Oh hell. Don't try to excuse yourself by dredging up some noble reason for seducing her. You wanted a woman and she was there. That's all it was, damn it.
Amanda's face, shattered behind her hair's protective strands, haunted his sleep.
* * * *
Amanda dozed, unable to sleep soundly because of seeing Callaway's dimple, feeling his embrace.
When she heard her cellphone's distant tone, she came instantly awake. By the time she stumbled out of bed, Cal was in the hall bringing it to her. His body was uncompromisingly nude, just as long, lean, and sinewy as she remembered from the night she'd met him, and deeply tanned with the one conspicuous exception.
Their eyes met. Hers dropped first. He’d already turned on the speaker.
“Manda, Manda, you've got to help me. I don't know what I'm going to do.”
Amanda waited for the torrent of words to stop. “Noelle, I can't help you unless I know where you are. Tell me.”
There. The words were easy to say. She didn't know why she'd been so frantic this afternoon.
“I can't… I don't want to tell you where I am because he'll find out. He's there, isn't he?”
“Callaway knows you talked me into drugging him, but it doesn't matter. He wants to help you.”
“You said he was with you when Sonny died. You knew about Sonny before I called.” The words were accusatory.
“Noelle, was Sonny your boyfriend?”
“He...” Silence. “I wanted to get married. I thought when I got my divorce, we could get married.”
“Honey, you have to talk to us, tell us what happened.” Amanda wasn't even conscious of using the plural.
“I know.” Noelle's sigh was breathy and long. “You'll have to come to me, Amanda. I'm scared. I don't want to go to jail.”
“Callaway isn't going to put you in jail.” Amanda hoped her assurance was true. Callaway held her eyes, inscrutable. “He isn't,” she repeated, challenging him to deny her words.
Noelle didn’t know how daunting Callaway looked in his impressive male nudity. “Bring me some money, Manda. He can come with you if he has to. Okay?”
Callaway nodded for her to agree, and Amanda did. “Where do we come?”
“Cancun. Since he's coming, too, you might as well go to the McIntyre hotel there. The Firth of Clyde.”
“All right.” Amanda sank down on the sofa.
Noelle was rushing on. “I know there's a plane tomorrow morning. You can catch that. Will you?”
“Noelle…” Something about Noelle's suggestions seemed too pat.
Noelle wouldn't wait. “I'll call you tomorrow afternoon at the Firth of Clyde. I love you, Manda.”
There was a click.
Too pat. Noelle had practiced.
Amanda became conscious of Callaway’s bare feet, long and narrow. They stood in front of her, waiting for her to do something, say something. An earthy aroma lay about him, of bed, sleep, and virility. The faint sweetness of aftershave cut with cigarette smoke.
She looked up. His hair was tousled, his features impassive. What was he thinking? What would he let her do? What would become of her and Noelle?
“I'll make arrangements,” was all he said. He glanced at a wall clock. “You'll have to call Melissa first thing in the morning. Better not plan on getting back for a day or so. God knows what your sister will do once we get there.”
All along she'd hoped in the back of her mind that Noelle wouldn't call back, wouldn't admit she was in trouble. Amanda had not wanted to hear.
He saw her eyes on him, reached out to rest his fingertips on the top of her head. Something in her expression must have touched him, because his hand and his voice were kind. “Go back to bed, Amanda. We can't do anything till morning.”
His fingers sifted through her hair.
She stumbled back to her room, remembering when she was in bed what his body had been beginning to show.
* * * *
Callaway, fully aware of his damned prick, couldn't put Amanda's distress out of mind.
She's looked after Noelle the way Claire looked after me.
Was he as big a disappointment to his sister as Noelle was to hers? But Amanda and Claire hadn’t let their failures govern their lives. He could learn from their examples, rise above his deficiencies so that a woman like Amanda wouldn't reject him outright as she had tonight.
As she had in Houston.
He jeered at himself. Amanda’s kind of women were capable, confident and intent on worthwhile goals, with no use for affable incompetents like Callaway McIntyre.
Only she wasn't so confident and capable as she seemed, was she? Not below the surface.
He closed his eyes and tried not to think of her disappointment at the confirmation of her sister's betrayal.
It was hard, when he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss away her unshed tears and make her forget her imagined failings with Noelle.
I want her, period. The old primitive instinct raising its ugly head. That's all it is.
He beat at his pillow and tried to go back to sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Cancun was hot. Mid-May in Atlanta was pleasant, but in the southern seas, an ocean breeze saved the spring from being almost uncomfortable. Balmy gusts brushed the flat sandy spaces and daubed at corners hidden behind structures, moderating the sun's scorching beams and cooling overheated human bodies.
Amanda, who had never been anywhere farther south than Orlando, tried not to goggle as they navigated the long customs line that snaked between strolling armed soldiers. In the hotel’s air-conditioned van, she watched palm trees, white sand, and flatlands go by.
And water. Always the water in the distance, a dazzling shade of blue she could never have imagined.
She pointed. “Is that the ocean?”
“That's the lagoon. The ocean's on the left and the Firth of Clyde is on the peninsula between them.” Callaway was behaving as if last night hadn't happened, as if he didn't remember how near she'd come to yielding to him, or her ignominious last-minute retreat.
He might have forgotten, but Amanda hadn't. She'd led him on, letting him play that romantic music, letting him hold her close. Led him on despite her better judgment.
Long before Callaway had realized what was happening, she'd known he was aroused.
Better not think about last night.
“This is wonderful,” she said. “I've seen pictures and movies with the sea and sky so blue, but being here in person is something else entirely different.”
“Don't you go anywhere?” he teased. “I thought everyone had been to Cancun. It's a regular tourist trap.”
“I don't have time for vacations. When I go anywhere, it’s usually to New York or Europe on buying trips, and there's never time to sightsee. I'm a working girl, you know.”
He looked out the window, suddenly aloof.
She’d forgotten how sensitive he was whenever work was mentioned.
The McIntyre Firth of Clyde was as splendid as the countryside, its lobby and hallways open to the outdoors in a delicious foreign flavor. They left the van, walked past the luggage depository, and reached the desk without opening a single door. As Cal checked in, Amanda checked out the large, airy lobby.
A huge floral centerpiece adorned the round coffee table in the middle of crisp cotton-covered sofas scattered around red tile floors. Tall tropical trees in planters made green splashes against white stucco walls. High ceiling fans turned lazily over people sitting singly or in chattering groups. One woman in a wide-brimmed hat tied on with a scarf, had chosen an inconspicuous corner away from the traffic to read a magazine.
As Amanda's glance passed over her, huge sunglasses were lowered for one split second.
Blue eyes locked on Amanda’s.
Noelle!
With blonde hair covered by the large straw hat and delicate features shielded by instantly replaced dark glasses, Noelle lifted a warning finger. She looked scared to death.
Amanda bit her tongue to keep from crying out.
Her sister got up to join a noisy group passing through the lobby and, concealed in the midst of laughing chatter, made her way up a corridor to a large urn for cigarette butts. There, after checking around for unwanted observers, Noelle slid something into the sand. Frightened eyes looked back over her shoulder.
At Amanda's imperceptible nod, Noelle fled.
How does Noelle expect me to pick up whatever it is she's left there with Callaway dogging my every step
?
“All set.” Callaway held up a keycard and took her arm, leading her toward the urn. “They'll bring our luggage up later.”
When they neared the large urn, Amanda opened her purse. “Did I get my passport back at the airport? I hope so. It would be awful to have to go about trying to get a replacement down here, wouldn’t it?” As she babbled, she rummaged through the contents of her purse.
They reached the urn. Her open purse lurched to the floor.
Compact, lipstick, lotion, ibuprofen, nail file, spray perfume, breath freshener, tampon, Sudoku book, ballpoint pen, hand sanitizer, sewing kit, tissue pack, and several condom packets clattered onto the tiles.
“Oh no.” She rushed to pick up the condoms.
Callaway bent to retrieve the compact. When Amanda snatched at the tampon, she knocked the ibuprofen box one way while the lotion and perfume went up the corridor the other way. Straightening, she let her foot send the sanitizer and sewing kit skidding in another direction entirely. “Oh, my.”
A hotel employee stopped to help, but Callaway was already retrieving the sanitizer and sewing kit. By the time her things were collected, Noelle’s wedged paper had been tucked away in Amanda’s purse with no one the wiser. She thanked the bellman and Callaway with a brilliant smile.
Callaway suspected nothing.
It wasn't that she wanted to deceive him, but she knew Noelle. If Noelle thought she’d have to face Cal, she'd bolt, like the time she was caught smoking in school and hid out at a friend's house for three days rather than come home and tell their father she'd been expelled.
If she could reason with Noelle alone, she could convince her sister to tell Callaway whatever he wanted to know. Otherwise, nothing, including conscience or threat of jail, would keep Noelle from running. Not if she was panicky enough. And she’d looked terrified.
If she ran away, they might never find her again.
The open corridor led to an air-conditioned elevator, mirrored in front and padded with velour on back and sides. Upstairs, humid outside air flooded the corridor, but they entered a frigid suite.
Ceiling fans over the coffee table and the small dining table were stationary, unnecessary in the cold. Latticework shutters hid sliding glass doors that led to a balcony overlooking sugar white sands. The sea beyond was azure, the sky a shade lighter.
In slacks and short-sleeved tunic, Amanda shivered.
Callaway went straight to the thermostat. “Maids get hot working and leave the air turned down. We don't need it, do we?”
“I don't.” Her teeth were chattering.
“My room's here.” Cal motioned toward double doors on the right. “Yours is over there.”
She followed him through the double doors on the left to her room with king-sized bed, built-in dressing counter, and bar. A balcony with a waist-high lattice brick wall held wrought iron chairs and tables overlooking the sands and sea.
Callaway unplugged the telephone by the bed and also the one in the bathroom. “You won't need these.”
When he left with the phones, she went into the bathroom. Glass shower doors stood on one side and a jetted sunken tub on the other. An empty telephone receptacle hung beside the john, a hair dryer beside the sink. A small television stood on the counter.
Nice place. If it weren’t for Noelle, she’d love being here.
With Callaway
.
After using the facilities, she came back to the common area to find the bellman gone and the outside doors open to let in the outside warmth. “If I owned this hotel, I'd live here year round.”
He shrugged. “Too crowded. Too many tourists. You'd get tired of it.”
No, she wouldn't. She was sure she wouldn't. Perhaps that’s what separated sophisticates like Callaway from ordinary people like her. When you had everything you wanted, there was nothing to look forward to. Maybe that’s what was wrong with him, why he was so uncomfortable any time work was mentioned.
She was itching to read Noelle's note. “Is that my overnight case? I want to freshen up.”
Locking the door of the bathroom and turning the TV to a program in Spanish, Amanda pulled out Noelle's message.
A ticket was attached to a flyer describing a guided bus tour of Chichen Itza originating from the Firth of Clyde the next morning. There was no note.
Noelle must mean for her to take the tour without Callaway. That would be hard since the only entrance to her bedroom led through the common living area. Although he didn't watch her as closely as before, he still managed to stay underfoot. She might be able to elude him, but when he missed her, he'd come after her. He'd be furious when she slipped off to meet Noelle.