This Love Will Go On (14 page)

Doug moved on the bench across from her and unwisely entered the fray.  “There has to be a compromise somewhere along the line.  Men don't have to be tough every living minute of the day.  A man should be able to relax when he’s at home with his woman.”

“That depends on the woman.” Jade shot back.  “Did you have a particular one in mind?”

A crackling silence followed Jade's words. Her appetite gone, Raine put down her half-eaten hamburger. Desperate for some kind of distraction, she looked past Doug's shoulder.  “They're starting the race.”

"Get ready.  Get set.  Go.” John bellowed the words, and from behind a ribbon, people began hopping toward the edge of the park. There were a dozen contenders of all ages in the race. Tate was not first, but he wasn’t the last, either.  And he hadn't fallen.

The race over, Tate ran back to the table, his eyes shining.  “I did good, didn't I?”

“You did just fine,” Jade assured him.

Preparations were being made for the three-legged race. There weren't many contenders and John began to hustle the crowd.

“Come on, folks. It's excellent exercise. Who's going to enter? We've got a dandy prize here for the winners.”

Doug grinned at her.  “Are you game?”

She hesitated, and in that beat of quiet, it seemed to her that everyone at the table waited to hear her answer.  “Sure, why not?  I can make a fool of myself as well as anyone.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll break a bone?” Jade asked in that mocking tone he did so well.

“You can call the paramedics for me.”

Feeling Jade's eyes on her, she rose from the table and followed Doug to the side of the tent.

There was already a curious crowd gathered where the contestants were being tied together with striped red, white and blue ribbons.

“You gonna participate?” John blustered at her.  “Well, I can't tie you together when you're standing three feet apart.  Step up close to him, Raine, and put your arm around his waist.”

In full view of most of the population of Verylon, she was forced to fit her body into the side of Doug's. His arm went around her and his hand clasped her hip.  Just at that moment, Jade join the watching crowd.

Quickly, with impersonal hands, John tied the ribbons at their ankles, calves and thighs.

Doug tightened his hold on her waist. “I'll try not to outreach you. Let's see if we can get a rhythm established.”

It was awkward, but not as bad as she had expected.  Doug was not that much taller than she, and he compensated skillfully for his longer length of leg.  He moved when she did, making slight adjustments to his stride to ensure her balance.

Together, using a rhythmic gait they seemed to establish quite easily, they reached the starting line.  At their arrival, the watching crowd quieted.

“Trust me,” Doug said softly.

Raine turned her face up to his and smiled.  “Is there any reason why I shouldn't?”

“Sometimes,” he said under his breath, “I wish there were.”

She laughed softly and turned to face forward and get ready for the race.  Across the top of several heads, her eyes met Jade's.  His face looked as dark as a prairie thundercloud.  Before she had time to wonder why, John bellowed the starting words once again and they were off.

“Move in strict rhythm so I know what you’re going to do,” Doug instructed.

Out of an instinctive need for self-preservation she obeyed. She had no desire to make a wrong move and pull him down on top of her.

They found a swinging stride that suited both of them.

Raine watched as other couples who had started off faster lost their rhythm and tumbled to the ground. Soon there was no one in front of them. They swung along together, Doug urging her on under his breath.  “Just a few more feet.”

Her foot fastened to Doug's caught on a rough spot in the grass and she lost her balance. She fell, taking him with her.

He reacted instantly, twisting to put his body underneath hers. His quick action pulled her on top of him. She lay sprawled over his chest in a way that looked anything but innocent.  Doug laughed up at her, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment, and took advantage of his position to move his hips suggestively under her.

“You have an evil mind,” Raine chastised him.

Doug threw up his hands and lay back on the grass, enjoying every minute.  “You're the one who threw yourself on top of me.”

“With a lot of help from you.”

Conscious of the crowd watching, Raine struggled to get up. She couldn't. She was still tied to Doug.  Jade stepped out of the crowd and his hard hands caught her shoulders.  He was trying to lift her up.  “Jade.  Wait a minute.”  She struggled to be free of Jade’s hard grasp on her shoulder.

“Raine,” Doug breathed, his face flushing brick red. She stared at him, suddenly aware that her movements had inadvertently heightened his sexual awareness of her and that he wasn’t any happier about it than she was.

Jade released her shoulder.  A knife clicked and Jade stooped beside them to cut away the ribbons at their ankles and knees. At the last ribbon, his fingers brushed the soft inner skin of Raine’s upper thigh. She couldn't conceal the shudder.

He saw the tiny goose bumps and his mouth tightened. He picked up the ribbons, his eyes moving over her lying on the ground beside Doug.  “You might want these for a souvenir.” He let the red, white and blue strips of satin go, and they fluttered to the ground at Raine's feet

Chapter 8

The hot summer days dragged by.  September came and went and the sharp October air in Verylon brought out the little white ghosts to dangle from tree branches and door wreathes made of crimson and yellow leaves.

The week before Halloween, Raine had a visitor in the print shop.  As the bell jangled, she looked up and for a moment, her heart stopped.  The tall figure silhouetted in the door was Jade's height.  “Hello, Raine.”

Her heart began beating again at a slower pace.  “Hello, Marc.”  She leaned back in her swivel chair.

“Are you busy?”

“Not particularly.”  She waited, watching him.  “Sit down.”  She indicated a straight-backed chair on the other side of her desk.

He shook his head.  “I'm not going to stay that long. I just…”  He paused, his eyes guarded.  “Oh, hell. I know it's none of my business, and I wouldn't be here if Sandy wasn't on me about it…”

“About what?”

“Jade.”  He stopped.  “Do you know what's wrong with him?  Sandy thinks maybe you’re the key.”

“I don’t know why she would think that.”  Raine tried not meet his eyes.  She couldn’t, without betraying her own shock.  “What’s wrong with your brother?”

“He's acting like a horse with his foot caught in a prairie dog hole.  Sandy was the one who noticed that he's always worse on the days he brings Tate in to you.  She thought maybe you were arguing about Tate like you did at the picnic.”

Her heart began to race again. She struggled to frame a cool answer.  “We haven’t said more than hello and goodbye since that day.”

“If it isn’t that, I don’t know what it is.  Whatever it is, it’s getting to him. He doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, let alone a grown man, and he isn't sleeping much, either.”  He gave her a straight look.  ”I thought you two had something going there for a while.”

To avoid his eyes, she looked down at the galley she’d been proofing. The words blurred.  “I told you then you were wrong.”

He leaned forward suddenly and put his palms flat on the top of her desk. “I don't think I was. Not about you and Jade. But I…” He straightened away. “I sure do regret what I said about my brother to you that night. I wish to hell he would find a woman.” He thrust an anxious hand through his hair.  “He doesn't do a damn thing but work. He works till ten every night and gets up at five. At the rate he's going, he'll be dead before he's forty.”

She clenched her fists in alarm.  “Tm sure that whatever is bothering Jade has nothing to do with me.”

“There was a rumor going around for a while that you were planning to marry that salesman dude. Are you?”

Raine lifted her chin.  “I’m not planning to marry anyone.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“What are you going to do?” she asked coldly.  “Explain to Jade that we had our little talk and that I’m still available?”

Marc looked stricken.  “He'd knock me flat on my ass if he thought I was trying to sell him to you.”

“And if you say anything to him about me, I'll do the same,” she warned him, only half-joking.

He shook his head.  “What can I do?”

“Nothing.” She stood up.  “There isn't anything anyone can do.  At any rate, it has nothing to do with me.”

Marc took a breath and said in a growl, “You can't tell me he doesn't love you.  He was looking at you at that Fourth of July picnic like he wanted to eat you alive.  And he knew right where he’d like to start.”  Mark looked directly at her chest.

She caught her breath.  “That's absurd.”

“And I think you love him.”

The lie came out quickly.  “Of course I don’t.”

Marc shook his head.  “Things can't go on like this forever.”

“They can and they will.  There's nothing between us, Marc.”

He lifted his head and stared at her.  “You two are the most stubborn fools I've ever seen.”  He stomped out the door.

She watched him go, her knees shaking badly. She gripped the desk with both hands and sank back into the chair.  What was wrong with Jade?
He’s always worse on the days he brings Tate in to you.
  Was he angry because she was so much a part of Tate's life?

Marc's words haunted her, kept her lying awake nights. She knew she had to do something. She just didn't know what.

On the next occasion that Jade brought Tate to her, he said a perfunctory hello and turned to go just as he always did. But this time, she put out her hand to catch him. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and when her cool fingers settled on his arm just below the elbow, he made an involuntary movement, as if she had startled him. She pulled her hand away, but not before she saw the dark flame in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said at once, and then wished she hadn't as the crease on the side of his mouth deepened from the slight lift of his lips.

“You don't have to apologize for touching me.”

She curled the fingers that still carried the memory of his hard flesh into her palm.  “Is it a hardship for you being away from Tate every Saturday?”

He leaned away from her slightly, balancing his body on: the heels of his boots.  “What's the matter? Are you tired of your 'lifetime commitment' already? Or is Martin complaining?”

She flushed angrily.  “No. I just…I just didn't know if you were still happy with our arrangement.”

“We've established a routine now.” He glanced over at Tate. The boy raced around Julia's pocket-sized yard and jumped into a pile of leaves. His dog followed. Tate's collie was no longer a puppy.  The full-grown dog was almost as tall as Tate and had a beautiful thick coat of burnished copper and a plumy tail that waved in perpetual motion.  “It might be hard to explain to Tate why we're making changes.”

“That's true,” she admitted.  “I just thought that…”

“Tate is with me almost constantly when he’s not in school,” Jade murmured.  “I need a day away from him as much as he needs a day away from me. If you were a single parent, you'd understand that.”

“You mean you really are human after all?”

“You of all people should know just how human I am.”  He took a step toward her.

Sobered, she shook her head.  “Don't play games with me, Jade.”

“What makes you think this is a game?”

Determined to keep it light, even though her heart racketed in her chest, she said, “It can't be anything else with you.”

“And you don't want to play?”

For an agonized moment she was tempted to cry,
Yes, I do, more than anything in the world.

“I’m really not a game-playing kind of girl.” A blink of the eyes, a tightening of her fingers in her fist were the only signs that betrayed her. Her voice, when it came out, was cool.  “I think I'd better get Tate in before he ends up in a rosebush.”

His green eyes raked over her.  “I wonder if Martin knows how lucky he is.”

Desperately afraid a small movement of her body would betray how little she cared about Doug's mythical luck, she turned and walked away from him over the grass to Tate.  “Come on, buddy.  Grandma Julia made some sugar cookies for you.”

Raine didn't sleep well that week, and on the next Saturday, when Jade came in to make the arrangements to pick up Tate at the end of the day, she would have said something to him, she wasn't sure what. But his manner was cool and impersonal, and the words died on her lips. The same thing happened a week later. The week after that she gave up, thinking Marc had an overactive imagination. There were other things to occupy her mind. The
Verylon Appeal
was gradually but surely going bankrupt.

Caught up in Christmas preparations, Raine tried to put the disastrous financial state of the newspaper out of her mind.  On Christmas Day, Julia presided over the table that was laden with food as if she had nothing more pressing to worry about than lumps in the turkey gravy. She had asked the entire Kincaid clan for Christmas dinner, and they all came, Sandy, Marc, Tate and Jade. Raine managed to be busy in the kitchen most of the time, and at the table she divided her attention between Tate and Sandy.  After the turkey was eaten and the dressing praised and the traditional complaints about the full states of their stomachs had been made, they went into the living room and sat around the tree to unwrap their presents.  Sandy, her cheeks flushed, looked down at Tate, playing with the new wooden tractor that Raine had given him and said, “Marc and I are going to be parents.  Tate’s going to have a cousin.”

Marc turned a bright shade of red while Julia beamed.  “When?”

“Somewhere around the 1st of May,” Sandy said proudly.

“Congratulations,” Jade said softly, his eyes on Sandy.

Her color deepened.  “We thought we were going to wait to have a family, but then we decided not to. There didn't seem to be any reason to put it off.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Raine told her and gave Sandy a quick hug.

But later, when she went in to the kitchen to tackle the stack of dishes, Jade came up behind her. She steeled herself, totally unprepared for his hand to slide along her arm and pick her left hand up out of the soapy dishwater.

“No Christmas ring?” he asked softly.

She wrenched her hand away, leaving a trail of soap bubbles on his arm.  “What business is it of yours?”

“Are you going to live with him instead?”

Raine swung around to face Jade, her eyes blazing. “I repeat, it's none of your business.”

His eyes gleamed, and she was sure he meant to say something uncomplimentary.  He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.  “You’re right, it isn’t.”

After everyone left and Julia had gone to bed, Raine sat in the living room, staring at the tree. The luster of the Christmas lights seemed to dim. In a few months, perhaps less, Julia planned to close down the paper and sell the shop. What would she do when that happened? Julia had assured Raine that she was welcome to stay with her. But how could Raine do that with no funds? She had a little money remaining in the trust fund her parents had left, but she couldn’t live on it.  She had to find a job, and it had to be somewhere in South Dakota.

Yet how could she stay and face an increasingly hostile Jade? For Tate's sake she must stay.  If she didn't, there was a good chance he would grow up learning to distrust women as much as his father did.

A few weeks later, during a January thaw, Raine had an idea. If she could somehow buy the equipment on time from Julia, she could turn the print shop into a job shop, working on commission.  She might be able to garner some printing business from outside the state. The thought captured her imagination and grew stronger as the winter days passed. She thought about it all through the blustery days of March. Then one day in April, when she sat in the print shop at her desk and looked down at the sheet of figures she planned to present to Julia that night, the phone rang.

“I wonder if you'd be able to take Tate on Friday rather than Saturday,” Jade's low voice said in her ear.

When she realized who it was, her mouth went dry. It was the first time she had talked to him on the phone in months.  “I don’t see any reason why I can’t.”

“I wouldn’t ask, but I need to drive to Canton to get some legal business done, and the offices aren’t open on Saturday.”

“It's no problem, Jade.  I can take him.  He can come here to the print shop with me.”

“Are you sure he won't be any trouble?”

She curbed the rise of impatience and kept her tone level.  “I'm sure.”

A silence hummed over the telephone wire.  “I have it on good authority that the paper is folding.”

His cool unconcern rankled.  “As soon as Julia is finished with her advertising obligations, she's going to stop publication.”

Another long pause.  “Have you made any plans?”

Why did he care
?  “No.”

“You'll be leaving Verylon.”

Suddenly she knew the truth.  He was questioning her because he wanted her to leave. Her temper flared to life.  “You're very anxious to get rid of me, Jade.”

His answer was smooth.  “There's no work for you here.”

He was actually pushing her to leave.  She fought sick disappointment with anger. “You shouldn't have let me see how anxious you are to get rid of me.  You don’t usually tip your hand like that, Jade. Hasn't it occurred to you I might stay just to annoy you?”

He said a soft ‘damn,’ and the clipped sound pleased her. She'd gotten under his skin. She burrowed deeper.  “Summer's coming. You hire extra help on the ranch, so does Frank Radley,” she said, naming another rancher whose land holdings were only slightly smaller than Jade's. “You could probably use an extra hand right now, before the college crew arrives.  The town's still complaining that you haven't fixed that fence. I can string barbed wire or herd cows of haul bales if I have to. I used to do it for you for nothing and cook your meals, too.” She paused. Only half in jest, she said, “Would you hire me, Jade?”

Silence simmered in her ears.

“No.”

The clipped word stung. He wanted her to leave. He couldn't have made it any clearer. She covered the hurt with a flip tone.  “Well, that takes care of one job interview. Let's hope Frank is more broad-minded than you are.”