Volcano (13 page)

“I'm just checking to see if everything's all right. I apologize for my mother's lack of hospitality. I make her angry.”

“I can see that.” Her voice was somehow cool and soft at the same time, gentle as a stroke across his brow.

How the hell did she do that? Feeling like the awkward teenager he once had been, Charlie plunged on. “Let me clean up and I'll come back and get you. I'm sorry I didn't prepare you for this charade. Don't worry about what you're wearing. We won't be here long enough for it to matter.”

“I brought a change of clothes. I'll be fine. It's better than a jungle.”

He thought he detected amusement this time. He hadn't thought his prim accountant knew the meaning of amusement. He gave her a sharp look, but not even the hint of a smile lingered on her wide lips. She never wore lipstick, didn't need it, but he would wager she carried it somewhere. She was too much like his mother, and his mother wouldn't be caught dead without it.

His mother had redecorated his old room in some kind of flowered cotton material in purple and pink. Shuddering at the ruffled pillow shams on the poster bed, he flung down his backpack, pulled out a clean shirt, and headed for the shower. Women! Why couldn't they leave perfectly respectable rooms alone? What was the compulsion to feather their nests with every conceivable twig and string within reach?

Catching his thoughts wandering to what Penelope might keep in her apartment, Charlie scowled, scrubbed, and after toweling dry, hastily shaved and ran a comb through his hair. He checked the mirror again and decided his hair needed a trim. He supposed he'd hear about that before dinner was through. His mother needed to get a life now that her children were grown.

Worried about Tammy's presence here when she should have been at school somewhere, he threw everything back in his bag, checked the mirror again, and headed for Penelope's room. He had packed only wrinkle-free shirts, but his mother had always hated knits, and he figured Penelope would disapprove too.

Penelope opened the door wearing a jade green sheath that stopped just above her knees. Charlie thought even this shapeless garment would be an improvement over her usual masculine attire, if she hadn't covered it up with a flowing sheer thing longer than the dress. Where in hell she got all these weird cover-ups was beyond him, but this one appeared to match the dress. She looked as if she were prepared for dinner with the president.
This
was what she'd packed for an overnight stay in the jungle?

Every single sentence he thought to utter was inappropriate. She still wasn't wearing her damned hair down, although it would have looked dramatic against the gauzy green.

“How the hell did you get all that in that little bag?” he finally demanded.

“It rolls up in a ball like a swimsuit.” She shrugged and stepped out of the room, brushing past him when he didn't move out of her way.

“It rolls up in a ball.... Hell, it's some kind of knit?” he asked incredulously, falling into step with her.

“Probably. I don't know. I travel a lot and I buy things that don't need ironing.”

He could scarcely believe his ears. A woman who didn't know what kind of clothes she was wearing. Amazing. Now that he looked, she wasn't wearing any dangly ornaments in her ears or baubles around her neck either. No fuss, no muss. Maybe he should have hung out with rich, beautiful women more often. They didn't need ornamentation.

Nah, that wasn't it. He'd dated beautiful women before. Most of them spent half their lives in front of mirrors. They put lipstick on before bed. Charlie risked a hasty glance at Penelope's mouth. She was wearing something glossy, but it was scarcely noticeable. She'd powdered her nose and covered the freckles though.

Raul. Get his mind back to Raul. This idiotic fascination with a woman who thought him lower than toadstools had to be some kind of denial technique. Raul could be dead. He didn't want to believe it—so he looked for lipstick on a woman's mouth.

Charlie steered Penelope to the sitting room next to the family dining room. The house had more damned places to eat and stand and sit than he could count. But there weren't enough to avoid his family.

Emile waited there alone. Tall, dignified, with silver-gray hair Charlie figured a stylist tinted and cut, his stepfather looked as if he'd just stepped out of some expensive men's fashion magazine from a plate labeled “distinguished statesman.” The red ascot was the only deviation from the norm. Emile had always affected an ascot. Considering he spent most of his time in a tropical country where air-conditioning was sparse, Charlie figured his stepfather had ice in his veins.

“It's been a long time, Charles.” Emile nodded graciously in Charlie's direction, then immediately turned all his masculine attention to Penelope.

As Emile appraised Penelope, Charlie fought the primitive urge to shove his stepfather's eyes back in their sockets. Instead, he draped his arm possessively over Penelope's shoulders.

“Penelope, my stepfather, Emile St. Philippe.” To Charlie's relief, he heard Tamara's cane tapping down the hallway. Deliberately ignoring the startled look in Penelope's eyes, Charlie pushed her in his sister's direction. “I need a word with Emile. Why don't you ask Tamara to show you her seashell collection.”

Her spine stiffened, and he could almost hear the protests grinding through that transparent mind of hers. Then she gave him a swift look, softened, and with a wicked gleam, patted his cheek.

“I do so love seashells, darling. You just go have your old boring man talk. Tamara and I will have a lovely time without you.”

Spiked, tackled, and brought low, Charlie grinned in appreciation of her sarcasm. Unable to resist the final play, he patted her on the rear as she passed by.

Unseen from Emile's direction, she shot him a glare that should have pierced and wounded, and warned of retaliation in the immediate future. Lord, but he loved a good fight. His blood was pumping in anticipation already. As Penelope reached Tammy and led her from the room, Charlie turned his attention back to his stepfather.

“Lovely woman. Do you know her family?” Emile was still following Penelope's path as she glided out the door. He swirled his martini as he watched.

Charlie had considered punching Emile out the day he'd discovered his stepfather's love nest. Out of respect for his mother, he'd resisted. But so help him God, if the man laid a single finger on Penelope, any semblance of respect flew out the window. He'd bury the creep.

“No one you would know, I'm certain,” he responded coldly. “And that's not why I'm here. How much do you know about the new construction in Soufriere?”

With the women out of sight, Emile reluctantly returned his attention to his stepson. “That piece of swamp on the south side? I thought the project abandoned.”

The man would have to live with his head in the sand not to know more than that. The island was a tiny place. Everyone knew everything that went on, without need of a daily newspaper. The pro-rain forest, antidevelopment people had staged protests for months. The local government had fought over who would handle the water/sewer arrangements. Townspeople had demanded low-cost housing. Real estate people had demanded modern construction suitable for sale to rich tourists. Everyone had an opinion.

“Emile, I am no longer twelve years old. You don't own this property without income to maintain it. I made it a point to know the basis of that income. You may never have worked a day in your life, but you own large percentages of every major construction firm on this island. You damned well know what's going on in your own backyard.”

Emile shrugged the shoulders of his elegant silk coat and sipped from his martini before responding. “I invest my money where it receives the best return. My financial advisers handle that sort of thing. Should you have need of advice, I'd be happy to give you their names. They're quite good. Beyond that, I know nothing more than there's a mud hole where there used to be forest.”

Why the hell had he thought he could talk to the man? Just because he could talk to Miami bankers, international acquisition managers, temperamental architects, and rough construction crews didn't mean he could talk to Emile. But Charlie knew instinctively that no man pretended ignorance without reason.

“You remember Raul Joseph, don't you? We used to play soccer together in high school.”

Emile wrinkled his smooth brow in thought. “One of those natives you insisted on befriending? I don't know why you wouldn't attend the private school I arranged for you. You would have made much more valuable acquaintances.”

Hell, this was going nowhere. Here less than an hour and he was already regressing into the same arguments they'd had when he was thirteen. He knew better than to come here. Where the hell would he turn now? He'd counted on Jacques putting him in touch with the right people. He hadn't counted on Jacques being married and protecting his family by disappearing.

Shit. Charlie glared in frustration at his imperturbable stepfather. “This isn't productive. I'm looking for an old friend. If I don't find him, I'm likely to become extremely angry. I'm not a pimply teenage boy any longer. I have money, influence, and a means of wielding both. If you want to duke it out over power tables, so be it. It would be a damned sight easier if you'd just tell me what you know.”

Looking thoughtful, Emile drifted toward the wet bar. “You still haven't learned finesse, have you? I could have taught you that, but you insisted on breaking your mother's heart by returning to your father and the trailer park you grew up in. There really isn't much we have to say to each other after all these years, is there?”

“For my mother's sake, I'd hoped so. If you loved her at all, you would make some effort to cooperate, but you never loved her, did you? Why the hell did you marry her in the first place? She scarcely came from one of the ‘best' families.”

Tamara chose that moment to return to the room, with Penelope in tow. His lovely half sister lit the room with her golden smile. Slender, blithe, as sweet as she was beautiful, Tamara had always been the dove of peace in this nest of wolves. She had his mother's startling blue eyes but her father's silken blond hair.

In that instant, Charlie answered his own question. In her greed and ambition for the good life, his mother had spent every penny his father had paid her in support and used her position as interior decorator to the wealthy to work her way into what passed for Miami society.

She must have used the oldest trick in the book to nail Emile's hide to the wall. He could remember Tamara being born within a year of his mother's remarriage. Less than a year. As an eleven-year-old, he'd been more disgruntled by the nuisance of the infant than interested in counting months. He didn't need to count them now. Emile had married his mother because she was pregnant. And he'd probably been furious that she hadn't borne him a son. Tamara's deformed leg must have quadrupled his fury.

Charlie couldn't believe he hadn't seen it earlier. Damn, but teenagers were blind, selfish idiots.

Fighting other nasty thoughts, Charlie turned and took both beautiful women on his arms. “Ladies, a stroll on the terrace before dinner?”

He'd never pry anything out of Emile. Maybe he should start looking for Emile's lovers. On an island this small, they shouldn't be difficult to find. The stories they could tell might be useful.

“Father looks angry,” Tammy whispered to Charlie as they stepped into the garden. “What did you say to him?”

“How the h... How can you tell that?”

Tammy smiled at her brother's attempt at polite language. Charlie had always pretended to despise her in front of his friends when he was a kid, but he'd always stood up for her. He'd pounded one of his schoolmates into the ground the day he'd found the creep making fun of her leg. She'd always thought of her half brother as a hero. She needed a hero right now.

“The muscle beside his eye twitches when he's angry. I always leave when that happens. What did you say to him?” Tammy liked Penelope, but she wished the other woman would disappear so she could talk to Charlie alone.

“We just don't get along,” Charlie said dismissively. “Now tell me why you aren't in school. I thought you always wanted to be a nurse.”

A nurse—like her father would allow that. She'd outgrown childish daydreams years ago. “They think I'm too delicate,” she answered defensively. “That's why you have to help me.”

She was afraid she sounded desperate. If she'd learned nothing else about men, it was that they retreated quickly around anyone who sounded desperate. She tried smiling reassuringly, but Charlie was staring at her as if she'd grown three heads.

“Don't look at me like that, Charlie. I'm twenty years old, old enough to be on my own. Do you want me to marry one of those insufferable jerks Father brings home for my inspection? Can you imagine how much money he must be offering to make them even consider someone like me?”

“What a lovely waterfall!” Penelope exclaimed from Charlie's other side. “I'll just wander over and look at it while you and your sister catch up on old times.”