Silver and Spice

Chapter 4

Gil Rivard was a perfect gentleman, certainly nothing like his grandson. He offered Anne a brisk, affectionate hug and a hand to hold on to as he led her through the hall to the living room. Unconsciously, she found herself smiling, looking with affection at the white-haired man with the gentle gray eyes who always made it so very clear he was glad to see her. “So our wanderer’s turned up again like the proverbial bad penny, Anne. What kind of trouble has he been in this time?”

“Don’t feed her lines, Gramps. She’s sassy enough. You two want brandy?”

“Please,” Anne murmured. Her need for Dutch courage must have shown in her voice, because Jake chuckled as he left the room. She and Gil exchanged glances.

“Your grandson…” she began gravely, and watched Gil’s fine network of crow’s-feet crinkle up when he laughed.

“I’m not responsible for his behavior, Anne,” Gil told her.

“Someone failed to take him into the woodshed when he was still a child.”

Gil shook his head. “You can’t claim he’s spoiled. Jake’s never asked for or expected anything from anyone in his life.”

“So every once in a while he has a good point or two.” She settled back in the wicker peacock chair that was her favorite spot in the room. Jake returned with a tray of drinks and snacks, and she listened absently to the conversation between the two men.

The house was too monstrous for Gil to rattle around alone in; she often worried about him. This room, though, was where he seemed to do his real living. Once an octagonal porch, it had been closed in with jalousie windows; white wicker furniture and emerald-green curtains added touches of brightness. In summer, both sun and breezes wafted through the room; in winter, a small wood stove lent a wonderful coziness. Anne had spent hours there over the years, and her visits had had nothing to do with Jake. Gil had attended her high school graduation, sitting with her grandmother; Gil was the one she had talked to about her career goals when she was in college; Gil had invested faith and trust in her when she started her job at the bank. If anyone knew of her relationship with Jake, it was Gil, but no words had ever been spoken by either of them on the subject. Jake’s grandfather, in spite of the age difference, had always been a special friend to Anne, and now, she gradually relaxed in the familiar room. At least until she realized that she seemed to be devouring the plate of cheese and fruit Jake had placed next to her. And the cup of tea. No brandy, after all.

His eyes met hers in the distance. The last thing you need is alcohol when you didn’t have a thing to eat at dinner, he telegraphed.

She smiled faintly, uncrossed her legs, strode over to the coffee table between the two men, poured herself a liberal glass of brandy, then returned to the curved wicker throne chair.

Seven steps seemed to be the safest distance. If she moved any closer to Jake, something went haywire in her nervous system, something disgracefully sexual that didn’t belong anywhere near his grandfather and emerald cushions and the lazy conversation about Gil’s antique sword collection. In his red flannel shirt and jeans, Jake looked distinctly feral. Undoubtedly a stranger would only have seen a normal-looking man with strong features and lazy humor in his silver-gray eyes, but Anne knew feral when she felt it. The man was about as trustworthy as a hungry lion let loose in a meat market; he was as unpredictable as a kite in a windstorm; he would never outgrow the need to take the road less traveled by…

Go with him, Anne, her heart whispered.

She quickly censored the vagrant thought, picked up the last cracker with cheese and delicately nibbled. She was not pleased with Jake at the moment. Silver mining, the fool. So he’d finally accumulated a little money. And he would probably throw it away. Again.

Marriage to a man like Jake would mean steak one year and canned beans the next. Bleakly, Anne acknowledged to herself that beans weren’t the point; it was the up-and-down lifestyle that threw her. The thought of children being tossed from one place to the next; a house all decorated just in time to move again… She’d lived that kind of life as a child with her mother. She hadn’t stopped having nightmares until she was old enough to dictate her own lifestyle. Jake’s life was very, very exciting; Anne’s was boring. She loved boredom, and she apologized to no one for valuing roots and stability and lifelong friendships.

Jake’s eyes met hers again, and Anne rapidly took another sip of brandy. Look, Buster. If I want a glass of brandy, I will certainly have one.

Your choice, Jake’s eyes warned her wickedly. I hate to have to tell you this, honey, but you’re not much of a drinker. And you do tend to become endearingly amorous when you drink on an empty stomach.

Her eyes darted to the windows, and she became intrigued by the ivy clinging to the window frames. Thoroughly irritated, she acknowledged that Jake knew too damn much about her. If she were meeting him now for the first time, she would certainly be smart enough to avoid him like the plague. The whole problem was that they’d known each other far, far too long.

Go with him, Anne, her heart whispered once more. Marriage-you know better. But what if…what if this was her last chance to be with him? What if he really never did show up in her life again, if he never made love with her again? Always, it was Jake who stood between her and the imaginary mate in the gray flannel suit he made fun of so regularly. Something always seemed to go flat when she found herself close to a commitment to someone else, a hint of panic that made no sense when Anne was totally honest with herself about exactly what she needed and wanted in a relationship.

Setting down her brandy glass, she rose restlessly from the chair and wandered to the window, staring at the fluttering leaves of the tall old maple in the yard. The night was lonely, a black sky offering no stars, a silent, cold, colorless world. She shivered, and just then suddenly felt two warm arms wrap around her from behind. Ever so naturally, Jake tugged her against the secure strength of his chest. It must have been those two sips of brandy that made her snuggle back against him like a kitten. “I love Anne,” Jake remarked offhandedly to his grandfather.

She stiffened like a cat, and turned around.

Slowly, Gil stood up from the couch, an affectionate smile wreathing his features. “Then perhaps you won’t be such a fool as to take off without her this time,” he scolded his grandson, and added absently, “I always hoped that the two of you…”

Anne didn’t say much until the Morgan was zooming along the deserted country road. “You gave him every reason to expect great-grandchildren,” she accused Jake furiously. “I just don’t believe that you would involve him-”

“All I did was tell him I loved you.”

Jake’s voice was quiet and reasonable. From Anne’s point of view, fuel for a fire. A wisp of hair had escaped from her figure-eight bun. She blew it back. “You all but announced you were sleeping at my place!”

“Which I am.”

“Which you are not.” She stared straight ahead, at black branches dipping so low they nearly touched the roof of the car. Of all the strange roads for Jake to have taken! “You’re going to drive me home, and then you’re going back to spend a respectable night at your grandfather’s. I don’t know where you got this wild idea about marriage, but it’s going no further, Jake. Nothing is going any further.”

“You are absolutely right.” He eased on the brakes and pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road. Puzzled, she stared at his jagged profile in the darkness, a profile set in stone except for the silver eyes. “Get off the throne, princess. The imperial approach sure as hell isn’t going to work with me.”

“I beg your-”

“Out.” He slammed the door on his side as he got out of the car. Wisely, Anne ordered her heart to simmer down and her body to stay put. Jake was angry. That certainly didn’t happen very often, and rarely with her, but every instinct informed her that she was safer exactly where she was. Her eyes followed Jake as he stalked around the front of the car. It was jet-black midnight outside, yet there was a liquid silver in his eyes that she could follow, and his lithe, smooth movements were those of an animal seeking prey. She would not be his prey.

Belligerently, she glared at him when he pulled her door open. “If you think I have any intention of talking to you when you’re not in a reasonable mood-”

“I’m inclined to shake you silly, but I intend to do that-or see anyone else lay a little finger on you-when hell freezes over. Now get out of the car.”

Well. As it happened, her legs were a little cramped. That was the problem with sports cars. Her sleek, elegant calves emerged, followed by the crimson dress from Saks and the pale gold jacket, and last the regally coiled champagne hair. Her eyes were pure emerald. “You think you’re very good at intimidation-”

“And you damn well have to be retaught honesty every time we’re together.” She had her chin stiffly in the air about the same time her toes were. Jake must have suddenly decided she wanted to sit on the hood of his Morgan. Anne was not going to be reduced to making a fuss. If he wanted to argue in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sitting on the hood of a car, on a tree-lined lane in a thick mist… She shivered when his arms suddenly closed on both sides of her hips, deliberately forcing her to face him. “Honesty, Anne? You remember it?” he snapped.

“You’re not angry-you’re scared. You think I don’t know you? I know you shave your legs on Sundays and you turn into a moody little minx right before a storm. I know you, Anne, just as I knew you three years ago, and three years before that, and another three years earlier, too, and back when you were a prim little virgin-”

“Jake.” He had never, that she could remember, hit below the belt. A flush climbed her cheeks. Jake’s thumb, curled under her chin, forcing her head up.

“Don’t you Jake me. You’re not shook up because I told Gramps I loved you but because you know that this round is for keeps. So put an end to it, Anne, if that’s what you really want to do. Say ‘Goodbye, Jake,’ as if you mean it.”

A most unreasonable thing to ask. Her heart was beating out triple time in dismay. Unwillingly, her eyes lifted to his, as vulnerable as a green leaf in the wind. “You want honesty, Jake?” she asked in a low voice. “We have sex between us. That isn’t love. You want more honesty? You never talked me into doing anything I didn’t want to do. I wanted you. I want you now. I will always want you…the whole conjugation of the verb. Anything else between us…would never work.”

She hated Jake, had always hated Jake for making her say things she never wanted to say. His arms suddenly wrapped her up, hugging her close, as he would a child. “That’s what you think? That the only thing we ever had was sex?” She heard the note of shock in his voice. Or was it hurt? Whatever the emotion, it disappeared almost instantly. “You’re joking, honey. When you were eighteen, you weren’t much more than a beanpole with huge green eyes, an orphan who’d been kicked around the block just a few too many times. I suppose you think I found you beautiful even then?”

“Yes.” In spite of herself, a small smile curled on her lips.

“You actually think I wanted you?”

“You couldn’t keep your hands off me,” she whispered.

“True.” He hesitated, his smile dying. “But dammit, Anne, you really don’t believe that sex was my only motivation…”

Her eyes half closed in sudden total weariness, her cheek snuggled against the soft red flannel of his shirt. He could tease all he wanted to; she knew the truth. So did he. And part of that truth was that just being held by him, as he was holding her now, evoked the most special kind of peace. “We make good lovers,” she murmured tentatively. “We would make a terribly unhappy married pair. I don’t know why you can’t leave the subject alone. Don’t you think we make good lovers?” Her fears and frustrations faded as she sank into the warmth and security his arms offered. A spark of Anne’s coaxing humor shone in her eyes, a desire to tease Jake away from his line of questioning. She didn’t want to hurt him.

Jake seemed willing to take her up on the change of subject, a devilish gleam in his eyes. “We make very good lovers,” he growled softly, his large hands framing her face. “Which is one very small reason why I want an arrangement for life.”

“I’d rather take cyanide now. It would be much less painful in the long run.”

A chuckle rumbled in his throat. “You’re so convinced we have a problem with different lifestyles?”

“I know we do.”

“That we don’t share a single value that matters?”

“We don’t.”

“But how else are we going to get children for you, Anne? Who else would take you on but me?”

“Do you want a list of the offers I’ve had?” she demanded. But she was suddenly not feeling quite so lighthearted. Her perch on the car turned precarious when Jake leaned forward and buried his lips in her neck. The tickle of his breath made her shiver restlessly, like the leaves trembling in the night’s whispering wind. She tried to restrain his arms, but didn’t have any effect.

“So you’ve had offers,” he murmured. “But you’ve failed to make a commitment to a man in a gray flannel suit, Anne. You’ve run out of time. And I’m tired of talking.”

Obviously. Now he was into necking on deserted roads like two teenagers with no place to go. He slid his hands inside her jacket and around to the supple slope of her spine. Her troubled jade eyes met his silver ones as his came closer, suddenly holding no more humor than her own. “Jake, I’m not going to marry you,” she whispered desperately.

“We’re not going to talk any more about marriage,” he agreed. “Just violets, Anne. You smell exactly like violets…”

Anne was unwilling to discuss violets. She was unwilling to sit there on top of a car in the middle of nowhere on a night turned cold. His lips coaxed, trailing sweet, persuasive kisses along the line of her stubborn jaw, up to the furrowed frown on her forehead, down over her unhappy eyes. His mouth settled finally on the most difficult obstacle, her two lips pressed firmly together, at the same time that his hands were staging a subtle guerrilla war on her back.

Suddenly, she was sliding off the hood of the car. Her toes touched the gravel roadside; Jake cradled her legs between his. The assault of length to length was not one her heart had been expecting. Their shapes fit together with exquisite puzzlelike perfection. She needed air suddenly, a chance to regroup her scattered objections. “Jake…”

His mouth, hovering, sank down on her parted lips and wouldn’t let go. His tongue whispered over the back of her teeth, stole deeper into her warmth, a lonely tongue seeking company. His hand went to work, rearranging the crushed folds of his corduroy jacket and her velvet one; then he molded her soft, swelling breasts into the muscles of his chest.

He was so warm, so impossibly warm. When he raised his head, his eyes met hers, pure pewter. “All I had to do was see you again,” he murmured gruffly. “That was all, Anne. I didn’t even have to touch you. You, looking so proper at Link’s party, the respect you inspire in other people, your pride in the way you walk and move, all grace, all supple femininity…” A slash of a crooked smile touched his mouth. His hand brushed back a single lock of her ash-blond hair that had stolen loose. “Not always a lady, though.”

Never a “lady” for him… A wanton heart gave in, returning pressure for pressure of soft kisses turned fierce and hungry. She threaded her fingers through his hair, loving the feel of the thick mat curling around her fingers, her palms urging him closer. He smelled like the woods. His breathing grew huskier as his hands roamed with growing insistence over territory they had no business touching, not here, not in the open countryside on a lush, dark velvet night.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “Please come with me, Anne. Just for two short weeks.”

His lips caught hers again, not giving her a chance to answer. Devil hands splayed on her hips and then cupped their slim softness, driving her pelvis into the cradle of his thighs, burying his arousal between them like some sweet private secret. A moan escaped from her soul and echoed out into the night’s silence. “Come with me,” he whispered, a sorcerer’s call.

She buried her face in his throat, too weak to stand. “You knew all along I’d go with you,” she said helplessly. “I won’t marry you, Jake. But if you want two weeks…” A thousand objections promptly raced through her head; she ignored all of them. Jake’s eyes bored into hers, accurately taking in the yearning in her eyes, the soft flush of passion, the fear of the hurt that she was sure she had just left herself open to. The pads of his thumbs slowly smoothed the lines of her cheekbones; his features were stark and grave in the darkness. He waited; she didn’t understand why. “You really want to stand here all night?” she whispered.

“I was trying to give you sixty seconds to take it back, Anne. Because after that…”

She shook her head. “I won’t take it back.”

They drove home in silence. Anne, exhausted, leaned her head back against the seat and studied Jake wearily from under her eyelashes. How did one go about working love out of one’s system? Was it an answer, to live and breathe and survive together for two weeks, until Jake could finally see that they were at odds on the values that really counted? Was that what it would take? Was she going to have to go through another parting?

Halfway through the ride home, his hand captured hers. Her fingers explored the calluses on his palm, the feel of the firm brown flesh of his hand, so much stronger and larger than her own. I don’t care what I have to go through, her heart whispered. I don’t care that it will have to end again.

In the driveway, Jake tucked her into the warm hollow of his shoulder as he walked her to the door. She would have shivered without his warmth. The wind had picked up even more strength; leaves fluttered in the air and clouds had parted to uncover a bright, cold moon. Jake fitted her key in the lock, pushed open the door and stood there. Surprise flickered in her eyes as he planted a very firm, very quick kiss on her lips. “You’re so very sure all we have is sex, Anne,” he murmured. “Obviously, I’m going to have to make it very clear that we have more than that. Much more.”

He strode down the drive, leaving her gaping in the doorway, as unsettled as a kitten.

Only when his car was gone did Anne open the door and go inside, still unable to believe that he hadn’t come in with her. So he was going to show her they had much more than just sex. Principles were fine, but she could not remember a time Jake had been interested in principles once he’d touched her. Principles had never been a prime concern to Anne after she’d touched him, either.

She wandered into her bedroom, hung up her jacket, neatly lined up her shoes and unzipped the back of her dress. Then, on impulse, she checked the latch on the bedroom window. It was locked.

An hour later it was open, not only the latch but the window as well. Anne’s elbows were on the sill, her chin cupped in her hands, and she was staring blindly out at the three-quarter moon. And she was freezing. The night air was brisk, and her dress was still unzipped in back. Not that she was inclined to move.

There had been a time in Jake’s life when he had preferred entering through a window rather than a door. A whole summer, actually. It had started when she was eighteen, a night when she had been very much alone and terribly depressed. Her mother had died two weeks before. Anne had told herself a dozen times that she was not grieving, because there had never been much love between daughter and mother to grieve for. The reminders didn’t seem to help. The feeling of loss kept overwhelming her; she hadn’t been able to sleep…and she had had no idea Jake was even in town until she heard the rattle in the second-story window of her grandmother’s house.

Horrified, she’d unhooked the casement window before he killed himself. He had climbed up a shaky trellis, clinging to the stone wall of the house. Jake burst through the window like Errol Flynn, give or take the nose, the different hair color, the jeans and a completely different build. She’d switched on the light by her bed, smiling as she hadn’t smiled in weeks, trying to look perfectly scandalized.

“What on earth do you think you’re-”

“I heard about your mother.” His sweat shirt was neatly tucked into his jeans for some reason. She discovered why when he untucked it, and kings and queens and pawns bounced all over the carpet. The chessboard came from behind his back. “I figured you might enjoy a game of chess.”

“It’s three o’clock in the morning!”

“So? You weren’t sleeping.”

She’d given up trying to reason with him when she was three. It was very like Jake to do the unexpected. It was very like Jake to totally ignore the white cotton nightgown that barely covered her thighs, her mane of hair all tangled around her face. Somehow she felt self-conscious only about the faint violet shadows beneath her eyes, because that was where he kept looking, studying her. She lost the game, in seven moves, and set up the board again.

Somehow, they never played the second game. “Come here, Anne,” Jake said quietly.

The voice did not sound at all like Jake. It threw her, the tender intimacy in his tone. She simply went to him. He folded her up so fast in a huge, warm hug, holding her…holding her. In a moment, the light was off, and they were lying on her bed, and she didn’t object. Emotions were exploding inside her, a terrible, terrible pain that she didn’t know how to let go of. He kept smoothing back her hair, his touch so gentle. “You want to talk about her?”

His voice was rough, oddly fierce. Jake had never liked her mother. She didn’t want to talk, anyway. It hurt too much to talk. Jake was warm and vibrant and strong, and all she wanted was to hold on to him. Jake always understood. She didn’t have to talk. She had the frightening feeling that if he let her go, she would fall down a steep cliff, that tears would start and never stop. Unconsciously, she shifted even closer to him, her legs pressing between his, her arms wrapping around his waist. Jake held her still, his hand continuing to comb through her hair. “Don’t you dare hurt for her,” he murmured. “Don’t you dare, Anne.”

His lips moved down in the darkness, finding her mouth. She closed her eyes, strange feelings flooding through her, new feelings. Her whole body seemed to be trembling, which made no sense. She’d trusted Jake all her life as she trusted no one else, and his lips were soothing on hers, soothing and warm…and unbelievably gentle. Tentatively, her hand groped for him, slowly moving up his shoulder, then sliding up farther to the hair at the nape of his neck. Such rich, thick hair. She buried her fingers in it, unconsciously clenching as his kiss deepened, as his other hand caressed down her spine to the soft flesh exposed by her raised nightgown. Possessively, he cupped her bottom, drawing her into the mold of his pelvis, his whole body suddenly so strangely taut, tense. For a moment, she was not exactly sure what the hardness against her abdomen was. Part of Jake, she thought fleetingly. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

His lips settled on her throat. “No.” Yet he was still trailing kisses down her neck, under her chin, around to her ear. She heard an odd grating sound in his throat, and then he reached for her again, his arms wrapped around her so tightly that they hurt. “You don’t have to be afraid, Anne. I’m not going to…”

But he was. She understood that. He was going to make love to her. She should have known he’d come to her. Jake had always come, every time there was trouble, from the time she’d been a little girl. It was different now. For the first time in weeks, she could feel her grief ebbing and other, even stronger emotions overpowering that feeling of loss.

They were new emotions, and she still felt shy when he pulled off her nightgown, when she saw the silver sheen in his eyes, the streak of pale moonlight on her body. Suddenly, there was no loss and depression, or perhaps those feelings had inexorably blended with others. Wild, primitive yearnings swept through her bloodstream, echoing in the call she whispered to him. The first time had to be with Jake. How could it have been with anyone else?

They were friends turned lovers. She knew him so well, trusted him so very much. He was slow and patient…and infuriating. So very like Jake. Having so immediately made a dozen momentous discoveries, she was hungry for more, the way only the newly hungry can be. She wanted so badly to be timeless Eve, and instead was eighteen-year-old Anne, who truthfully didn’t know so very much. Her kneecap hit his kneecap. He chuckled. How could he? No lover in any romance she’d ever read chuckled. And then he actually made her laugh…a sound he rapidly muffled with a kiss.

Anne was so very careful to play by the rules in everything she did. Jake didn’t seem to know any rules, encouraging her in everything she did, not seeming to care if she was awkward, acting as if there was nothing to be shy about when she was terribly and suddenly aware there were a thousand things to be shy about. What on earth did he think he was doing?

She could not seem to catch her breath. Laughter, then kisses that stole her breath. Tickling, and then a rough-smooth kneading that ignited fires. Soft, soft tongues played with each other, a play that suddenly wasn’t play. Jake’s palm was cupped over that feminine mound between her thighs, and she was whimpering, not laughing. When he moved over her, he’d already told her ever so gently what he was going to do, and she was impatient, even irritable…until she felt the thrust inside her body, shockingly intimate. Then something went wrong. Jake had hurt her.

“The pain is over,” he promised. “No more, Anne. Trust me.”

She did, but trust had nothing to do with this. Pagan Eve was still only eighteen. She could talk to Jake. She’d always been able to talk to Jake. This wasn’t going to work. Maybe there was something physically wrong with her. Could they discuss it? She was afraid he was going to tear her apart.

He listened; she would remember for the rest of her life how Jake had listened. How his face was carved in moonlight, how he never smiled. She would have died if he’d smiled. Instead, his lips moved, over her eyes, over her cheeks, settling on her mouth again. The kiss had sent her well on her way to euphoria before his lower body moved again, and by then her body somehow already knew the rhythm. She moved with him, mindlessly, and then, magically, everything was different.

Her flesh grew moist and silky; so did his. She was not lost, not anymore. She felt wild and free, and this strange, fierce sweetness kept building. She needed…something. So terribly. Jake kept whispering to her, coaxing her. And then night exploded into day like a flash fire. An ecstasy ripped through her that she could feel to her fingertips, an intense, rich pleasure that she had never expected in a thousand years.

After that, he wouldn’t let her go. She was exhausted, but he insisted on taking her through that ecstasy again and again…

Anne closed the window. She undressed, brushed her hair, settled under the covers, and knew she wouldn’t sleep.