Authors: Jennifer Greene
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.
The next morning, at the bank, Anne pushed the button for the elevator and glanced at her watch. Three minutes after ten. No one was going to shoot her for being late for the first time in six years, but all the same she was a bundle of nerves. Not only had she forgotten to set her alarm clock, but this was the second night in a row that she hadn’t slept very well. Undoubtedly by coincidence, Jake had been in town two days.
Smoothing the jacket of her gray wool suit, she stepped out of the elevator. Marlene was waiting with the usual pile of notes to hand to her…and she was wearing an odd half-smile that made Anne pause. “Having a good day?” she asked curiously.
“Very good.” Marlene chuckled. “I have a feeling your day is going to be just as good, Miss Blake.”
Another coworker gave Anne a strange look. Rather distractedly, Anne smiled a greeting at her, shifting her leather briefcase under her arm as she strode toward her office. She opened the door, and her jaw dropped.
Violets were
everywhere,
spilling all over her desk, on the small table between the two visitors’ chairs, on the low credenza against the wall, even on the carpet. The stems of the small purple blossoms had been wrapped in gray silver foil, and their fragile scent filled the air. She heard the faint giggling of her female colleagues just behind her, yet the sound seemed to come from a mile away.
She dropped her briefcase onto a chair, one of the few surfaces not covered with flowers. A white envelope was propped up in the center of the purple profusion on her desk. With trembling fingers she picked it up:
To Idaho, princess.
There was a sudden hush behind her. In a daze, Anne half turned to see Mr. Laird’s unusually florid face in the doorway, his eyes riveted to the incredible transformation of her office. “Anne, the entire place has been in an uproar for the past hour.” His lips pursed and then softened. “They started arriving a half-hour ago. The tellers downstairs aren’t even trying to add two and two. You’ve always been a puzzle to them, Anne, never giving a hint you had a private life, and now this…” Mr. Laird threw up a hand. “And for heaven’s sake, you’re five minutes late for a meeting in the conference room. Had you forgotten? And as for these being delivered to the office, frankly, it’s not at all appropriate.”
“It certainly isn’t,” Anne agreed readily. Mr. Laird was so right. Jake did terribly inappropriate things. Aroused women on wooded country roads, left them standing frustrated in doorways, invoked memories so that they couldn’t sleep…and sent violets.
“Are you coming?” Mr. Laird inquired crisply.
“Yes.” Of course she was coming. As soon as she blinked back the sweet, unexpected blur of moisture in her eyes.
***
Anne heard the persistent thumping on her front door just as she was arranging the last container of violets on her bookcase. Her nerves leaped in response, knowing it was Jake even before he crashed through the door in jeans and sweatshirt. “Hi,” he said blandly. He took a small but lethal bite from her neck, touched her nose and sauntered in tennis shoes past her to stare into the living room. “I’m disgusted. Really disgusted. I hoped there would be more. I don’t know what on earth’s wrong with the florists in this town that they don’t stock more violets.” He pivoted back to look at her, hands loosely on lanky hips. “Aren’t you proud of me?”
The thank-you speech she’d rehearsed all afternoon went the way of a whirlwind. “Proud?” she asked blankly.
“A gentleman always sends candy and flowers to a lady. They’re very appropriate gifts.” He prodded her with a get-with-it gesture. “I nearly forgot.” He dug into his
pocket, and produced two chocolate bars, a little crushed. “The candy part. Want some?”
“No, thank you.” She touched her fingers to her temples. “God, you’re exhausting, Jake. Would you kindly go back outside the door, say hello, let me give you an appropriate thank-you for the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen? Then we can go on from there like normal people.”
He considered, and then shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Sheer mischief lit his eyes as he surveyed her gray designer suit, white blouse, black pumps and the jet combs holding her hair in an impeccable twist. “Did you have a DAR meeting today?”
“Did you clean out a basement?”
“If you’d been doing what I have, you would undoubtedly have dressed in jeans, too,” he protested, and cocked his head. “Well, actually,
you
probably wouldn’t have dressed in jeans, sweetheart, but most people—”
“Are you going to stand there and insult me long enough for me to make coffee, or is this just a quick social visit?” Anne questioned politely.
“I wasn’t insulting you. I’ll bet lots of people clean their ovens dressed to go to a church bazaar.”
“You’d go to the President’s inauguration in a frayed shirt.” Trying not to laugh, she moved swiftly into the kitchen and started to pick up the coffeepot, but he followed and stopped her by capturing her wrist in his hand.
“I want you to go outside with me for a minute or two. I’m not ashamed to be seen publicly with you, even dressed as you are,” he added virtuously.
“Thank you so much.”
“Are you going to be angry if I tell you I called Laird to make sure we could leave by Friday?”
“Yes.”
“And I called your grandmother,” Jake added as he closed the door behind them and nudged Anne toward the parking lot in back of the building. “I called Jennie partly because I’ve always loved her, and partly because I decided that it was the chivalrous thing to do.” At Anne’s horrified expression, Jake grinned. “Chivalrous. You know, like candy and flowers and no sex. Now, Anne, don’t look like that. I didn’t say one word to Jennie about marriage, because we’re not talking about marriage anymore. I just told her that we’re going to Idaho, that my intentions were more or less honorable, that I would take good care of you, and that Gramps would be delighted to hear the sound of her voice should she need anything at all over the next couple of weeks.
“Jake!”
Her grandmother had always taken to Jake…reservedly where Anne was concerned, however. Anne had the sinking feeling of being pulled down into quicksand. She was all too aware that Jake must have given her grandmother the same kind of expectations he’d given Gil. Great-grandchildren-type expectations. It wasn’t funny. Neither was the motor home standing at one end of the parking lot. All white, waxed and polished.
“Uh-oh.” At Anne’s level stare, Jake managed to fake a look of dismay. “You were planning on a quick jet trip with return passage all paid for, weren’t you? That certainly would have facilitated an easier, more rapid escape whenever you wanted to call off the adventure and run home.” He shrugged. “Anne, I’m
trying
to play by your rules.” He started ticking off his actions on his fingers. “I left you at the door last night, all chaste and safe. I sent you flowers and
brought candy to you. I got your grandmother’s permission to court you, just as if we were living in the eighteenth century. Now, I can’t think of
everything.
”
It was one of those times when Anne had a rough time working up any sympathy for him. She reached for the door of the motor home, then stepped up inside the door, turning back for only a moment.. “
Try
to behave yourself for a full five minutes now, will you, Jake? Give it everything you’ve got.”
The cerulean carpet was as thick and springy as a sponge beneath her feet. Rapidly, Anne’s eyes trailed the length of the motor home, from the plush captain’s chair and overhead berth in front, to a blue velour couch and matching chair, to a tiny but remarkably complete kitchen, fitted with everything from a microwave oven to a pull-out pantry. Thoughtfully, she stepped farther in, absently opening the refrigerator to find eleven cans of beer and three apples. Cupboards revealed three varieties of canned spaghetti, canned stew and vitamins. She threw Jake a telling glance.
“We can’t all thrive on yogurt,” he said mildly. “Just look at the rest.”
She did. He must be keeping the tux he’d worn to Link Cord’s party at his grandfather’s, because it wasn’t here. The closet was empty; the drawers of the bureau were stuffed with jeans and sweaters. A double bed in back had a double sleeping bag on it. A door opened to a corner bathroom, tiny and spotless. Another door opened to what must have been intended as a shower cubicle, but instead, it housed charts and maps with pins stuck into them, a pull-out desk and an assortment of strange tools. Picks? Chisels? She didn’t ask for the details.
Her mind had shifted to racing gear the moment she’d stepped into the motor home. Jake, by contrast, had suddenly turned quiet, watching her. When she finished exploring, she wandered back to the front, having to maneuver around Jake’s tall figure…and assisted totally unnecessarily by his hands around her hips. It was a small, natural intimacy, not contrived, just…Jake. Yet it disturbed her. As if she weren’t already disturbed enough.
He popped the lid on a can of beer, which he raised in her direction. She shook her head. “Bertha’s not a toy, Anne.” A motor home named Bertha? Anne thought. “Coeur d’Alene’s loaded with all the comforts of home, but I have to have a more accessible place to stay when I’m working out of the mining district.” Eyes locked on her face, he sat back on the couch with one leg loosely crossed over the other. “Idaho isn’t exactly loaded with Holiday Inns. Not in the Silver Valley.”
Facing away from him, Anne explored the rest of the cupboards. She found a lone tea bag, tentatively tested the faucets for water, and had a disposable cup in the microwave oven seconds later.
“There are enough beds for everyone to sleep lonely,” he said dryly. “The berth is just as comfortable as the double bed. I meant what I said, Anne. The sleeping arrangements are up to you.”
Anne said nothing. After a minute, the signal on the microwave pinged, and she was suddenly very busy, searching for a spoon, stirring her tea, finding a place to toss the tea bag…
“I can’t read your mind, dammit.
Sit down.
”
He’d given up the lazy drinking of his beer and was hunched forward on the couch, clearly unsettled all of a sudden. Anne calmly took her tea to the blue velour chair, sat down, crossed her legs and faced Jake calmly, certain that he couldn’t see the panic inside her head. And she
was
panicking.
“Do you really have that many objections to our traveling this way? It’s only for a few days, Anne, three at the most, two with the best of weather. At the end of the two weeks, I’ll send you home on a luxury jet, if you still want to come back to Michigan.”
“The motor home’s fine, Jake,” she said quietly.
It wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. The motor home—Bertha—was just a detail, bringing an awareness that they were going to be on top of each other. There would be no privacy, no easy escape—things she’d counted on when she’d agreed to go with him.
She sipped her tea. Truthfully, his whole campaign lacked subtlety. Skip the motor home. He’d encouraged both Jennie and Gil to anticipate cooing over great-grandchildren. He’d started a no-touch policy so they could get to know each other in a nonsexual way. In principle, she approved of the no-touch policy. In reality, her body very definitely expected attention when Jake was around; her body wasn’t getting it. Her hormones were already furious, a totally unnerving situation.
And, of course, there was Jake’s money. The money she never knew he had. Well, Jake could take his assets and chew them up in little pieces. That was his business, and Mr. Laird would just have to get an ulcer at the sight of the Rivard multiple assets going down the drain as far as the Yale Bank and Trust went. Except that one look at that cashier’s check and her eyes had lit up at the thought of all the potential long-term gains for Jake, a nest egg she might be able to force on him before he had the chance to blow it on silver mines and heaven knew what else.
And last, the violets.
Anne dismissed the violets. They were very definitely part of the campaign, but no woman with breath in her body could have resisted the violets. It was the rest. She added up his actions on the master calculator inside her head. “I’ll take the upper berth,” she remarked idly.
“Fine.” Jake looked relieved that she was talking.
“You’ve been walking all over me, Jake,” she announced.
A flash of surprise lit his eyes, very quickly masked by those short black lashes of his. “We’ve been testing the waters,” he agreed, and changed the subject. “I didn’t buy you the violets so you could put them on your bookcase.”
She took another sip of tea, trying to force the alien feeling of panic out of her bloodstream. “No?”
“You want to know what I really had in mind?”
Anne was not without intuition. “No.”
“I had this dream last night. Of you naked in a tub of hot water. Surrounded by violet petals…”
She jumped up from the chair, tugging her prim gray suit into place. “Actually, the motor home is an excellent idea, Jake. Because at the end of two weeks, you’ll be happy to hire a private plane to take me home.
That’s
what this trip is about! Different lifestyles. Your adventurer to my stick-in-the-mud. Which is very funny…only not exactly. You’ll see, when I replace your beer with yogurt, when my neatnik habits get to you, when day after day you have to live with the differences between us… Over the long term, we
just won’t work.
And love by itself isn’t worth a ripe plum. I learned that early. Married people have to speak the same language, share the same values, want to live the same way…” She shook her head. “To prove that to you, and maybe even to prove it to myself one last time, I’m willing to go to Idaho with you. But I really don’t think it’s going to take even two weeks for us to drive each other mad.”
For some unknown reason, tears were trying to well up in her eyes. Hurriedly, she turned away, and in two steps had reached the door. The handle refused to give for a minute, but she
managed to open the door on the second try. She took a step down and strode off, only vaguely aware that her next-door neighbor was pulling grocery bags from the trunk of her car, which she’d parked behind the motor home.