Just because we’re supposed to be married?” She gave her shoulders an impatient little wiggle, trying to shake off the residual effects of his touch as she bent over to scoop up her shorts. She shot him a look as she struggled to force her still-damp feet into her sandals. “I mean, all married people don’t grope each other in public, do they?”

“I don’t know,” he said in a mild tone, blowing away smoke. “Do they?”

They began walking, close together and in silence, McCall methodically smoking, Ellie carrying her shorts clutched against her chest underneath the towel because putting them on in front of him seemed too great an intimacy. When they came to their cottage, she stopped abruptly and for a moment simply stood gazing at the cloud of mosquito netting cascading down over the hammock from a coat hanger hooked in the veranda’s thatched roof. She looked up at McCall. He gazed back at her, but the light over the door cast his face in unfamiliar shadows, making it unreadable.

“Thank you,” she said, once again dangerously and inexplicably close to tears. She remembered how she’d thanked him once before, standing on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. She thought how strange it was that what had seemed so natural to her then now seemed utterly impossible.

He shrugged and unlocked the door. “No problemo.” He pushed open the door and flipped the light switch, then gave the inside of the cottage a quick once-over before turning back to her. “Well,” he said. And there was an awkward pause.

Ellie finally muttered, “We should probably-” just as he was starting to say something. So she stopped and said, “Go ahead.”

He cleared his throat and made a careless, throwaway gesture. “No, I was just going to say that according to our new instructions we’re going to need to get an early start tomorrow morning.”

She nodded, her head bobbing foolishly. “Right. So we should probably call it a night…”

“Turn in early, try to get a good night’s sleep…”

“Plus,” said Ellie, her voice rusty and blunt as an old trowel, “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m beat.”

He glanced at the hammock and his lips curved in a rueful smile. “Don’t know that you’ll fare much better on that thing.”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”

He hesitated, while her heart hammered out-of-sync rhythms. Then he jerked his head toward the open door. “Okay, then. Why don’t you go in and do whatever it is you need to do? I’ll wait out here.”