Silver and Spice (16 page)

But the chills kept coming, from the very depth of her heart, from the most vulnerable corner of her being. She asked questions and smiled and curled closer…and all of that was real. Just as real as the wrenching cold inside her that kept growing.

“Bed,” Jake announced finally, and stretched as he got off the couch, reaching out a hand for her.

She took it. His fingers securely held hers, familiar and warm. In the bedroom, they slipped out of their clothes, and moments later were curled together spoon-fashion. Jake was half asleep almost before his head hit the pillow, but Anne’s eyes flickered open.

She had to ask, her voice lazy and sleepy and studiedly casual. “So you’re losing interest in silver, Jake? You think you’ll move on to coffee soon? Or to the Silicon Valley?”

Jake’s voice, like Anne’s, sounded sleepy. “I can’t imagine ever completely losing interest in silver. But as…far as what comes next…” He leaned over in the darkness to kiss her forehead. “I don’t know, Anne. There are still a thousand things to do out there. Does it really matter?”

“No, of course not.” She closed her eyes, snuggling against him, feigning sleep until she heard his even breathing. There was no other answer she could have given him. She’d made a very real commitment of love. And just as she knew Jake would try to move mountains to make her happy, she also knew his soul would never be content in one place for long—but she’d known that when she made the commitment.

Still, her
no
seemed to echo in the darkness, like the whispered cry of a child from a long time ago.

Dreams haunted Anne’s sleep. First, of packing her dolls in a suitcase. “You’ll like him, Anne,” said her mother. “Really you will.” She had; but her stepfather hadn’t liked her. Locked in a closet for an offense she could no longer remember, she felt suffocated by the yawning darkness; her lungs were desperate for breath despite her low keening whispers. Her terror was too great to cry out. The door opened to light that hurt her eyes. “Oh, my God,” her mother said.

Packing again. Boarding school. The ache of loneliness that never left, hugging books to her chest for comfort…then packing again. Another wedding, the smell of champagne floating like a wisp in the dream, then the sip she’d sneaked. Another strange house, and another and another; they all rushed past her in the dream. Packing again, packing again. “You’ll like it here, Anne. Really you will.”

A puppy was wrenched from her arms, and suddenly she was older, with budding breasts encased in a stiff white blouse and wearing a Black Watch plaid skirt that was too long. Her grandmother was standing in front of her, stiff and proud and proper; no one cried in front of Jennie; no one would dare. “I want to stay with you,” Anne said quietly. “Please don’t send me away. Please…” She didn’t cry. A maid took away the worn blue suitcases. Anne never saw them again.

A foggy cloud surrounded the image of a tiny boy in the dream. Jake’s child, with big, vulnerable gray eyes and a crooked smile and shaggy, blondish hair. “You’ll like the new place,” Anne told him. “Really you will.” And she got out a big blue suitcase and looked around for Jake in the dream. Only Jake wasn’t there, and suddenly Anne was crying…

***

Her lashes fluttered open. The bed was empty beside her. Sunlight shone gently on the king-sized bed and thick white carpet, all with a soft, coral cast from the stained-glass window. Disoriented, Anne closed her eyes for a moment. There was a lump in her throat; she couldn’t seem to swallow properly.

“You’re finally awake, sleepyhead?” Jake’s head appeared at the door with his most mischievous grin. She couldn’t seem to look at him and stared blankly at the tray in his hands instead. “Peppermint tea,” he announced. “Toast. One omelet, à la Rivard. What’s wrong, love?” A sharp gaze pierced the hollows under her eyes.

“Nothing.” She tried to smile. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

“Breakfast will perk you up.”

“It looks delicious.” She pushed the pillow behind her, still somehow unable to look at him. “You’re a master at spoiling me, Jake,” she scolded, and hoped her voice had just the right amount of teasing. The normal amount.

“You need spoiling,” he answered, but there was something in his voice that time that wasn’t normal. The grave, harsh note made her eyes flicker up to his…and quickly away.

She tried to do justice to his breakfast—really tried. Perhaps if Jake had tried to make conversation…but Jake suddenly didn’t seem interested in small talk. She felt like a moth pinned on a slide under a microscope. He was watching her. She could feel his eyes—inside, outside, all over.

He took the tray when she rose to get dressed. Not even thinking, she found herself taking up old modes of dress, a camel skirt and long-sleeved navy silk blouse, austerely tailored. She made up her face and wound her hair in a sleek, efficient coil. The old perfection faced her briefly in the bathroom mirror; she didn’t look at it long. Her heart was ripping itself into shreds.

Going back into the bedroom, she found Jake walking toward the closet. He glanced at her appearance, his face oddly expressionless, strangely without color. He pulled an old denim jacket from a hanger and put it on.

“Jake—”

The words were clipped. “I don’t want to hear.”

She swallowed, sick inside. “It’s not that I…” she started, then stopped. He’d crossed to the dresser, and was shoving his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans. “
Jake.
I just want a little time to think. I…”

She was talking to thin air. He’d left the room. She caught up with him in the kitchen, where he was taking a key from the hook by the stove.

“Listen to me,”
she said desperately. “Jake, I fell in love with your Idaho and your silver and your house and even your crazy ghost town. But I thought you were telling me something else. I thought you were telling me that you’d finally found something important enough to you that you’d want to…
settle
…somewhere.
Anywhere.
In the desert, the jungle, the mountains. I love
you,
not the place, but—”

The door didn’t slam in her face. Actually, it closed very, very quietly. She heard the sound of the motor-home engine, and in another minute there was silence. A terrible, terrible silence.

Was it suddenly forty below? Anne wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering violently. Tears filled her eyes. He hadn’t even pretended to listen, she thought furiously.

Worse than that, she had a terrifying suspicion that he wouldn’t be back. This was his house, of course; he had to come back to take care of it sometime. In a thousand years. Jake didn’t care about the house. He’d never cared about houses.

The knowledge of desertion seared through her like a knife. Old scars opened for the blade. She knew exactly what desertion felt like. Her mother had changed loyalties so readily; her father had died; people had passed in and out of her life so often. She knew far better than to count on living people. Jake alone had always been there for her.

Only Jake…

Tears gushed into her eyes as she wandered through the empty rooms. Oh,
you fool, you fool.
So fast, so painfully fast, the old scars ripped open. How long had she equated security with the wrong things? Jake had
always
been there for her.

And you let him go?
The finality of that door closing echoed in her ears.
How could you, how could you, how could you…?
Frantically, she wrenched open the door…but Jake had taken the motor home. The Jeep was still in Silver Valley. The boat, which she didn’t know how to operate anyway, wouldn’t take her anywhere except around the lake.

She fumbled for the phone book in a drawer in the kitchen.
Too late, too late, too late.
She dialed the number of a car-rental agency. Yes, it had cars available—if she could get there to pick one up. She could hardly walk all the way to Coeur d’Alene. How
dare
he just leave her like that? Dammit, he’d rushed her every step of the way was it so inconceivable that she just might need the chance to think for two minutes and realize what a total idiot she’d been?

A neighbor a half-mile down the road drove her to the car-rental agency. Mrs. Barker, a big-boned woman in purple shorts, was clearly not used to opening her door to a woman with hair streaming down her back, crying her eyes out. In the next life, Anne would undoubtedly remember that taxis existed. In the next life, perhaps, so would Mrs. Barker. In this one, one woman simply reacted to the panicked, incoherent pleas of another woman.

The rental agency offered Anne a Mustang with a stick shift, for the money she had in her pocket. Anne stopped crying. She had an hour’s shopping to do in Coeur d’Alene. Florists’ shops, but then Anne wasn’t thinking clearly. The backseat was filled with her purchases by the time she set off on Highway 90. There was no question where she was going. The airport at Spokane would have been the prudent choice. Jake had clearly written her off. Anne was only beginning to understand that in his own way he’d waited for her from the time she was eighteen, and had waited far long enough. If she was going to get bogged down with those kinds of details, though, she would certainly start crying again.

Actually, she did, as she drove east toward Silver Valley. It was two in the afternoon when she drove through Wallace. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Tears were streaming from her eyes, and sun poured through the windshield as she reached Killer Road. The first wild uphill curve made her sick to her stomach. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, wet and clammy, as she made the impossible curves and turns, downshifting, then gearing up, panicking on the downhill curves, terrified when the engine balked at the steep inclines.

She didn’t question where she was going, because if Jake wasn’t at the ghost town, she wouldn’t know where to find him. She had to find him. She
had
to find him…

Her heartbeat slowed down to normal as she took the last curve and turned off the road onto the gravel lane. Vaulting out of the car, she opened the gate, drove through and closed it behind her. The sign still said No Trespassing. Which made her start crying again.

When she saw the motor home in the valley, she slowed the Mustang down, stopped. A strange kind of silence seemed to rush through her heart. No one was around. The ghost town was the same. Wind whispered through the firs and aspens; sunlight beamed through the fluttering gold leaves; the stream picked up prisms of color and danced them back for her eyes. Biting her lip to hold back the tears, she got out of the car, pushed the front seat forward and reached into the back.

The scent of daffodils filled her nostrils, as sweet and intoxicating as a spring breeze. The fragile yellow blossoms were starting to wilt, but the scent was still there, surrounding her as she walked toward the motor home with her arms filled.

She didn’t knock, primarily because she didn’t have the courage. Opening the door was an incredible effort all by itself; her fingers were freezing cold, almost numb. And a thousand other things had gone wrong. Her hair was wind-tossed from the ride; she knew her face looked white and strained. And she couldn’t breathe; there was the most ridiculous huge knot in her throat…

Jake turned at the sound of the door. A coffee cup sat on the counter; he was standing in front of it. Something was terribly wrong with his face—it looked gray, not like Jake’s face at all. And his beautiful eyes were cold, the color of stone. There was nothing in his eyes—not shock, not welcome. Not…anything.

Rage, the last emotion she felt, was the only one she could cope with. Trembling, she hurled the entire armload of flowers in his direction. “
Everyone
is entitled to a moment of panic now and then,” she told him furiously. “That doesn’t mean you just
walk out
and scare someone to death. Don’t you
ever
do that to me again, Jake!”

She whirled and stalked out of the motor home toward the car, moving too fast to think, stumbling, not caring. She scooped up the second armload of daffodils, brought them in and pelted Jake with the flowers one by one. “If you think I care whether we live in Colombia or on the dark side of the moon, you’re a fool. If you think our children will care, you’re just that much more of a fool. Fools inevitably get their priorities mixed up. It’s
different
with us, Jake—how
could
you have been so stupid? We count on each other. What on earth is the matter with you? Some people have never had anyone to count on, but that’s not
us.
How could you be such an idiot?”

She ran out of flowers and threw her hands up in the air.
 
“The kids’ll have us to hold on to and each other to hold on to and that’s exactly what the difference is. I don’t know what on earth’s been the matter with you all this time that you couldn’t see it! Sometimes you can be scared of something for so long that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Who cares? It’s about time you changed, Mr. Rivard! Because when you’ve found
love,
the kind of love worth holding on to, you’d darned well better
hold on to it!
”

He hadn’t moved. He didn’t move.

For that century of an instant, Anne didn’t move either, and then her toes moved on springs again, bursting out of the motor home for the second time. Moisture was forming beneath her eyelids again. These tears were very different, as soft and helpless as they were inevitable.
You’re just making a fool of yourself.
She stalked back to the car and clasped the last of the flowers to her chest, dropping some of them and breaking the stems of others. She picked up each one so very carefully and then gathered them tightly to her chest so that more stems broke; stems she didn’t see. She walked back one last time into the motor home, not looking at Jake, unable to look at him this time. She looked instead at the incredible sweet-scented mess she’d made.

Flowers were everywhere. Broken stems and crushed petals. Jake’s shoes were covered in daffodils. One was hanging from his shoulder.

Anne lifted her chin, pretending there were no tears in her eyes. “I’m disgusted,” she said flatly. “Totally disgusted. What on earth is wrong with a town that doesn’t stock more daffodils? So they’re out of season. That’s no excuse. Some people manage to buy violets when they’re out of season…”

Her voice trailed off jaggedly. She just couldn’t keep up the act any longer. Through blurred vision, she finally found the courage to look at Jake. He was still standing by the counter, all but buried in daffodils, setting down his coffee cup after taking a sip. Taking a sip of coffee?
Now?
And his face no longer had that grayish cast to it. “I do love you, Anne,” he said mildly, “but it took you a hell of a long time to get here.”

She could have killed him.

There wasn’t time. In the blink of an eyelash, he had his arms around her and was lifting her high in a crushing rib-breaking hug. She was the one holding on so very, very hard. “You’re home, Anne,” he said vibrantly.

She was. Home. Not to a place, but to her mate. Security was where love was. Roots were where the heart set them down.

His lips hovered over hers for an instant, and then moved in. That kiss…she could smell the heady fragrance of spring all around them, taste all the sweet heat of a languid summer, hear the sensual crackle of leaves in autumn, feel the warmth of his arms around her on a cold winter’s day. Let the seasons come and go. As long as Jake was here…