The Maddening Model. Suzanne Simms
anyone else in her class at school,” she related with an emotional detachment that had come with experience and maturity.
“So—” he shrugged “—you were tall.”
“It was more than that,” she confessed. “I had the neck of a giraffe. My shoe size was a ten, extra narrow. And I was covered from head to toe with freckles.”
“You may have been an ugly duckling, but you turned into a swan in the end,” he said appreciatively.
She deftly changed the subject. “When did you realize you were different?”
“Am I?”
She laughed out loud again. “Of course, adolescent boys want to tower over everyone else, don’t they?”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t realize I was different.”
“Why not?”
“My family.”
“Explain.”
“All the Hazard men—that adds up to nearly a dozen if we count uncles, cousins, nephews and brothers—are tall.”
They both knew there was more to it than height. It was height and a commanding presence.
She was genuinely curious. “Don’t you have any women in your family?”
Simon frowned. “Only those we’ve convinced to marry into the clan.” He went on. “My nephew, Jonathan, married a brilliant Egyptologist just before I left the States.”
Surely any nephew of this man’s would still be a boy. “Your nephew would be how old?”
He thought for half a minute. “Thirty-seven. Maybe thirty-eight by now.”
Sunday was baffled. “How...?”
“It’s one of those generational-gap things,” he said inconclusively.
She arched one eyebrow. “What is a generational-gap thing?”
Simon lifted his massive shoulders, and then dropped them again. “My father married five times and had five sons. Avery is the oldest. I’m the youngest. There’s a thirty-year gap between us. Avery’s two sons, Jonathan and Nick, are both older than I am.”
“I see.”
They walked past another group of delicately carved pagodas, a traditional Thai garden with immaculately trimmed trees and shrubs, huge stone urns of colorful flowers and life-size statues of elephants and water buffalo.
“As a matter of fact, it’s thanks to Jonathan that I’m in Thailand,” he said at last.
“Did he vacation here, and then entice you with tales of his travels?”
“Not exactly.”
She waited, assuming he would tell her more.
He did.
“I don’t know the whole story,” Simon began. “I don’t think anyone does, with the exception of Jonathan, and he’s real closemouthed about it. All I heard is that his old nemesis finally caught up with him in a back alley here in Bangkok several years ago. Jonathan was fished out of the khlongs the next morning by a friendly local, and spent a month in the hospital recuperating from his dip in the canals.”
Sunday was stunned. “Someone beat him up?”
“Somebody beat him to a bloody pulp.” Simon paused and stared off into the distance. There was something implacable about the way he stood there, something unnerving in his eyes and in the square set of his jaw. She wouldn’t want to be this man’s enemy. She wouldn’t want to be Jonathan Hazard’s old nemesis, if Simon ever caught up with him. “Not literally to a bloody pulp,” he said finally. “There wasn’t a visible scratch on him. All his injuries were internal.”
She tried to swallow and found it impossible. “He must have been badly hurt.”
“He was half-dead.” Simon shook his head from side to side. “Make that closer to three-quarters.”
“Is Jonathan all right now?”
“Good as gold. Right as rain. Has been for ages.”
She was relieved.
“Anyway, what impressed him about Thailand was the warmth and hospitality of its people. He wasn’t used to that in his line of work.”
Sunday’s hand fluttered to her breast. “Is Jonathan—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—a spy?”
“Was.” Simon walked on. “At least, that’s the rumor.”
“He’s your nephew and you don’t know for certain.”
“I never asked. He never said.”
“Men!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Even if she tried to explain it, he would never understand. Sunday threw up her hands. “Men!”
* * *
Simon wasn’t sure when he first became aware that they were being followed. It had started with a slight niggling sensation at the back of his neck, a mere pinprick of awareness.
Instinct.
The men in his family had an instinct for trouble. It was a kind of sixth sense, an inexplicable talent for spotting a disaster before it happened. Maybe it was the reason so many of them had made danger their business.
By the time they’d left the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Simon was certain.
Three paces behind them.
Small wiry man.
Thai.
Dressed in dark trousers, white shirt, brown sandals.
Black hair. Black eyes. Nondescript features. Nevertheless, Simon had seen him somewhere before.
The Celestial Palace.
“Damn!” he swore, making a production of removing his hat, taking a linen handkerchief from his back pocket and mopping the perspiration from his forehead.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” Sunday remarked, retrieving a tissue from her handbag and blotting her upper lip.
“Yes. Let’s grab some shade,” he suggested, reaching for her hand and urging her toward a stone bench beneath a copse of trees. He wanted to see what the man shadowing them would do next.
“I thought I knew everything there was to know about what heat and humidity can do to a woman’s disposition, but I was wrong,” Sunday said, taking a silk fan from her handbag.
She waved the fan back and forth in front of her. It created a slight breeze that carried her scent to his nostrils.
Simon breathed in deeply. Sunday Harrington smelled of exotic incense, tropical heat, warm silk and...roses, of all things. It took a great deal of self-control—more than he thought he had, for a minute—not to bend over and nuzzle her neck, or to bury his face in the inviting cleavage between her breasts.
Son-of-a-gun! Maybe he’d been gone from home too long. Maybe his vow of celibacy, however temporary or sensible under the circumstances—he was living like a Buddhist Monk—was backfiring after more than a year. One thing was certain: he’d better get a grip on himself.
“I promise it will be cooler up in the mountains,” Simon said, clearing his throat.
“I hope so.”
He was aware that she sat there quietly, calmly, observing everything around her. She had the ability to sit utterly still, to simply be. It wasn’t a trait he often saw in Westerners.
He was