“It wasn’t exactly like that.”
“You’re being selfish. And stupid.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” Before she lost her courage, she needed to get the rest of this over with. “Put the others on, will you?”
In the next ten minutes, she learned that Andre still talked on the phone to Ted, that Holly was auditioning for a part in a play, and that Charlotte had mastered “Drunken Sailor” on the guitar. Each conversation was more painful than the last. Only after she’d hung up did it register that all three of them had posed the question her parents had never raised.
“
Panda came up behind her on the deck and took the phone before she could check his call log. Was he in touch with the tabloids or not? He disappeared back inside, and when she finally went in herself, he was watching a baseball game. “I need to make another call,” she said.
He studied her. “Phone’s been acting up lately. Give me the number and I’ll put it in for you.”
“I can handle it.”
“It’s temperamental.”
She had to stop playing games. “I want to see your phone.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t have anything to hide, you’ll let me look at it.”
“Who says I don’t have anything to hide?”
He was enjoying himself, and she didn’t like it. “You know everything about me, but I don’t know any more about you than I did eleven days ago. I don’t even know your real name.”
“Simpson. Bart.”
“Afraid I’ll see the
“You won’t.”
“One of the other tabloids, then? Or did you contact the legitimate press?”
“Do you really think somebody like me is going to cozy up to the press?”
“Maybe. I’m a lucrative meal ticket.”
He shrugged, extended his leg, and pulled his phone from his pocket. “Knock yourself out.”
The fact that he was giving up the phone told her she wouldn’t discover any secrets, and she was right. The only call on his log was the one she’d just made. She flipped the phone back to him.
As she walked away, his voice drifted toward her, quiet and a little gruff. “I see you as a lot of things, but a meal ticket isn’t one of them.”
She didn’t know what he meant by that, so she pretended not to hear.
PANDA ABANDONED THE BASEBALL GAME he hadn’t been watching and moved back out to the deck. It was time to have a serious talk with himself. As if he hadn’t been doing that for almost two weeks.
But being closed up with her like this would drive any man nuts. Those shorts and T-shirts made her look like a damned fifteen-year-old, which should have turned his stomach but didn’t because she wasn’t fifteen.
He was trapped with his arousal, his resentment, his fear. He gazed out into the night, trying not to give into them. Failing.
LUCY STUDIED THE CURLING WALLPAPER in her bedroom. They were leaving here tomorrow morning, and Panda was as much a mystery to her as he’d been when she’d climbed on his bike. She didn’t even know his real name. Most important, she didn’t know whether or not he was selling her out.
She’d eaten barely any dinner, and she went into the kitchen to fix herself a bowl of cereal. Through the window, she saw Panda on the deck, where he was staring at the lake again. She wondered what he was thinking about.
She sprinkled some Special K in a bowl and carried it into the living room.
CHARITY ISLAND FERRY
RESIDENT PASS
# 3583
Your Pure Michigan Adventure Begins Here
Had this fallen out of Panda’s wallet or had a previous tenant lost it? Only one way to find out. She returned the card to the seat cushion, leaving it just as she’d found it.
The next morning it was gone.
Chapter Five
LUCY FINALLY KNEW SOMETHING ABOUT Panda that he didn’t want her to know. That should have made her feel better, but she didn’t want to leave Caddo Lake, and her mood was dismal as they rode away. She persuaded him to stop in Texarkana where, fake pregnancy in place, she pointedly purchased a prepaid phone of her own. She told him to put it on her expense account.
Right after they crossed into Arkansas, they had to pull beneath an underpass to wait out a rain shower. She asked him where they were going, not expecting him to answer. But he did, at least partially. “We should be close to Memphis by nightfall.”
His bike had Texas license plates, he vacationed on the Louisiana border, they were headed for Tennessee, and he had a resident ferry pass to an island somewhere in Michigan. Were these the practices of an itinerate construction worker or simply the lifestyle of a wanderer? She wished she could be as mysterious, but it was hard to have secrets when your life had been laid out for public examination while you were still a teenager.
Their nighttime lodging was a backwater Arkansas motel near the Tennessee border. She took in the room’s painted cinder-block walls and ugly puce bedspreads. “I’m sure there’s a Hyatt someplace nearby.”
He dropped his pack on the bed closest to the door. “I like it. It has character.”
“Characters. We’ll be lucky if those drug dealers lurking outside don’t break in and murder us in our sleep.”
“Exactly why you can’t have your own room.”
“Why I can’t have my own room is because you like being difficult.”
“True.” He cocked his head and gave her his calculated biker’s sneer. “Plus, this way, I might see you naked.”
“Good luck with that.” She grabbed the pajama shorts and T-shirt she’d bought when they were at Caddo and headed for the bathroom. Once she’d sealed herself in, she took a deep breath. She was flustered enough from spending the day plastered against his back with the vibrations from that big bike stirring her up. She didn’t need him baiting her.
The flimsy shower stall was barely larger than a phone booth, and every time she moved, she banged her elbow into the plastic panels. She tried to imagine Panda attempting to wedge his body into such an uncomfortably small space.
His naked body.
She dropped her hands from the breasts she’d been soaping for too long. She was female. She couldn’t help the way Panda stirred her baser instincts. There was something primal about him. He was earthy and carnal, all brawn and muscle. Made for sex. It would be rough and raunchy, so different from sex with Ted, who’d been the gold standard of male erotic perfection-polished, inexhaustible, selfless.
Only now could she begin to admit how taxing that selflessness had been. She’d wanted to give back as good as she got, but what she got was so perfectly executed that she had no idea how to return it in equal measure, and that kept it from being as good as it should have been. She’d worried that her moans were too loud, her movements
