It took Angel ten days to decide that she was definitely pregnant.
For one thing, her breasts had become sore and her nipples swollen. For another, she couldn’t stand the smell of butter or bacon or salad dressing. When she cooked, she had to keep running to the open kitchen door to get a breath of fresh air. She was ecstatic about her symptoms. But she didn’t mention them to Stuart.
He seemed to notice every time she bolted for the outdoors; these days, Stuart noticed everything about her. “Is something wrong?” he’d say. “Are you looking for something out there in the banyan tree?”
“Caloosa,” she’d say. “The mockingbirds were chasing her again today, and I haven’t seen her since.” Or she’d say, “The sunset is so lovely that I had to come out to take a look.”
Whereupon Stuart would say, “I’ll look for Caloosa. Want to come with me?” Or “The sunset’s prettier on the beach. Let’s walk down and watch it.”
No matter how she felt, Angel could never say no to Stuart’s requests. She had lived alone on the island for so long that she’d thought she liked being alone. Now, here was Stuart, always around, always wanting her company for something or other. She’d be on her way to the meadow to spend time with her bees, and Stuart would come along and suggest something that sounded too good to pass up.
They hiked. They explored the limestone caves on the north shore. They made love.
He was good company, which was why she usually stopped what she was doing and joined him. For the first time in years, she was having fun.
How could she not have fun, when he made every activity so exciting? Swimming, for instance. She loved to swim, and she swam every day. But swimming with Stuart was much more interesting than swimming by herself.
One day he found an extra snorkel in the closet and asked her to come out to the reef with him.
“I can’t,” she told him. “I have work to do. There are larvae I’m keeping an eye on over in the east meadow.”
“You’re keeping an eye on larvae? Why? They’re not going anywhere anytime soon, are they?”
“Of course not, Stuart, larvae don’t go much of anywhere, ever. I’m waiting to see—”
He pulled her into his arms, something he did more and more often these days. “I’m waiting to see that big bad moray eel, and I don’t know where to find him. I’ve forgotten where you said to look.”
“I said not to look, if you’ll remember correctly. Big bad moray eels aren’t something you want to stir up.”
“How will I know where he is if you don’t come along to steer me away from him?” he was wheedling now, sliding his hands up her backbone and tunneling them through her hair. He smiled at her—it was a sunny smile full of pleasure—and she could hardly deny him anything when he turned on all the charm.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll get my swimsuit.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Stuart said. “There’s no one to see us. We could run around this island without clothes all the time.”
“Until you sit on your first sandspur,” she retorted, but she didn’t get her swimsuit after all.
Stuart grabbed her hand and, pulling her along with him, kept her laughing all the way to the beach. Once they got there, he helped her out of her clothes, and she pulled his shirt over his head and peeled his jeans down his thighs.
“You look like Eve in the Garden of Eden,” he said in a tone of reverence when they stood naked in the bright sunlight. “You look like Venus rising from the sea.”
“You look like a Greek statue,” she said, unable to think of any other comparisons. One thing she knew was that he looked as if he really liked what he saw as his eyes raked her figure, lingering on what he claimed to consider her finer attributes.
“Our baby will be beautiful. I hope it looks exactly like you,” he said, and she demurred until he silenced her with a light kiss on her lips.
He drew her closer. “Maybe we don’t want to swim after all. Maybe we want to take the time to enjoy being together...like this...you and me...”
He kissed her again, more deeply now, but she was still in a playful mood, and pulled away, laughing. “You’ll have to catch me first,” she said as she started to run. Her feet skimmed like lightning over the warm sand, and Stuart raced after her. When she realized that she was going to be caught and perhaps even tackled, she neatly sidestepped him and bounded into the water, falling to her knees amid the frothy waves.
“Caught you,” Stuart said, leaping in after her. She had to cling to him to keep from going under, and he kissed her, his lips cool and salty against hers.
“We forgot the snorkels,” she said after a while.
“Who wants to come up for air?”
“We can’t keep on doing what we’re doing,” she said as another wave washed over them.
“Why not? Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster did in that movie—what was its title?”
“From Here to Eternity,” she said, sliding her legs around his until the two of them were entwined.
“When we make a movie, we’ll call it From Here to Maternity,” Stuart said.
“Spare me the silly puns,” she said, because her mind was trying to figure out if this was an utterly romantic episode or if it was merely a throwback to some primeval animal instinct from the time when animals crawled out of the ocean and started to live on land. As she was thinking, as she was kissing him, Stuart pressed his hardness against her thigh.
“If you’re going to do that, you might as well do it where it would do some good,” she said, and then she kissed him the way she knew he liked to be kissed, deeply and with feeling. It wasn’t hard to enjoy this, not with the sea wrapped around them like silk and their own bodies primed for the exquisite pleasure that they had come to expect when they came together.
Angel hadn’t expected to like lovemaking so much. But she did. And she liked it more and more each time. Stuart was a master of lovemaking; he played her body like a virtuoso. As the days flew by and her body started changing, albeit subtly, Angel became even more sensitive. Stuart’s cool hands soothed her hot breasts, and orgasms, which she now experienced with regularity, made her nausea go away. She had not yet reached the point where she went to Stuart and by look or by touch suggested making love whenever she felt sick to her stomach, but she thought she might. She wondered how he would react if she made the first move. So far, she’d never summoned enough nerve. The way Howard had reacted to the increased libido of her first pregnancy was never far from her mind.
Angel loved being pregnant, feeling pregnant, knowing that her body was harboring a new little life. But as soon as he knew she was pregnant, Stuart would leave. More and more, she thought about his leaving with dismay.
When Stuart was gone, who would she talk to at breakfast? Since the first few days of their marriage, Angel made coffee in the morning and spread guava jelly on toast, Stuart cooked eggs or cut up a few of their homegrown mangoes to put in their cereal, and they ate companionably at the porch table. If Stuart were gone, who would beat her at rummy? Who would read her humorous fillers out of Reader’s Digest as she trailed a bit of yarn across the floor for Caloosa to chase?
When Stuart was gone, who would make love to her and murmur complimentary things in her ear? Who would make her feel like a woman, something she hadn’t felt for years?
Even though in her heart she was sure that she carried a baby inside her, Angel didn’t give Stuart a clue. She couldn’t, because then he would leave. As the days passed, as she began to be filled with remorse at her own duplicity, she knew she was emotionally unprepared to share her suspicions—no, her certain knowledge—that she was pregnant.
And then Stuart received a letter.
* * *
IT ARRIVED via the mail boat, courtesy of Toby, who was showing an uncommon interest in them. Before Stuart had come to the island, Toby used to toss the mail on the dock without a word; now he’d linger, looking hopefully up the hill at the bungalow until Stuart appeared to talk with him. What they talked about, Angel didn’t know.
As luck would have it, Angel happened to be down at the dock on the day Stuart’s letter came.
“Yo, Stuart,” Toby said as he tossed a line to Stuart on the dock. “I’ve got something for you.”
Angel, who had walked down to the dock with Stuart and was sitting with her feet dangling over the side, looked up in surprise.
Stuart took the envelope and glanced at the return address. An expression of foreboding flickered across his features.
“Something from your family?” Angel said brightly, jumping to her feet so that she could read the return address over his shoulder.
Stuart merely nodded and stuck the envelope in his pocket. Angel thought that if she’d received a letter from a family member, she’d have opened it on the spot, especially if she was on the first leg of a long journey, as Stuart claimed he was.
Stuart and Toby got into a conversation about the Florida Marlins and how their season was going, an affable exchange that ended when Toby said he had to get back to Key West. As Toby guided the boat toward the cut in the reef, Stuart started back up the dock.
“Wait for me, I’ll walk with you,” Angel said, but instead of the welcoming expression she’d learned to expect from Stuart, all she got was a stony look.
On the way up the path, Angel searched through her own mail and found nothing of interest. Stuart took the newly arrived envelope from his pocket and stared at it for a long time.
“Anything wrong?” she asked.
“No. My brother doesn’t write often, that’s all.”
Angel flopped down on a porch chair. “That’s too bad. If I were lucky enough to have a brother, I’d want to keep in touch.”
“An only child tends to overestimate the joy of having siblings,” he said, and she glanced at him to see him scowling uncharacteristically. He still hadn’t opened the letter.
“I think it would be wonderful to have a family. Now that my mother’s gone, there’s no one.”
“Maybe you should consider yourself lucky,” he said.
“How can you say that? If I’d had someone—” Angel stopped herself short. She’d been about to say that if she’d felt closely connected to someone, perhaps to family members, she wouldn’t have thought up this crazy scheme to have a baby. She couldn’t, in all honesty, say the words. But then, why this sudden compunction about honesty? She certainly hadn’t been completely honest with him. He had no idea, she was sure, that she was having symptoms of pregnancy.
“You wouldn’t want a brother like my brother Fitz,” he said.
“Is he that bad?”
“Bad?” he said slowly. “I don’t think bad is the word for Fitz.”
“How would you describe him?”
“I wouldn’t bother. I’m trying to put that part of my life behind me,” he said.
“You don’t intend to return to your family firm after your leave of absence?”
“I have other things in mind,” he said. He folded the envelope, stared at it for a few seconds, and stuffed it deep in his back pocket. He still hadn’t opened it. He focused his eyes on her. “Don’t you have work to do?”
His tone of dismissal hurt. Usually he was eager to spend time with her.
“I’ll be out in the field. Do you still want to dig around in the oyster shells on the Indian midden this afternoon?”
“Some other time,” he said. He threw himself down on a chair and sat staring out at a butterfly hovering over the planting of Turk’s caps outside the porch screen.
After a moment, Angel went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of cold water from the bottle in the refrigerator, and thought about asking Stuart if he wanted some. A glance through the doorway showed her that he was still sitting there, his expression thoughtful, and she decided against it.
“I’ll be back in time to stir-fry vegetables for dinner,” she called to him, but he gave no sign that he heard her, and she let herself out of the house quietly.
Stuart had never been so uncommunicative, and she knew it was all because of the letter from Fitz.
For the first time, she was curious about Stuart’s family and the lack of affection in his voice whenever he mentioned them, which was seldom. Maybe if she took it easy, she’d find out more. It wasn’t for herself that she needed to know about Stuart’s elusive family, she assured herself as she swung along the crooked path to the east meadow. It was for the baby, who would be born an Adams.
* * *
WHEN HE WAS SURE that Angel had left the house, Stuart opened the letter from his brother.
Dear Mr. Adams,Thank you for your donation to the Sailors’ Home. As you know, your generous gift will help many fine sailors who have contributed so much to this nation’s success.Our mission in Boston continues to support many sailors who otherwise would have no home, and we plan to start construction on our facility on Nantucket this summer. If you’re ever in the area, please stop by our Boston office so that we can thank you for your donation in person.Very truly yours,H. Fitzroy Adams Chairman of the Board New England Maritime Charitable Trust
Stuart’s lip curled in derision as he crumpled the letter in his fist. A form letter from his own brother! What a joke.
Not that he had expected a personal communication from Fitz. He hadn’t heard from his brother in almost two years. Not since Fitz had deserted him when he needed him most.
But what was the point of thinking about it? Fitz had gone his way after the incident on Nantucket, and Stuart had gone his. Fitz seemed eager to distance himself from Stuart; maybe he feared that Stuart’s disgrace would stain his own reputation. Since that terrible night, Fitz had reportedly given up drinking and ostentatiously devoted himself to good works.
Fitz had even married and was now the father of a baby girl Stuart had never seen. Nor had he met Fitz’s wife, Jeanne. When he was still living in Boston, Stuart had read about their wedding in the papers; it had been a big social event in Newport to which Stuart wasn’t even invited. When he saw the announcement of their baby’s birth a year later, Stuart had realized that Fitz had attained the life that he, Stuart, had always dreamed about.
That life was closed to him now. Who would want to plan a life with him after what he’d done? No one, that’s who. With other avenues closed to him, shunned by his family and friends, he had thought his arrangement with Angel was the best way to marry and conceive a child who would carry on his name.
Too bad he couldn’t send a clipping about his wedding to Fitz:
Adams-McCabe Nuptials, the headline would read.
Stuart Adams of Boston and Nantucket, scion of a prominent Massachusetts family whose forebears arrived in America on the Mayflower, recently wed Angel McCabe, a bee researcher from Halos Island, Florida.The bride, whose mother is dead and whose father is nowhere around, wore a wrinkled white linen dress and carried a bouquet of wilting hibiscus. The groom’s replies were barely audible in the church, which was deserted by everyone but three children, a Popsicle man and, of course, the wedding party.
The rotund maid of honor was stricken with an attack of hiccups as soon as the bride said her first “I do.” The toothless custodian, who acted as best man, dropped the ring, which the bride didn’t want to wear anyway.
After the wedding and a short reception at a local restaurant, the couple honeymooned briefly in Key West, where they discovered that they were unusually compatible sexually.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams will reside on Halos Island, an isolated atoll off the Florida coast. They expect their first child soon.
Stuart grinned to himself. That little news item would certainly upset Fitz and all the other Adamses who had avoided him ever since his guilty plea to a charge of manslaughter. Members of their family were supposed to live circumspect lives, stay out of trouble with the law, marry well and procreate. So far, Stuart had managed to do none of those things.
Except procreate, possibly. Angel could be pregnant already with a new little Adams. Stuart could picture the baby in his mind; it would be a roly-poly little elf, with his eyes and Angel’s coloring. He or she would be a wonderful baby, he was sure of it.
He might not be able to send Fitz a wedding announcement, but Stuart would certainly see to it that he got a birth announcement, and maybe he’d even send along a copy of the personals ad that had brought him to Angel. He only wished he could see a photo of Fitz’s face when he saw them.
Cheered by the thought of Fitz’s almost certain consternation, Stuart began to feel much more optimistic. He wished he hadn’t told Angel that he didn’t want to explore the Indian midden today.
Come to think of it, maybe he ought to go find her. She might still want to go.
* * *
ANGEL, on her way to the meadow, was confronted by Caloosa, who bounded in front of her and came to a skidding stop.
“What in the world is wrong with you, Caloosa?” Angel asked, bending down to pet her, but the cat was so skittish that she jumped out of Angel’s way.
“Caloosa?” Angel said. She’d never seen her cat act this way before.
The cat ran to the edge of the path and looked over her shoulder at Angel. When Angel approached, Caloosa twitched her tail and leaped into the shrubbery. Angel could have sworn that Caloosa wanted Angel to follow her.
The connecting path to her swimming beach was nearby, and Caloosa ran in that direction. Angel, unsure why she was doing it, followed along.
At the edge of the beach, Caloosa skirted the palm grove and ran out onto the sand. When Angel emerged from the brush into the bright glaring sunlight of the beach, she couldn’t see the cat at first. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that Caloosa was running back and forth at the edge of the ocean, keeping just outside the reach of the surf. Angel was amused at how the cat managed to dodge the water; then she realized that Caloosa was acting highly distressed at the sight of an object that was rising and falling on the gently billowing waves.
Angel ran to the high-tide line and saw immediately that whatever Caloosa was paying so much attention to was moving and definitely alive. Why, it’s a pelican! Angel thought with a start. The bird’s feathers were ruffled and dirty, and it wasn’t sitting correctly in the water, but it definitely was a brown pelican, one of a flock that inhabited Halos Island.
By this time, Caloosa was mewing distractedly, and after Angel kicked her shoes off and waded a few feet into the water for a better look, she realized that the bird was caught in a discarded six-ring plastic beer pack. It was clearly exhausted from the struggle of trying to escape it.
Angel didn’t even have to think about it; she plunged into the water, clothes and all, to rescue the beleaguered pelican.
The surf wasn’t high today, and she was a good swimmer. In a matter of seconds, she reached the pelican, which stared at her without much hope out of the eye on the side facing her. Angel paused to tread water for a moment or two as she planned the best way to disentangle the terrified bird, and when she realized that not only was its bill caught in one of the rings but that its feet were twisted in two others, her heart sank. This wasn’t going to be a simple task.
The bird seemed to be losing strength. Angel gingerly placed her hands around it, expecting it to burst free of the plastic and nip her at any second, but the bird was apparently so worn out from its struggles that it attempted only a feeble token effort. Angel launched herself toward shore and kicked as hard as she could, pushing the pelican ahead of her.
Her hair got in her eyes, making it even more difficult for her to see, but she was making some progress. She was beginning to congratulate herself when she felt the first sting on her lower leg. A jellyfish, she thought. What an inconvenience. But then the sting became a searing pain that made her cry out involuntarily so that she gulped a mouthful of water. After that, attempting to ignore the pain, she clamped her lips shut and tried to keep kicking. It was a nasty shock when she realized that whatever was stinging her was now trailing across her thigh, scorching the skin in a kind of slow torture.
She fought to keep from crying out. She didn’t dare try to brush away whatever was causing the pain for fear of what it might do to her hand. Panic caught in her throat, but she wasn’t about to abandon the pelican after what she’d already gone through. The bird, however, seemed resigned to its fate. It lowered its head and heaved a great sigh.
Angel gritted her teeth against the torment and pushed the bird toward land with one last giant heave, hoping that this desperate effort would provide enough impetus to wash the pelican up on shore.
At that moment, she spotted the source of her pain: the clear blue flotation sac of Physalia pelagica, the dreaded Portuguese man-of-war, hulked only a few feet away from her. She knew that this member of the phylum Coelenterata, like other jellyfish, possessed a network of toxic tentacles that floated beneath it, and if she became enmeshed in its tangle, she would be in even worse straits. And where there was one man-of-war, there were usually others. She could be smack in the middle of a whole flotilla of them, unable to see them because of the rise and fall of the waves.
Keep calm, she told herself, and that was when she heard Stuart shouting at her.
“What’s wrong, Angel?”
“Man-of-war!” she called back, scarcely able to speak. The pain was shooting through her whole leg, and she had to fight not to scream in agony.
Stuart started into the water. “No, stay there, it’s too dangerous!” she yelled, kicking and paddling with all her might. For all she knew, she could be heading into a web of poisonous lashes, but she had to get to shore.
At that moment, a large wave bore her upward and toward shore, so that with one more powerful lunge, she was within Stuart’s grasp.
“Watch...out...” she managed to gasp as he hauled her onto the sand. She knew that the tentacles of the man-of-war could be more than fifty feet long, and that they could be coiled around her leg. If Stuart touched them, he would be stung, too.
“I see them,” Stuart said tersely. His eyes raked her body, taking in her sodden clothes and the red welts beginning to rise on her legs. “Where else did they sting you?” he asked, as he pulled off his shirt and used it to wipe gently at the tentacles adhering to the welts.
“Just on my legs,” Angel said through teeth gritted against the pain.
She strained to see the pelican, which was lying on the sand only a few feet away, its sides heaving. “Can’t you take care of the bird first?” she asked.
Stuart glanced at the pelican. “If you’re up to removing the tentacles from your legs, I’ll take a look at the bird.”
“I can do it,” she said. He handed her his shirt, and she began to swab gently at her welts. Stuart, after studying the situation briefly, grasped the pelican firmly and eased its feet and neck out of the plastic rings.
“This fellow’s going to be okay,” he said. He went to the edge of the water and released the bird. It looked stunned, but Stuart spent no more time worrying about it. He hurried back to Angel.
“You’d better lie back,” he said. “I’ll do this.”
Angel gratefully allowed him to minister to her. Now she felt the toxin from the man-of-war spreading through her body, making her feel weak and woozy. As Stuart said, “There! That’s the last of them,” she felt a cramp in her leg.
Stuart looked alarmed. “You are okay, aren’t you?”
She nodded, unable to speak. She swallowed hard against the nausea rising in her throat.
“Angel?” Stuart said, as if from a long distance away.
She realized that she had closed her eyes; she opened them again. “Is the pelican all right?” she asked anxiously. Stuart was blocking her view.
Stuart moved, and they both saw the pelican fly a short distance before coming to rest on the surface of the ocean. The bird sat there, riding the waves. Caloosa, who had been crouching nearby, watching the proceedings, suddenly got up and trotted over to Angel, where she rubbed up against her mistress’s face.
“The pelican will be fine,” Stuart assured her. “I’m not so sure about you.”
“I’ll be fine, too,” Angel said, and then she lost the battle with her stomach.
* * *
“TALK ABOUT STUPID,” Stuart said. “Talk about ill-advised. You should have seen the Portuguese man-of-wars. There were certainly plenty of them.”
“I was worried about the pelican,” Angel said from her position on the sofa where Stuart had deposited her after carrying her back to the house.
“You risked your life for that bird. Does that make you feel better?” He eyed her sternly from the kitchen, where he was diluting ammonia with water.
“I’m glad he’s okay. Are you sure you saw him fly away?”
“Absolutely sure. He’s probably diving for fish out past the reef right now, which is more than you’re going to be doing,” he said. He hurried into the living room and knelt by her side, washing the welts on her legs with the ammonia-and-water solution. His touch was gentle, and she felt a rush of gratitude toward him. Stuart was right, of course. She should have been more careful, should have seen the jellyfish floating on the surface of the water.
The ammonia stung, and she winced. Stuart glanced sharply at her face. “Some people have really bad reactions to man-of-war stings,” he said. “Do you still feel nauseated?”
“No,” she said, but she was lying. She always felt nauseated these days.
“If you start having trouble breathing, you’d better tell me,” he said. “And you’d better get out of those wet clothes.”
Angel struggled to sit up. “Bring me the robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, will you?” she said.
He went and got the robe, handing it to her silently. “Do you want me to help you to bed?” he asked her.
She shook her head. With difficulty, she pulled her shirt up, and he helped her ease it over her head. Angel felt stifled under the wet fabric, finding it hard to breathe, and her stomach turned over. She pushed the shirt upward, but her hair was wet and tangled, and it snagged on one of the shirt’s decorative buttons.
“Careful,” Stuart said, cautiously unwinding the strand of hair.
Angel inhaled deeply when she was free of the shirt. Stuart was looking at her strangely.
“You still look a little green around the gills,” he said.
“I’ll be all right,” she replied. She reached around and unhooked her bra, sliding it down her arms and setting it on top of the wet shirt. She knew Stuart was looking at her breasts, their nipples already swollen with the enlargement of early pregnancy, and though she still felt sick, she couldn’t help feeling a thrill of pride that he desired her even when she looked like a drowned rat.
“Help me, Stuart,” she said, trying to slide the wet shorts and panties down her legs, which were visibly branded in a crisscrossing pattern of welts that showed minute hemorrhages underneath.
He complied, expertly but carefully easing her clothes past the welts and over her feet. She slid her arms through the armholes of her robe and wrapped it around her, and Stuart helped with that, too. He was trying to look businesslike and failing miserably; in spite of the pain that she still felt from the man-of-war stings, Angel almost smiled. Even now, there was a sexual tension between them. These days, it never went away.
She felt a pleasant tightening in her lower abdomen, and it felt good but inappropriate. Ditto the way her nipples were puckering under the loose robe in anticipation of his touch. If Stuart had touched her at that moment, had given her any sign that he wanted her, she would have said yes. But, because of her unsettled stomach, Angel was glad when he didn’t.
Stuart arranged a pillow behind her and tossed aside the wet bed sheet that he’d pulled over the couch to protect it from the seawater. She was surprised and yet somehow not surprised that he was so competent in handling this emergency.
She shifted onto her side and pillowed her hands under her cheek. “How did you know the proper first aid for man-of-war stings?” she asked him.
He studied the marks on her legs through narrowed eyes. “I’ve been around the sea all my life. I’ve sailed around the Caribbean enough to know what harm a Portuguese man-of-war can do.”
“You have?” she said. The aspirins he had given her when they first came back to the house were making her drowsy, but she didn’t want him to leave her; she didn’t want to be left alone. But Stuart had been on his way to somewhere when he spotted her struggling out in the ocean; surely he wouldn’t stick around once he had taken care of her. Keep him talking, she told herself.
Stuart sat on the floor and leaned back against the arm of the couch. “One summer when I was in college, a friend and I bummed around the Bahamas for two months. We crewed on a dive boat, and we ran into more than a few jellyfish and assorted nasty sea creatures,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Barracudas. A shark or two. And once I stepped on a sea urchin.”
“Mmm...” was all Angel said.
Stuart noticed her lassitude. “Would you like to sleep? Take a nap?” he asked sharply.
Angel shook her head. “No. I like to listen to you talk,” she said.
“What would you like to talk about?”
“Tell me about your childhood,” she said.
Probably she was merely making small talk, but he was reluctant to comply. He racked his brain, trying to think of an aspect of his childhood that he wanted to mention. The only thing he could think about was Valerie, and he didn’t think that his childhood sweetheart was an appropriate topic to discuss with Angel McCabe.
She seemed to sense his hesitation. “How about your family?” she asked. “What are they like?”
His family. Certainly that was the last thing he wanted to talk about.
He started to tell her so, but one look into those interested brown eyes reminded him that she was going to be the mother of his child and had a right to know the bare essentials about that child’s ancestry. He inhaled a deep breath.
“Family. Okay, here goes. My mother was of Boston Brahmin stock. My father comes from a long line of Adamses stretching back to the Mayflower, and he spent his whole life furthering the family shipbuilding empire. I have no sisters, and my only brother is a year younger than I am. My parents are both dead. My father died from too much drinking, and my mother died from too much smoking. I barely knew them, since I was reared by a succession of people who were paid to look after my brother and me.” He was unaware of the bitterness in his voice until Angel spoke. He’d thought she was falling asleep.
“I’m sorry, Stuart,” she said in a soft voice. To his surprise, she rested a hand on his arm and squeezed it in a show of support and reassurance. He was unaccountably moved by this, and he had to look away.
“When was the last time you saw your brother?” she said.
Of course. He’d known she was curious about the letter he’d received today.
“It’s been a while,” he said, in a tone that he hoped would put an end to her questions about his family.
She appeared to consider this for a while. He thought that if he was lucky, Angel would nod off, but she seemed more wide-awake than ever.
“I think it would be nice to have a brother or sister. It’s sad when siblings aren’t good friends,” she said.
He managed a diffident shrug. “If you knew my brother, you wouldn’t feel that way,” he said, immediately regretting it.
“Oh? What’s he like?”
How to explain Fitz? Stuart didn’t think he could. How could he tell Angel about the rivalry that had been the overriding characteristic of his relationship with his brother, how they had fought since they were babies, first over who got to play with the red fire truck, and later over their allowances and which clothes belonged to whom? How could he tell her how he, as the older, more responsible sibling, had gotten Fitz out of trouble numerous times, with little appreciation from his brother? He didn’t want to explain about the times he’d reasoned with schoolmates who were in the process of beating Fitz up and how he’d taken a few licks himself for his pains, or how he had bailed Fitz out of a hundred financial binds brought about by his brother’s own bad judgment, or how he had corralled Fitz at family parties and hidden him away so that his snippy great-aunts wouldn’t see his little brother when he was drunk.
“Fitz is just Fitz,” he replied enigmatically. He stood up. “I think I’ll check out the refrigerator, see what’s handy for a snack,” he said, and leaving her staring after him in openmouthed surprise, he headed for the kitchen.
If only he had been able to manufacture a more plausible excuse to get away, he thought morosely as he surveyed the few limp pieces of celery and half a key lime pie in the fridge. And now he might even have to eat something.
He didn’t have to agonize over the choice for very long. He chose the pie.
* * *
WHAT IN THE WORLD had she said to make Stuart take off like that?
Angel heard him opening and closing the refrigerator and rummaging around in the silverware drawer, but she wasn’t fooled. Chair legs scraped against the rough kitchen floor; she heard him sit down. There was no doubt in her mind that Stuart had started itching to get out of the room as soon as Fitz’s name came up. She had seen it in his agitated expression.
Slowly she sat up and inspected the places on her legs where the man-of-war had stung her. Stuart’s hands had been sure and soothing as he tended her wounds—as gentle as a woman’s, in fact. They were hands that could easily comfort a child, but she didn’t allow herself to hold that thought. If she started thinking in that vein, she’d start coming up with reasons why Stuart should be part of their child’s life.
Suddenly her eyes came to rest on a crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Wincing with the pain, she leaned over and picked it up, recognizing almost immediately that this was the letter from Stuart’s brother.
She had no right to read the letter. She knew that. But she heard the rhythmic clink of fork against plate as Stuart ate, and as long as he sat at the kitchen table, he would never know she was reading his letter. Even as she cautioned herself that she shouldn’t do it, her fingers smoothed the paper flat.
She scanned the letter quickly, noting the impersonal tone and the signature that had almost certainly been mass-produced by a signature machine. Whatever she had expected of this communication from Stuart’s brother, it was not this form letter signed so formally by H. Fitzroy Adams. Was this what Stuart had been so uptight about?
She heard Stuart push his chair back, so she quickly crushed the paper in her hand and tossed it to one side of the couch. He’d find it there later, none the wiser that she had read it.
Stuart came in at the same time that Caloosa entered through the pet door; the cat immediately crossed the porch and went to Angel.
“That fool cat got you into trouble. You could have drowned,” Stuart said.
“But I didn’t,” Angel said.
“If you’ll do something like trying to rescue a pelican in the middle of a bunch of man-of-wars, how can I trust you not to do the same kind of thing when you’re pregnant? Or when the baby is small?” He was frowning at her, his arms crossed over her chest.
“I won’t. I’ll be more careful when I’m responsible for a child,” she said, but she was thinking that if something happened to her on this island, so far away from other people, her baby would be all alone and no one would know it.
Stuart stood watching her with the cat, a whole panoply of expressions playing across his face. Angel, acting as if Caloosa had her full attention, pretended not to notice.
Stuart heaved a sigh and shook his head. “Sometimes, Angel, I wonder if you know what you’re doing,” he said.
Before Angel could reply, he turned his back and walked away. Anyway, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Stuart was right. Maybe she didn’t know what she was doing at all.