Cry Uncle (30 page)

“
I really want to help
you.”

He wished her gaze wasn’t so guarded, so
dubious. Then again, who was he to resent her for distrusting him?
Hadn’t he been busy distrusting her for the past few weeks?

She fingered the newspaper nervously. The
pages made a faint rustling sound. “It’s messy work,” she
warned.

He chuckled, but the laughter carried an
edge. “Oh, well, in that case, forget I offered. A gentleman like
me would never want to get messy.”

“
Jonas...” She sighed, and
he saw a hot blush rise in her cheeks, the same blush he’d seen
last night when she’d come while he was deep inside her.
Remembering made him pretty hot, too. “Forgive me for being
suspicious, but why, all of a sudden, do you want to do
this?”

“
You know damn well why,” he
answered calmly, then took a healthy swig of his coffee. He was
actually feeling far less confident than he sounded. Not that she
could ban him from Birdie’s house, but if she decided to crank up
the drawbridge at his first attempt to march across the moat,
getting her into his bed was going to be more difficult than he’d
imagined.

“
All right,” she relented,
then frowned in deep concentration as she focused on an article
about a budget crunch in the state’s welfare system. Her abrupt
surrender, mixed with a tantalizing measure of evasiveness,
appealed to him as much as her pink cheeks and her bony shoulders
and the small swells of her breasts barely curving the fabric of
her loose-fitting yellow T-shirt.

He’d messed up last night with Pamela, and he
had no regrets. He certainly wouldn’t mind getting messy with her
today.

***

SHE HAD TO ADMIT he was an enormous help.

They stood side by side in Birdie’s enclosed
porch, removing huge chunks of the wall that had once separated it
from the kitchen. They had sent Birdie and Lizard, along with most
of Birdie’s cats, across the street to Joe’s house to occupy
themselves with Lizard’s herb garden. The absence of Birdie and
Lizard had proven as useful to Pamela as the presence of Joe.

The air was warm and cloudy with plaster
dust. Joe had supplied Pamela with an old duck-billed cap of his,
and he wore one himself. He’d also provided bandannas for them to
tie around their noses and mouths, to keep from inhaling the
dust.

Wearing the bandannas prevented all but the
most necessary talk. When a slab of plasterboard came loose, Joe
lugged it out to the back yard, freeing Pamela for the more
painstaking work of scraping excess plaster from the counter and
removing shreds of dry-wall from the vertical studs. Much as she
hated to admit it, they made a good team.

Just like last night.

A treacherous thought. She tried not to pay
attention to Joe’s strength, his lithe movements, the powerful
flexing of his back as he hoisted the heavy debris and hauled it
outside. She tried not to notice the beautiful blue of his eyes,
visible in the space between his improvised face mask and the visor
of his cap. She tried not to remember the way they’d teamed up last
night, how good it had been.

“
Why did you sha-she-booty?”
he asked.

She lowered her chisel and scowled at him.
“Huh?”

He set down the slab of dry-wall he’d been
holding and enunciated more carefully through his bandanna gag:
“Why did you decide to do this?”

She turned from him to stare at the tattered
remains of the wall. She could have told him she’d done it to make
Birdie’s house more livable, or because it was the closest she
could come to practicing her profession while she was living in Key
West. She could have told him she’d done it because she wanted to
work hard, sweat hard, keep Lizard busy and keep her mind off her
own problems. All of that would have been true.

“
It was something to do,”
she mumbled, then read his perplexed look and repeated her answer,
mouthing the syllables clearly through the soft cotton
fabric.

“
I was thinking, maybe it
was kind of—what’s the word, sublimation?” The bandanna garbled his
words, but not enough to make them incomprehensible.

She was not going to discuss last night’s
activity with him. “If I had anything to sublimate, it was
fear.”

“
Are you afraid of
me?”

She shot him a quick look. He appeared to be
inspecting a vertical stud, but she wasn’t fooled. “I’m afraid of
Mick Morrow.”

“
He’s a continent away—and
he’s looking for Pamela Hayes. You’re Pam Brenner.”

“
Why should I be afraid of
you?” she asked, feeling a little reckless. “Are you planning to
kill me, too?”

He laughed. It didn’t sound like laughter
through the bandanna, but she could tell by the humor in his eyes
and the motion of his shoulders that he was enjoying a good
chuckle. “Hey, sweetheart, dead ladies don’t do a damned thing for
me. I want you very much alive.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot beneath the
broad triangle of cloth. A laugh escaped her, partly from
embarrassment and partly from relief at being able to talk to Joe
again, and relax in his company. Even if he wasn’t the man of her
dreams—although last night he’d done an estimable job of redefining
certain dreams of hers—she hadn’t liked being frozen out by
him.

“
What we’re going to do,”
she explained, grimacing when she tasted lint from the bandanna on
her teeth, “is break down the door frame and have this simply be
open.” She paced to the end of the counter and gestured with her
hands to indicate the opening. “We’ll put a half-wall behind the
sink to hide the plumbing. It’s going to look
wonderful.”

“
I think it will,” he
agreed, scanning the area with his gaze. “You’ve got a knack for
this sort of thing, don’t you.”

“
It’s what I do
best.”

“
I’m not so sure of that,”
he teased, then grew still. His eyebrows dipped in concentration.
“What’s that knocking?”

“
What knocking?”

He touched his index finger to his bandanna
to silence her. She heard it, then—a rhythmic rapping sound.

“
One of the cats,
maybe?”

“
Whatever it is, it’s at the
front door,” he said, tossing down the hammer he’d been holding and
heading down the crooked, narrow corridor to the front of the
house.

Pamela hurried after him, ready for an excuse
to take a break. They’d been working for over an hour, and without
air conditioning Birdie’s house was taking on the qualities of a
sauna.

By the time she caught up with Joe, he had
the front door open. Two people stood on the small porch. The man
had on an elegant, unstructured suit of beige linen, the trousers
pleated and the sleeves of the jacket rolled up one cuff. In
defiance of the summer heat, his charcoal-gray shirt was buttoned
up to his Adam’s apple, although he didn’t have on a tie. His dark
hair was so impeccably groomed it might have been clipped with a
manicure scissors, one strand at a time.

The woman beside him was equally impressive.
She wore a plain black shift that was so simple in its lines,
Pamela knew it had to have cost a fortune. Her hair was shorter
than the man’s, and it had been moussed into a profoundly chic
arrangement around her face. Both she and the man wore horn-rimmed
sunglasses with small, round lenses. The woman also wore bright red
lipstick.

They looked to Pamela like
refugees from some terribly precious boutique. Having spent the
past month in Key West, she’d been lulled into the prevalent belief
that shorts and T-shirts were the ultimate in fashion. She hadn’t
seen anyone dressed with such slavish deference to
haute couture
since she’d
left Seattle.

The stylish couple fell back a step at the
sight of the two grungy, dust-covered workers. “Joyce, Lawton,” Joe
mumbled through his bandanna, then tugged it off his mouth to
circle his throat. “So, you finally decided to roll into town.” He
doffed his cap and hurled it down the hall behind him.

“
We arrived last night,” the
woman said. Pamela wished she could see the woman’s eyes, but the
lenses of her sunglasses were too dark. “We’re staying at the Reach
Resort. We went to your house. A very peculiar old woman was
there.”

“
She had peacock feathers
fastened to her sleeves,” said the man.

“
There was a little girl
with her. She had feathers braided into her hair. They were
stomping barefoot in a mud puddle at the back of your house,
carrying bunches of dandelions and chanting strange things. They
said we’d find you here.” The woman regarded Joe critically, her
bright red lips pressed together in disapproval.

“
Yeah, well...” Joe dusted
his hands on the seat of his jeans and extended his right hand to
the man, who shook it without much enthusiasm. “That little
barefoot girl is Lizard. I guess you didn’t recognize
her.”

The woman turned and glared at the man. “I
told you that was her.”

“
She didn’t look anything
like the photo we got last Christmas.” The man glowered at Joe.
“Whose picture did you send us at Christmas?”

“
That was Lizard, without
the feathers.”

“
Elizabeth,” the woman
corrected him.

“
She prefers to be called
Lizard.” Joe eased Pamela’s bandanna down over her chin, then slid
his arm around her waist. “Pam, these are the Prescotts, Lizard’s
aunt and uncle from California. Joyce, Lawton, I’d like you to meet
my wife, Pam.”

A long, stunned silence ensued. “Your wife?”
the woman named Joyce scoffed.

“
Yeah. My wife. Lizard’s
aunt by marriage.”

Joyce glared at Lawton again. “Why weren’t we
informed of this?”

Lawton, in turn, glowered at Joe. “Why
weren’t we informed of this?”

“
I didn’t know you cared.
Anyway, I figured if I’d sent you an invitation to the wedding, you
might have felt you had to buy us a gift. I thought I’d do you a
favor and spare you the expense.”

Pamela caught the glint of amusement in his
eyes. These were the people who wanted to take Lizard away from
him; he ought to have been baring his teeth and growling. Yet his
arm was draped casually around her shoulders, and his smile
produced a dimple.

In spite of the ghastly first impression she
must be making, with plaster caked under her nails and perspiration
trickling down her neck, she wasn’t going to let the Prescotts
daunt her. After all, she was a professional, a smart, talented
woman with a couple of university degrees. Until recently, she’d
earned a large income, and she owned an expensive condo. A
supercilious couple costumed by Armani couldn’t faze her.

“
How do you do,” she said
cordially, extending her hand. “Joe’s told me so much about
you.”

“
He hasn’t told us anything
about you,” Joyce retorted.

Joe opened his mouth to respond, but Pam
answered for herself. “There really isn’t much to tell. We met, we
fell in love, and we got married.”

“
The impact this could have
on Elizabeth—”

“
Has been quite positive,”
Pamela said with breezy certainty. “She’s been happier than
ever.”

“
She has feathers in her
hair,” Lawton muttered.

“
And I have plaster dust in
mine,” Pamela informed him, pulling off her cap and riffling her
fingers through her sweat-damp hair. “That’s why God gave us
shampoo.”

“
As you can see,” Joe broke
in, “we’re in the middle of some work here, doing repairs on the
peculiar old lady’s house, because she’s a good friend of ours. So,
Lawton, Joyce—” he nodded to each in turn “—it’s great seeing you,
and why don’t you have your lawyer call my lawyer.”

The four of them squared off for another
awkward minute, and then the Prescotts beat a retreat. Only when
they’d reached the Infiniti parked at the curb did Pamela feel
Joe’s hand furl into a fist at the small of her back.

“
Charming folks,” she
said.

“
They’ve got money,” Joe
muttered, as if that would be the deciding factor in who won
custody of Lizard.

“
They didn’t even recognize
Liz.”

“
All they’ve seen of her for
the past three years is snapshots. And they’re right—I cleaned her
up some for the Christmas photo.”

“
Joe, look at them! Can you
imagine them letting Lizard plant herbs in their back
yard?”

He sent her a quick, ironic look and then
spun around and entered the house. “I’d better call Mary DiNardi
and let her know the boom’s about to fall,” he said.

Pamela lingered in the doorway for a moment.
She could guess what that look of his said: that when she’d first
walked into the Shipwreck one month ago, she’d been no more
prepared to raise a child than the Prescotts were today.

But she’d changed. She’d put away her silk
blouses and tailored trousers. She’d forgotten about nail polish
and nights at the ballet. She hadn’t listened to Mozart in a month;
she couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten steamed asparagus or
sipped a properly aged Bordeaux. But she’d learned how to tramp
through the mud and herd an unruly child through a store, how to
tune out the whining and accept Lizard’s candor without taking
offense.

If she could learn, why couldn’t the
Prescotts?

They didn’t have the same incentive she had,
she answered herself. They would be doing it only for themselves,
to satisfy their own preferences when it came to the girl’s
custody. Pamela wasn’t doing it for herself.