Silver and Spice

Chapter 2

Anne heard him; she even had a vagrant urge to try a swinging left hook to wipe the uneven grin off his face. For one helpless moment, though, she couldn’t stop herself from making a quick, fierce study of the man. Her eyes swept over the familiar planes of Jake’s face, resenting the new, unexplained crease between his brows, scanning the hook nose and sensual mouth and the chin so inevitably peppered with evening stubble. If there had been the slightest sign that he had been ill over the past three years; if by any chance he had been ill and she hadn’t known… Jake was such a terrible fool when it came to taking care of himself.

About the instant her eyes were finally reassured that he was perfectly fine, she was uncomfortably aware that the devilish spark in his own eyes had increased to a full-fledged flame. Clearly, he was delighted by whatever emotions her transparent face had given away. And about that same instant, the word married finally registered in her brain like the surprise little bomb that it was.

“Married?” she echoed lightly. Her vulnerable eyes turned cool, and her tone deliberately radiated concern. “So you’ve finally flipped out, have you, Jake?”

He chuckled as he handed her the sandals. She wasted no time putting them on. His hand on her shoulder was undoubtedly intended to offer her balance…except that the feel of that hand threw her off balance. Behind all the lazy laughter in his eyes was a stark, steady glint of determination. “Now, don’t get scared,” he said teasingly.

“Scared?”

“Like the little girl who’s lying in bed waiting for the alligators under the mattress to come and get her. Marriage doesn’t have to be like that, honey.” Absently, Jake pushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture that failed to restore order of any kind. “I figured it was about time I came home and finally did something about you, Anne. You’re thirty-one. A female bachelor, getting fussier and more set in your ways every day. Pretty soon you’ll be over the hill-”

“True.” She added with a remarkable amount of compassion, “Perhaps age is your problem, too? Maybe you’re going through a midlife crisis, Jake. I think you can get pills for that.”

“Not until I’m forty. I still have six years to go. Speaking of pills, are you taking any?”

“Brewer’s yeast,” she said sweetly. “And occasionally wheat germ.”

Damn that crooked smile of his. It was the sexy eyes that had initially led her down the primrose path to his bed a very long time ago, but it was the impossibly crooked smile that had made her fall in love with him. Memories flooded her consciousness as if a dam had burst.

She plugged the hole in the dike and headed for the door. “Out you go,” she said cheerfully. “It’s been a wonderful conversation, Jake, after not seeing you for three whole years. I won’t even mention that it’s two in the morning, that you had no right to pick my locks-”

“Window.”

“Pardon?”

“I came in through the window.”

“What-?” But it was obvious which window he had come in-the one near the bed where the curtains were fluttering in the night breeze. Anne found herself staring, suddenly lost. Jake had climbed in another window another time, when she was eighteen. And made love and made love and made love and… She lifted her face to his, jade eyes turned emerald. “Go away, Jake. Just go completely away.”

“Now, Anne.” Jake’s hand brushed the small of her back as he urged her through the door. “You know we’re both dying for a cup of coffee.”

“You are not staying.”

“Of course not.”

Despite the seeming meekness of his tone, Jake’s words echoed in the hall with the reverberation of a detonated grenade. Anne had waged war with Jake before. She wavered momentarily, weighing the dangers of spending fifteen minutes with Jake over a cup of coffee in the same way a general might calculate the risk of sending his troops over a minefield. A good general, of course, would send the troops around the minefield.

Anne let out a breath. “One cup of coffee,” she said flatly. “Only so you can tell me what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into the last few years.”

“Lots,” he assured her. His slashed-on smile was her reward. Jake always rewarded terrible judgment.

Her unwilling heart turned a cartwheel. Her heart had turned cartwheels for those special private smiles three other times in her life-not counting that first time Jake had loved her and left her, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. “I’ll just bet you have,” she said lightly. “So where have you been raising hell this time?”

“Idaho. Northern Idaho, where the mountains are so steep they can barely build roads. Where the whole area’s deserted. You can walk for hours and have the feeling no one has ever been there before you.”

“Sounds perfectly dreadful.” They fell into old habits in the kitchen. Jake opened cupboards and drawers, finally finding the instant coffee and cups.

“A minute,” she told him when the cups were filled and he was staring at the dials on her microwave oven.

He punched the button. “This is nicer than your last place.”

“I like it,” she agreed, trailing after him with spoons, place mats, napkins, cream in a sterling pitcher and a matching sugar bowl. All the things she considered appropriate for serving coffee, knowing full well Jake would have been content to sit near a campfire with a mug.

“It’s nicer…but the kitchen’s still just like you. Your grandmother’s hand-painted china and everything in its place, all the cups lined up just so.”

“I’m the same old frantic neatnik,” Anne agreed. “So how long have you been back in town?” she asked casually.

“Since late this afternoon. Just long enough to find out where you were, pick up the Morgan from Gramps, and get to Link’s party.” He set both cups on the table, but didn’t seem interested in drinking from his own. He was still trying to undress. Not that Anne didn’t understand that Jake had an honest antipathy for formal attire, but one could stretch understanding only so far. His shoes and tie had been off when she came in; somehow the jacket was off now. Jake was looking very, very comfortable as he leaned back against the counter, his shirt cuffs folded back, the silver hair on his chest showing in the V of his open shirt. All settled in. He had the wolf’s ability to move slowly and lazily when he was clearly up to no good.

Anne settled in a chair and lifted her coffee cup. “Either you heave your suitcase out the back door onto the porch, or I will,” she said pleasantly.

He chuckled. “Did you get all the presents I sent you?”

“I mean it. You can’t just come back here-”

“In a minute, Anne. Meanwhile, what on earth are you doing living alone?” Jake asked conversationally.

“The same thing you are. Being very happy in my own way.”

“I counted at least twelve men at the party who would have been happy to convince you otherwise.”

“Thirteen,” she said mildly. Her palms curled around the warm cup, suddenly needing that warmth. “I only counted one brunette and one redhead in your corner, but then you weren’t there more than an hour. Either one, I’m sure, will be happy to store your suitcase for the night.”

“Come here, Anne.”

His voice was a husky, seductive tenor. A call from the north woods, a low, primitive mating call that echoed through wind and night and silence…and had nothing at all to do with a brightly lit, spotless kitchen in an affluent suburb. A drop of coffee splashed on Anne’s wrist as she set down her cup and stood up.

“All right. I’ll put your suitcase on the porch,” she said reasonably.

She moved swiftly, so swiftly that she almost made it to the doorway before his fingers curled around her wrist and tugged, very gently. Just as gently, the rest of the room suddenly went out of focus. Her meticulous kitchen with its bright porcelains and immaculate chrome all blurred; Jake’s face was the only thing in focus. She took in the fan of character lines around his eyes and the grainy texture of his sun-weathered skin, the shaggy brows… A helpless murmur escaped her throat as his lips touched hers, once, soothingly, his mouth soft and smooth, the taste of him something she’d never been able to forget. “God, I’ve missed you, Anne. God, I’ve missed you…”

Her hands hung limply at her sides as she fought the rush of a thousand memories. The smell of Jake, the look of the long, curling hairs on his chest, his Adam’s apple and the cords of his neck, the feel of being wrapped up in a world of senses where nothing else mattered… His fingers combed back her hair, clenching and unclenching in the long, silken strands as they had done so many times before.

Their relationship had never worked, and never would work except on this one level. She knew that far too well, far too painfully…but his lips were so warm, brushing over and over on hers until they trembled, until they parted and his mouth molded itself to hers and his tongue slipped inside. God, she’d missed him. No one had ever even come close to filling the emptiness but Jake. Love, hate, frustration, laughter and sheer wild passion…a thousand emotions were involved in her feelings for her roguish wolf, only half of them pleasant, none of them comfortable, not one of them having the least thing to do with the well-ordered life in which she took such pride and satisfaction.

No, Anne, moaned her very rational brain, which was an expert on survival. Her hands refused to listen, slowly running up his arms, reexploring the mold of his shoulder muscles before she allowed her fingers to curl up in his thick, springy hair. Some of the tension left his body when he felt her acquiesce; his lips again softened on hers.

“I’m never leaving without you again,” he murmured. “Hear me, Anne, because you’re going with me…”

She couldn’t hear anything; in a resounding rush, her heart was pounding out a song she’d heard many times…but never with this particular chorus. Never with this particular need to force his lips back to hers, this ache for the claim of his hand on her breast, this fierce resentment of the intrusion of clothes. She’d thought she would never see him again. The last time, she’d told him never to come back, and meant it. Jake knew she’d meant it. Only now, like a crocus bursting through snow, she felt vulnerable and full of life again and reaching for sunlight and desperately unwilling to let go even for a moment…

“So sweet,” he whispered. “So sweet, Anne.”

His lips dipped into the hollow of her neck and his breath tickled her throat, warm and whispery. His thighs rubbed against hers in an evocative dance. Every movement he made increased the rush of sensations in her body, even his evening beard that chafed like crushed velvet against her soft skin. His hands swept up and down her spine as he trailed haunting slow kisses along the side of her neck. When his lips sought hers again, she was waiting. The pressure she returned was wanton, her fingers raking up through his hair, a fierce, racing, desperate cry of need escaping from her. How she loved this man! How she had longed for the look of him, for his touch and smell and sound and taste… She could feel his pleasure at her ardent response as intimately as she could feel the unmistakable pressure of his arousal against her abdomen. She’d denied her loneliness for so long…too long.

A flush of heat touched her cheeks as his eyes met hers, all silver, all pagan shine. Far too slowly, he wrapped his fingers in her hair to nudge the strands aside. His knuckles grazed the nape of her neck as he sought the hooks at the back of her gown. In a moment, she was naked to the waist.

The next moment he had gathered her so close that neither of them could breathe. Her arms locked around his neck; her lips burrowed in his throat. “This time,” he whispered fiercely, “you’re going to marry me, Anne. This time the ball’s in my court…”

Marry… The word stung like the lash of a whip. Her passion chilled with lightning speed. Shaking, Anne jerked back from him, snatching for the front of her gown. “Dammit, Jake…” Normally it took two fingers to handle the hooks and eyes; now she seemed to have ninety and still couldn’t manage it. “Damn you.” She held the gown up with one hand. Feeling sick and furious, she could barely look him in the eyes. “You started that. You know I never meant to-”

“Yes,” he said shortly, and tugged her trembling cheek to his ruffled shirt front, managing the hooks and eyes himself. When he stepped back from her, he was oddly still, his body radiating none of the tension and frustration that were pulsating through her own. The watchful look in his eyes was unfamiliar, like a terrible new trick, as if he could read her faint trembling, her pale color and porcelain profile, and see things…that just weren’t there.

“Look, I don’t find the subject of marriage very amusing.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“It won’t work,” she said furiously. “And you know that just as well as I do!”

“It will work.”

Be calm. Anne took a breath and then another, staring in total frustration at the ceiling. “Even you, Jake, cannot expect to just walk in here after three years and-”

“And talk marriage? But I just have, Anne. Because we know each other far too well to pretend time has made any difference. You know it hasn’t.” He reached out, and the pad of his thumb very gently caressed her cheek, a touch as tender as the look in his eyes was determined. “We just proved that,” he said roughly. “We’ve always proved that, every time we touch each other.”

“You think you deserve a gold medal because I still want you?” she demanded. “Rabbits want each other, Jake. You want to hear me say that I missed you? Well, fine. I missed you like hell. And now you can just get the devil out of here.”

Enough was enough. Actually, enough was just past enough, because she could feel an unfamiliar, disgraceful welling of moisture in her eyes. Anne never cried. Turning on her heel, she stalked toward her room.

Jake didn’t follow. In seconds, she’d turned the lock on her bedroom door and leaned back against it, her arms wrapped around her chest, her eyes closed. Waiting for Jake to go.

Moments later, she heard sounds from the other room, but definitely not the sound of the front door closing. It took her five minutes to realize that instead of leaving, he was actually…settling in for the night! She tried to decide whether her fragile poise was up to going back out there and forcing the issue.

Finally moving away from the door, she slowly took off her dress and hung it in the closet. Then she slipped on a long flannel nightgown. Even when the light was off and the comforter up to her chin, she found herself staring at the door in the darkness, waiting for the knob to turn. It didn’t. Eventually, the light under the door went out. If you had a whit of sense you would call the police, a small voice in her head advised.

The thought brought an exhausted though definite hint of a smile to her face. That kind of flamboyant gesture was certainly not her style. Besides, there was no conceivable reason she shouldn’t offer an old friend her couch for the night. And Jake had once been an old friend, an old childhood friend, before they became lovers.

The gold hands on the alarm clock announced 5:07 a.m. An ungodly hour to find oneself staring at the ceiling. Anne finally gave up trying to sleep and threw off the covers. Gathering up underthings from her drawers, she silently unlocked her door and tiptoed out.

Jake was asleep, sprawled on the carpet in the living room. She might have guessed he’d find her couch too confining. He’d found the blankets in the bathroom closet, but his chest and one long leg were uncovered. Jake was out like a light, his silvery hair thick and disheveled on the pillow. Biting her lip at the oddly vulnerable look of him, she tiptoed into the bathroom and flipped on the light, then closed the door.

A stranger sleepily confronted her in the mirror, a wanton mermaid with hair streaming over her breasts, a Lorelei with stormy green eyes and plum-swollen lips…a moral degenerate who’d come close to selling her soul in the middle of the night to have that man share the pillow with her.

She turned her back on Lorelei, peeled off her nightgown and put on a stark white bra and simple bikini underpants. Carefully, she fitted her panty hose to her long, sleek legs, snapping the waistband in place with a vengeance.

She pulled on a plain white slip, then mercilessly applied a brush to her hair. It took ten minutes before the long strands were completely untangled, then another five to pin a figure eight at the nape of her neck. Every strand of ash-blond hair was subdued.

Makeup came next. It wasn’t quite so difficult to face the mirror; Wanton Wanda was fast being replaced by prim and proper Anne. Moisturizer, then foundation…

She and Jake had grown up together in a way. Their grandparents had lived just three doors away from each other, grandparents whom they frequently visited as children and who, by different twists of fate, became their guardians in later years. The friendship had started when Anne was three, wailing her angelic little head off the day she fell off a tricycle. Jake, then six, had vaulted over the forbidden high fences between yards to discover the source of the caterwauling. He’d fixed the trike pedal so a giant couldn’t reach it and was very proud of himself.

Jake was her dark prince from then on. Not that he didn’t have the coloring to be the regular kind of prince, but Jake was clearly never cut out to wear white and ride a white steed. The real Prince Charming would never have gone in for an occasional game of kickball and a lot of swinging on fences and kicking stones at the lakeshore. Jake was capable of merciless teasing, and though Anne was a quiet listener with everyone else in her life, with Jake, she could never seem to stop talking. He was always listening to things she didn’t want anyone to know.

Her father had died when she was five, a major blow to a scrawny little waif with green eyes. Her mother proceeded to search the whole world for another husband, and she found three before Anne reached her early teens. Their lifestyle never lacked the label “advantaged.” Anne, oversensitive and painfully shy, barely survived it.

But you were hardly much of a survivor then, she told her reflection in the mirror, and she brushed faint brown eye shadow on her lids and added an almost imperceptible stroke of eyebrow pencil. Jake’s childhood, like hers, had involved a great deal of travel. His parents simply liked to take to the road. They had a little Cessna…and the plane went down. It happened the year Jake was ten, the same year his grandfather, Gil, had taken him in, the same year he’d managed to run all the way to Tucson before the police caught up with him. Reaction to his parents’ death, the neighbors clucked. Anne knew far better. Jake was born with wanderlust in his soul.

By the time she was eighteen, Anne had long been a permanent resident at her paternal grandmother’s. Anne’s mother had never objected to the relationship between Anne and Jennie. Children were a nuisance. Buffeted too long by fierce, painful, endless winds, Anne was still in shock; her mother had died of pneumonia two weeks earlier. She hadn’t even known her mother was ill. And Jake could not possibly have known; yet he climbed in at the window of her grandmother’s house to comfort her…and he made love to her. Any judge would have sentenced Jake harshly for taking an innocent in a weak moment. Judges knew nothing; Anne couldn’t have survived that moment in her life without Jake. Two weeks later, Jake had a choice between completing his last year at Harvard and embarking on a fishing venture off the coast of Alaska. Why risk graduating with honors? Alaska had won hands down.

Anne whisked blusher on her cheeks. When he’d left she’d felt as if a jagged rock had been torn from her heart. He’d asked her to go with him on that venture. Run off to Alaska at eighteen? No. But her refusal didn’t prevent her from being out of her mind in love with him, nor did it ease the desperate loneliness when he was gone.

Judging from the state of his jeans the next time she saw him, he must have blown his parents’ inheritance in one quick fling. Oil-bearing shale in Montana, was it? Anne was twenty-two, graduating from college, invincible. No one could tell her otherwise. Independence and control and self-sufficiency were her goals; any number of male undergraduates had been foolish enough to try to distract her from those goals. Jake had come back out of the blue and listened as she expounded her philosophy of never needing anyone, as she told him how she would never be vulnerable again. He’d listened, all the way to bed, for almost two solid months.

That affair had left her bruised and worse, because they’d fought terribly at the end. He wanted her to go with him. She wanted him to stay. He’d split for Tulsa, something to do with telecommunications. For months, she saw his face in every crowd, jumped every time the phone rang… But by the age of twenty-four, she was completely over him. Completely. Serious about banking by then, involved, busy, her own woman. She was home with the flu the day he walked in. No doctor would have forced her to stay in bed as long as he did. The hours went far too swiftly; they couldn’t even spare the time to argue…

Anne washed her hands, switched off the light and tiptoed back to her bedroom. The faintest gray dawn light was coming in at the windows. She switched on the closet light and pulled a mauve blouse from its hanger. The fabric was silky to the touch but totally plain, with a stand-up collar and long sleeves.

At twenty-seven, she’d been close to marrying a man named Jim Hollinger. There was no possible way Jake could have known that, no possible reason for him to show up at such a critical time. She’d had to give back Jim’s ring, and Lord, she’d been ashamed. Jim was a true-blue nice man. Jake was an impulsive, wandering rogue, and he was never going to change. He’d stayed four months. At the end of that time, he was still wearing ragged jeans and didn’t have any idea where he was headed. She’d told him never to come back. And meant it. Lord, she’d meant it. Every single time he’d shown up in her life, she’d fallen-hook, line, sinker, soul, fingernails, toes. And every time he left, there was a terrible yawning gap, a wrenching loneliness, an ache in her heart that would never ease.

She tucked the blouse into a heather pin-striped straight skirt. Its matching jacket followed, a designer label, severely tailored. Spectator pumps, a slim bracelet-style gold watch…the austere image was not a disguise, but Anne. Polish and perfection and a control she valued. She went out regularly on Saturday nights, with men who wanted and respected the kind of woman who looked good and talked well and could hold up her head in any social gathering. Jake couldn’t care less about all of that. Because her childhood had been chaos, Anne had patterned her adult life on very different lines. Jake had always been the only zigzag in the pattern…

There was no sound from the doorway. She didn’t know why she suddenly glanced up…to find him there, all scraggly brows and leonine mane, the bold line of his shoulders clearly defined under the sheet he had carelessly draped around himself. Sleepy eyes were busy surveying Anne, from her figure-eight coil to her spectator pumps.

“Your slip is showing,” he remarked idly.

She was too smart to jump. “Since I know you will anyway, make yourself a cup of coffee. I have to go to work.” He said nothing. Wariness prickled her nerve endings as she bent to add lipstick and a handkerchief to her purse. The feeling of vulnerability was suddenly there again, unwanted and upsetting.

“The image just doesn’t always work the way I think you want it to, princess,” he murmured thoughtfully. “You’re a striking woman, no matter how you dress. Sometimes I like the formal Anne best, actually. All marble surface, all softness underneath. A contrast that very honestly reflects the lady… Anne?”

She was picking up her briefcase from beside her small desk. “Hmm?” His comment confused her. He’d always mocked her clothing styles, always teased her about them.

“I really have come back to marry you.”

Her heart stopped. She took a silent breath. “Last night I had a few glasses of champagne. This morning I won’t be so easily rattled, Jake. You can take your insanity-and your suitcase-over to your grandfather’s, after you’ve had your coffee.”

“Very assertive,” Jake admired gravely.

In spite of herself, Anne’s lips curled in a smile. “Thank you so much.”

“I haven’t decided whether to try for a long, drawn-out battle or to play low-down and dirty. Do you have a preference?”

“Only for you to move away from the door.”

“Low-down and dirty then,” Jake decided absently.

“But it takes two to play, and one of us isn’t playing.” She brushed past him, her eyes averted from the mat of masculine hair on his chest. The smell of his sleep-warm flesh assaulted her nostrils. She headed rapidly for the door.

“Anne?”

“No,” she called back to him. That seemed to cover everything.

“I love you to distraction.”

In less than a minute, she’d snatched up her coat and let herself out the front door. Crisp September air greeted her, a dew-drenched lawn, and the special silence of the morning. She was far too early for work, but she could always pick up a cup of coffee and a newspaper somewhere… Her heels click-clicked on the pavement as she strode toward her MG, shivering just a little from the morning chill. She slid into the driver’s seat, stuck the key into the ignition and started the engine. For just an instant, she caught her reflection in the tiny rearview mirror. A suspicious brightness glittered in her eyes. And her fingers were trembling annoyingly on the wheel.

She and Jake were chalk and cheese. She valued stability; he was a hopeless rover. He was lazy-sleep-in to her rise-and-shine, jeans to her business suits, lackadaisical chaos to her well-ordered world. She knew exactly what she required in order to survive; she had learned the lessons when she was very young, and the lessons had been very hard and very painful.

It was not amusing to have fallen in love with the wrong man.

Slipping the car into reverse, she backed out of the drive. You’re thirty-one, Anne reminded herself. Mature enough to know certain relationships can go only so far. Plenty mature enough to say no to a dead-end physical relationship that has already brought more than enough heartache.

Again her eyes met their reflection in the mirror; this time there was a trace of humor in their haunted green depths. Mature? Jake could bring out the terrible two’s in a hundred-year-old saint. Anne had lost control the moment she’d seen him at the party. Mature?

She loved that man. And she heartily wished that he’d never come back.