The Marriage Conspiracy Page 12

  And he would always try to make it over for family events. Then again, he had been ambitious back then. Totally dedicated to getting ahead. He’d worked long hours with the OCPD, and sometimes he just couldn’t get away.

  He had come to dinner that Easter, though. He had walked into the house and set his eyes on Stacey, and that was that.

  “Who’s your friend, Joly-Poly?”

  Joly-Poly. He used to call Joleen that, back then. She hated it. Joly-Poly. Roly-poly. They sounded way too much the same. And roly-poly, everybody knew, meant fat—which Joleen was not. Or it meant those little gray armadillo-backed bugs that squeezed up into a tight little ball if you touched them.

  She’d answered him grudgingly. “This is Stacey. And you’d better be nice to her.”

  “Oh, I will. Real nice. As nice as I can be.”

  Joleen had seen it all, then. In the way Dekker was looking at Stacey—and the way that Stacey was staring back at him, all that specialness, that magic she had, shining in her eyes. Zap. Hit by the thunderbolt, like in that old movie, The Godfather, both of them. Goners.

  They were married six weeks later. And almost immediately things had started going wrong….

  “Right, Jo?” she heard Dekker say.

  Joleen blinked. “I…pardon me?” She gave her husband her brightest smile.

  He looked at her as he had in the nursery—as if he was worried about her. And as if she made him a little bit nervous.

  But that look only lasted a fraction of a second. She doubted their hosts had even noticed it.

  “I said, the reporters don’t bother you, the way they get to me.”

  She picked up her water goblet and sipped from it, giving herself a minute to pull her wandering mind fully back to the here and now. “That’s right.” She set the goblet down. “But then, I’ve only had them tailing me since yesterday. I’m sure it’s not gonna take long until I’ll be as fed up with them as Dekker is.”

  Emma sighed. “When Jonas and I got married, it was the same. I couldn’t take a step without tripping over some news hound.”

  “It became necessary,” Jonas said, “to throw the hounds a bone.”

  Dekker took his meaning. “A press conference.”

  “Right. We’ll set one up for Monday or Tuesday. You talk to them on your terms, in a formal setting. Tell them how happy you are, how much in love, whatever you’re willing to let them know. The point is, you can plan ahead what you’re going to say to them. You control the situation. Give them enough to make a decent story and they’ll leave you alone—for a while, anyway.”

  “At this point, I’ll try anything,” said Dekker.

  “As I said, we’ll set it up ASAP.”

  Dekker slanted Joleen a look. She read the question in his eyes. He was wondering if she was ready to talk about the Atwood situation.

  Joleen nodded. “Might as well get it over with.”

  Emma laughed. “What is this? Get what over with?”

  Dekker said, “We have…another issue we could use some advice on.”

  “Tell us.”

  So Dekker told them. He did the job much more simply and efficiently than Joleen could have managed—only leaving out the connection between their sudden marriage and Robert Atwood’s ultimatum. And, of course, the depressing details of their sleeping arrangements.

  Joleen felt the eyes of her host and hostess on her more than once during the telling. And she had a sense that they both easily deduced what Dekker was leaving out—well, maybe not the secret of their nonexistent sex lives, but certainly the fact that they had married to give Joleen a better defense against Robert Atwood’s potential claims of her unfitness as a mother.

  “It sounds to me as if you’ve made all the right moves,” Jonas said when Dekker had finished. “Stay married—happily, of course. Provide the best of everything for that little boy. And by that I mean a good, stable, loving home as well as all the obvious things that your money will buy. If you do all that, I’d say that bastard can’t touch you.”

  “I thought so, too,” Dekker agreed.

  “I think we should go ahead and see Ambrose on Monday, though,” Jonas said. “I’m about 99 percent certain he’ll tell us there’s nothing else to do until Sam’s grandfather makes his next move. But there’s no harm in checking with him, in case there’s something we’re not seeing here.”

  Emma must have noticed Joleen’s questioning look. She explained, “Ambrose McAllister handles all the personal legal matters for the Bravo family. He’s been doin’ it for more than thirty years. He is the sweetest, dearest man. And smart as they come, too. You will love him.”

  Joleen tucked her napkin in at the side of her empty plate. “I truly do appreciate all this.”

  Emma grinned. “No thanks are needed.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “Now, let’s head on upstairs. I have a nephew up there and I want to meet him.”

  It was the kind of day Joleen had read about and seen in movies: a real California day. Not a cloud in the sky and seventy-eight degrees at four in the afternoon.

  Emma suggested it might be fun if they all went on out to the pool. She said they didn’t need to go back to their rooms to change.

  “You all can just choose what you need from the cabanas. Palmer always keeps them stocked like a department store, with everything from bathin’ suits in all sizes to air mattresses, goggles and snorkeling gear.”

  Joleen laughed. “What about sunscreen?”

  “Honey, that’s in there, too. Name your brand.”

  So they all trooped out to the pool area, which had three cabanas, one for men, one for women—and one that was done up just like the poolside bar at some fancy hotel. Emma even went and got her dogs—a couple of cute and very well-mannered miniature Yorkshire terriers that she explained had first belonged to Jonas and Dekker’s mother, Blythe.

  The dogs sat in the shade of the loggia, which was a long colonnaded back porch beneath the big terrace off the master bedroom suite. The dogs looked so sweet and eager, wagging their tails and panting with happiness, as if just being there tickled them pink.

  The humans, on the other hand, suited up and swam in the cobalt-blue pool. Mandy and Sam splashed around on inflatable toys in the shallows, with the nanny there to tend to their every whim.

  With Sam so well taken care of, Joleen even dared to stretch out on an air mattress and close her eyes for a few minutes. It was a little bit of heaven, just floating there in the blue, blue pool under the paler blue of the California sky.

  But then she felt the slight tug on the side of the mattress and knew without opening her eyes who it was.

  She didn’t move, didn’t speak. Kept her eyes shut. Maybe, if she didn’t acknowledge him, he would just swim away. For several long and lovely minutes, she had not even thought of him. It had been real nice, for a change, not to have her lifelong-friend-turned-husband-turned-object-of-impossible-desire dominating her every thought.

  But then he had to go and dribble cool water over her sun-warmed thighs.

  “Dekker,” she muttered, “I am tryin’ to relax here.”

  More water dribbled over her. She opened her eyes—just to slits, enough that she could see he was scooping water into his palm and pouring it on her in a trickling stream.

  “Stop,” she said.

  He didn’t.

  She turned her head and met those eyes that, right then, seemed to just about exactly match the cobalt blue of the pool. He was grinning, like a naughty kid up to mischief and enjoying it.

  “What part of ‘stop’ was unclear to you?”

  The grin faded. “Something’s bugging you.” He spoke low, for her ears alone. “What?”

  “Nothing is—” She cut herself off. Lately, she’d been telling way too many lies. But not to Dekker. She never lied to Dekker. Was she going to start now?

  He was waiting, treading water inches from her air mattress, dark hair slick and shiny as the pelt of a seal, water drops gleaming in hi
s brows and lashes, dripping in little rivulets down the strong column of his neck.

  A forbidden urge assailed her—to lean close, stick out her tongue, lick the water right off his neck, then slide her tongue upward, over that wonderful dent in his chin and straight to his lips.

  “Damn it, Jo. What is going on?”

  She snapped her guilty gaze away from his mouth—and up to meet his accusing eyes. “I…” She sent a swift glance around them. Jonas and Emma were sitting side by side, on the edge at the deep end, dangling their legs in the water, with eyes only for each other. The kids and the nanny paddled happily in the shallows.

  No one was looking at them. But still, it was hardly the time or the place to talk about this—if there even was such a time, such a place…

  Trailing gleaming drops of water, Dekker lifted a hand and clasped her arm just below the elbow. It was a touch intended to reassure, she knew. A touch that meant, I’m here. You can trust me. You can talk to me.

  But it didn’t work.

  Because heat went zinging through her, a bullet of longing, ricocheting up to her shoulder, zipping back and forth around her heart and then zooming on down to her belly—and lower.

  “Don’t!” She jerked away.

  Dekker stared at her for a long, awful moment. It was a stunned, angry stare—and an injured one, too, as if she had done more than jerk away from him. As if she had slapped him right across the face.

  Then he turned around in the cool, clear water and swam away from her.

  Chapter 11

  Something had happened, with Jo. Something was wrong. Dekker didn’t know what.

  She wouldn’t tell him. Once she gave him the brush-off, there in the pool, she started avoiding him. Avoiding his eyes, avoiding physical contact.

  Around six, when the nanny took the kids in to feed them, Jo excused herself, too. She vanished into the house for the good part of an hour. The rest of them were just coming inside when she appeared again, freshly showered, smelling like flowers, wearing a clingy scoop-necked dress the same golden-brown color as the lights in her hair when the sun got caught in it. The dress skimmed all her curves and fell to just above her ankles.

  Emma said what Dekker was thinking. “Girl, you are lookin’ good.”

  Joleen smiled her thanks at the compliment, and then Emma explained that she and Jonas were going to have to leave their guests to their own devices for a while. “We have got to freshen up.” Emma slid her husband a sly look. The glance he gave her in return made it pretty clear that more than freshening up would be going on as soon as he got his wife alone. “Dinner in the small dinin’ room at eight-thirty. We’ll have drinks in the living room off the grand foyer, at eight—that is, if that’s all right with the two of you?”

  “Sounds great,” Jo answered.

  “Yeah, great,” Dekker muttered, instantly wishing he could call the words back, try them again, make them sound a little more upbeat.

  But he wasn’t feeling all that upbeat at the moment. Damn it, he wanted to know what was eating Jo.

  And Emma and Jonas didn’t care about his bad attitude, anyway. Right then, as far as those two were concerned, the rest of the world flat-out did not exist. Emma curled her hand around her husband’s arm and led him away.

  Which left him and Jo, standing there alone just beyond the set of French doors that led out to the loggia. It was a chance, he realized, to find out what her problem was.

  But before he could say a word, she started giving him orders. “Go on up and have your shower,” she instructed, as if he were some kid who had to be reminded when he needed a bath. “I’ll see how Sam’s doin’.” She turned and walked away from him.

  He should have stopped her, should have said, Hey, wait a minute. What the hell is going on here? But he didn’t. He just stood there, wishing he could strangle someone, watching her walk away. That damn dress clung to her backside like poured honey. And it had a slit, too. Right up the back, all the way to her knees. He could see the smooth, ripe skin of her calves as she moved. He must have stood there for a good sixty seconds, till she was way out of sight, staring like a long-gone fool at the place where she had last been.

  He just wasn’t used to this—to Jo shutting him out. Not in the past few years, anyway. Yeah, when she was a kid she used to put on attitudes with him. She would get all insulted at something he’d said. Wouldn’t tell him what he’d done to make her mad, or anything sensible like that. She’d just get steamed up and not speak to him for days or even weeks.

  Which hadn’t bothered him a whole hell of a lot back then. She was a kid and she had more to deal with than any kid should, after her dad died. He figured she had a lot of frustrations bottled up, from always having to be the responsible one in her family. And he figured he could take it if she wanted to exercise her frustrations on him.

  But the days of her putting on attitudes with him were behind them. Had been for a long time. Or so he’d thought until this afternoon—when she’d given him attitude to spare.

  Why? He needed to get to the bottom of it.

  That night, he decided. When they were alone, after the drinks and the dinner and all that, when they finally went up to bed. She’d have a hard time evading him then, since they would be sleeping in the same damn room.

  The hours seemed to crawl by until that time came, even though Jonas and Emma were terrific hosts and the food was exceptional. After the meal they went to the media room, where they watched a bizarre but entertaining film about aliens—both the illegal variety and the kind from outer space. Emma explained that Jonas had been the movie’s major backer. The film-maker was evidently Jonas’s close personal friend.

  Joleen sat at Dekker’s side through both the meal and the movie. She laughed in all the right places. She chatted easily with his brother and Emma. She even talked to him, now and then, soft little murmurings. Things like “Please pass the bread” and “Thank you” and “Excuse me,” when her napkin slid off her lap and she bent over to get it and her leg brushed his under the table.

  She never would look at him, though. Not really look at him. Her eyes were always sliding away whenever he tried to snare her glance.

  So all right. Later. He’d deal with her later. When they were finally alone.

  At a little after midnight they said good-night to Jonas and Emma. They stopped in at the nursery to get Sam, who’d already had his bath and been dressed in his pj’s. The little guy had fallen asleep in a nest of pillows on the floor of the playroom. Dekker carried him back to their own rooms, where Jo tucked him into bed. She tiptoed from the smaller room and quietly shut the door.

  It was time, and he knew it. Time to confront her. Time to get whatever it was out in the open where they could deal with it.

  But there was a slight problem.

  He did not have a clue where to begin.

  She said, “You go ahead. Use the bathroom first.”

  “No. It’s all right. I can wait.”

  “No really, you go on.”

  They stood there, in the area between the foot of the bed and the grouping of big, soft, gorgeous sofas, staring at each other.

  Finally she let out a sound—a small noise in her throat that spoke of pure impatience with him, with the situation, with who the hell knew what all. “Oh, all right, Dekker. I’ll go first.”

  “Good,” he said, his tone as gruff and fed up as he felt right then. “Do it.”

  She turned for the big closet and dressing area that led to the bathroom, and when she got in there, she shut the door behind her. Which left him alone in the bed/sitting room, staring at the shut door and facing the bleak truth.

  He just…didn’t know how to get through to her.

  She was the talker, damn it. She was the open one, the easy one, the one who never hesitated when it came time to hash something out.

  He never had to do more than lift an eyebrow or mutter, What? And she would be telling him any and everything she had on her mind.

&
nbsp; So what the hell had happened? What had gone wrong? Had he done something to get her mad?

  He couldn’t think what.

  However, somehow, since late this afternoon, muttering What? and raising his eyebrows had gotten him exactly nowhere with her. He’d even gone so far, down there in the pool, as to ask her directly what was going on. For that, he got half a denial.

  At least she’d done that much. Stopped herself in midlie. He could do without hearing lies from her mouth.

  Dekker stalked over to one of those big, beautiful couches and dropped into it, swinging his feet up and plunking them down on the gleaming wood of the inlaid coffee table. He looked at his shoes, though he wasn’t really seeing them.

  He was thinking that Jo had damn well better not start telling him lies. He’d had enough lies in his life. Enough lies and enough sulking. Enough of the kind of woman who needed more of everything than he could ever give. The kind of woman who made him feel that he was lacking, somehow, that he couldn’t quite cut it—as a husband, as a man, as a caring human being.

  The kind of woman that Stacey had been.

  Hell, was he cursed or something? He couldn’t help but start to wonder. Right now, it seemed as if all he had to do was marry a woman to turn her into a—

  Dekker shut his eyes.

  No. Not right. Not fair.

  Jo was not Stacey. Not in a hundred thousand years.

  And Stacey, well, in the end, no matter how mixed-up she’d been, and no matter how exhausting the emotional chase she had led him, he had chosen her, loved her, pursued her. Married her.

  And he’d been no more ready to be a husband than she had been to be a wife. They’d made a royal mess of it. She had wanted his undivided attention, twenty-four hours a day. She’d wanted him to live, sleep, eat and breathe Stacey. And for a while he had given her just what she wanted.

  But he was a man with a plan then. He had things he wanted, too. Like to make detective, which meant time away from Stacey. Which made Stacey very unhappy.