Authors: Jennifer Greene
“That wasn’t fair, was it?” he said quietly. “Turning on the lights.”
“No.”
His voice was low, gentle. “There were times I remembered the look of you in my dreams. They never measured up to how beautiful you really are, Anne.” He added, “Do you want me to turn off the light?”
“What I really want…” There was something in her throat, some strange, hoarse catch that made the words come out like a whispered plea. “I can’t seem to…move.”
His hands reached out and claimed hers, drawing her through the water toward him, cradling her instantly in his warm, slippery limbs. Anne wrapped her arms around his waist as if he were a lifeline, the blood surging through her veins, her cheek nestled against his shoulder. The water lapped and soothed, lapped and soothed, its heat forcing warmth back into her chilled limbs. Jake stroked back her hair, pressing small, firm kisses on her forehead.
In the water, her own flesh looked strange to her, all white next to his, all translucent, a voluptuous image of curves and tucks that was so unlike the images she had of herself. Her lips searched for his, suddenly desperately hungry for the feeling of closeness his touch could give her, had always given her. She found what she was looking for; her mouth clung to his, drinking him in, invading his mouth with a liquid-soft tongue. Limbs tangled around limbs, drawn to each other in the dark solitude. It had been too long, her body told her, too long since he’d touched her and held her.
Jake was her haven. Her mind explained patiently that that made no sense. Her heart knew different truths. His palm glided over her breast and rib, down to her hip and thigh, and her breath caught. Slowly, he loosened her arms, his lips dipping down to the warm, damp, exposed hollow of her shoulder. “Whatever you think, I didn’t intend this,” he murmured. “But then, you were so foolish, sweet. You stood there worrying about every item of clothing that had to come off, almost as if you were afraid, as if you were a virgin again…”
“You know better,” she whispered into his throat.
“I know better,” he agreed huskily. “I know you when a dark storm is haunting your eyes and your lips are trembling and your legs are wrapped around mine…”
His mouth claimed hers, fierce, sweet, aching, hard. Almost roughly, his fingers combed through her hair. Hairpins went flying, and a cascade of ash-blond hair came tumbling down, crushed in his hands. Rapids rushed through her bloodstream, a violent, terrible shiver of vulnerability. She was suddenly floating free in the water, propelled by Jake’s rough stroke away from the side. There was only Jake to hold on to in a liquid world without gravity. A low, guttural cry escaped from her throat when he raised her up from the water and touched his tongue to her breast. His tongue was moving like the lash of a whip…only tenderly. Tender, sweet lashes.
“Tell me,” he whispered.
She shook her head helplessly. Tell him…what? About the hot water and the cold, cold air and the sky trying to light the entire world with stars…? Tell him about the fire in her soul? Air and water and fire, an elemental cry that echoed through her bloodstream until the fierce, wild yearning was out of control…? But it changed nothing. He had a power over her no other man had…but he already knew that.
“Tell me you don’t remember,” he went on, still whispering. “Tell me you don’t feel the same anymore, that this makes no difference. Tell me what you
don’t
want, Anne…” His hands roamed over her water-silkened flesh, his lips pressed into her throat. Her fingers curled in the wet fur on his chest, and she could feel his heart pounding. She could feel her own heart pounding.
So silent, the whole rest of the world. Just the rasp of his breathing and then the pressure of his mouth on hers, the smooth, warm feel of the water and the blend of limb to limb, inseparable. A sensation that she was going to fall and never stop falling… “Lord
,
I want you, Jake,” she whispered. “Don’t let go…”
She was so safe. Safe and wonderfully free and alive, when he held her. Yearning ached through her in a warm, long quiver; dynamite growing desperate to explode…
The rattle of wooden gate seemed to come from a thousand miles away. Jake’s fingers suddenly dug into her flesh, startling her. Even before the gate creaked open, he’d whirled her behind him and pinned her against the rough side of the tub.
“Mr. Rivard?” A pair of fox eyes peered at them in the glow of the lights beneath the water. “I was mighty worried when I noticed the yard lights were out in this part of the campground. We were having trouble with the water temperature yesterday, and I—”
“Hit the light switch,” Jake said brusquely.
“Beg your pardon? I—”
“Now.”
He hit the switch. The pool lights went out instantly; the water turned black. Anne buried her face in Jake’s shoulder blades and closed her eyes.
“I had the thermostat repaired yesterday, but nobody’s reserved the tub since then, until you did, and I thought I should check. I mean I never meant to disturb you…”
The man was embarrassed and didn’t know how to make his escape. Jake handled him, in another world. The real world. Shame rippled painfully through Anne. She’d always known the relationship had no foundation to sustain it other than sex, yet so easily, so readily she’d just…
Everything was suddenly violently wrong. Her head ached. Clouds had formed a cloak over the stars, and cold air dipped down inside the wooden gates and whipped at her damp hair. Her heart was still trying to beat down its disappointment at not having her sexual needs satisfied…
sexual
being the operative word, a voice in her head scolded. She was insane to have made this trip…
She heard the latch of the gate and knew the man had left. Jake loosened his fiercely protective hold, and Anne was free to breathe again. And she did breathe, her eyes averted.
“Anne…”
A finger cocked up her chin. She batted it away, and surged past him and out of the water, her skin tightening as the cold night air raced over her dripping limbs. She reached for a towel, then rapidly changed her mind and grabbed up her robe, which she swiftly belted around her still-soaking body.
“Take it easy, Anne,” Jake said slowly, quietly coming up behind her.
“I’m not particularly proud of myself, Jake,” Anne shot back, “so just lay off.” Her hands were shaking as she grabbed the rest of her things and tried to tug open the gate. It wouldn’t give.
“He relocked it and I have the key. Just a moment.” Deftly, Jake got into his jeans and pulled a sweatshirt over his head. Anne saw the moody look in his eyes and averted her gaze. His jaw was tight, but he wasn’t angry. There was just a certain stillness about him that made her want to bite the inside of her lip; she wanted out of here. Out and completely away from him.
He stuck the key in the lock, but claimed her arm before she could open the gate. “It doesn’t make sense,” he insisted, “to fight something we both want.”
“We’ve
been
there,” Anne hissed. “Jake, you know that. I don’t know why I agreed to come. All that’s going to happen is that we’ll end up sleeping together again and building these…ties…and then I’ll go back to being Anne and you’ll go back to being Jake, and I can’t
handle
that again. You’ll go off to heaven knows where—”
Jake brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek, so tenderly that she could have hit him.
“With you.”
“No! I don’t
want
that kind of life. I can’t
handle it.
I don’t
need it…
” She pivoted, turned the small brass key in the door and hurried down the wooden ladder into the frigid night.
Jake didn’t catch up with her until she was in the motor home, reaching in a drawer for her hair dryer. Her hair was drenched and took a long time to dry.
Jake took the dryer from her hand and dried her hair for her. Over the steady whine of the hair dryer, she gradually calmed down, not really from discipline but rather from exhaustion. If Jake had said one word…but he said nothing at all. Once her hair was dry, he pulled a nightgown over her head, helped her into the upper berth and tucked her into her own pink comforter. “You’re not going home,” he whispered. “I know exactly what you have in mind at the end of the two weeks, Anne—leaving. All right—if that’s how you feel then. But you’re not going home before the two weeks are up. Hear me?”
She heard him.
Lazily, Anne’s lashes fluttered open. A thin band of sunlight stole through the curtains surrounding her upper berth. The droning of the engine told her that the motor home was on the road. Groggily, she rolled over, tugging her comforter with her, and with a sleepy yawn parted the curtains enough to see out.
The rich, black farmland and the cornfields had disappeared, as had the gentle, long rolls of western Iowa. Pale wheat now stretched along both sides of the serpentine road, except where a gnarled gray butte jutted up from nowhere. The arid landscape was strangely colorless, stark and bleak. Fences suggested cattle land, yet she saw no sign of life. Or houses. Or even trees… Then suddenly a clump of cottonwoods whizzed by as Jake took a curve. The trees were beaten and bent by the kind of wind Anne could only imagine might blow through here and never stop.
She climbed down from the bunk and went to stand behind Jake. “Good Lord, where are we? How on
earth
long have you been driving?”
“Since two this morning. I had in mind your seeing the Badlands by dawn, but couldn’t quite make that. On the other hand, you slept in to just about the right time.” His eyes flickered up to meet her gaze in the rearview mirror, and he immediately flashed her a crooked smile. “When you get around to it, I’d sell my soul for a cup of coffee.”
“Would you, now?” She yawned and shook herself sleepily, still half immersed in the crazy dream she’d awakened from. She’d been standing stark-naked in a room, explaining to the silver-eyed rogue in front of her the futility of investing in high-risk, low-yield stocks, and he’d been listening, dressed in a gray flannel suit, interrupting her only to mention that he wanted to live in a two-story brick house in the country. She yawned again. The dream vaguely irritated her. She expected even her unconscious to have better sense, and Freud could take a hike.
Her bare toes sank into the lush blue carpet as Anne rapidly disappeared into the bathroom, splashed her face with cool water and stared sleepy-eyed at the mouth that had all but begged Jake to take her the night before. She splashed more cold water on her face.
Distress didn’t seem to wash off that easily. The lingering image of the child who had appeared toward the end of the dream was even more disturbing. A little boy with Jake’s special eyes… Anne compressed her lips. Old pains were very good erasers; so was an intense determination to make sure no child of hers would ever experience the insecurities and instabilities that had marked her own childhood. Hurriedly, she ran a brush through her hair. Last night had been a narrow escape, but she
had
escaped, and she doubted even Jake’s ability to conjure up a hot tub in any other campground. In the meantime, she’d seen his whiskered chin and weary eyes.
A few moments later, she removed a steaming cup of coffee from the microwave oven, set it in the console next to Jake, then moved rapidly back to get her own cup. “I’ll drive for a while,” she called to him. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”
“Stop worrying about your clothes and come here.”
She brought her cup, vaguely miffed at the order, very definitely startled that the man’s attitude this morning so blatantly lacked the lover’s seductive skill of the night before, and peered out the window where he motioned. Rather abruptly, she sank down in the passenger seat. The wheat fields, just that quickly, had changed again.
The road ran precariously along a ledge high above a bottomless gorge that yawned threateningly below them. Pink cliffs lined the lonely horizon with strange, contrasting striated lines of crimson and yellow. Pinnacles and buttes jutted up from the gorge below, some shaped like needle-slim knives aimed skyward. In places, the limestone was formed into mystical
castles, complete with turrets and waterless moats. In other places, the wind had worn perfect circular holes, caves or giant mushroom-shaped ledges into the rock. The twisting gorge seemed to gnarl and turn for endless miles; the knifelike peaks stretched high, and the sun streaming onto those desolate rock formations brought out a rainbow spectrum of colors. Pink and blue and green, colors that didn’t belong in rock.
“This is one of my favorite places on earth,” Jake murmured. He reached for his coffee, glancing only once at her. Through shuttered eyes, he took in the high-necked flannel nightgown, the fair hair loosely coiled over one shoulder, the complexion all rose and cream. Before her nerves could register that intimate perusal, he was turning away. “The Sioux called this land Mako Sica—Bad Land—but they found a harmony with it. The white settlers in such a hurry to get across to find their gold and silver must have called it hell—those that survived.”
Anne held her cup in both hands to keep the coffee from spilling as Jake negotiated the twisting uphill road. She immediately decided that this landscape was one of her least favorite places on earth. The land was terrifying, with its gutted hollows and lonely spires. She couldn’t imagine how any living thing could survive here. No trees, no water, rock faces too steep to climb; just endless mazes of stone in shadow.
Yet, mesmerized, she couldn’t seem to turn away from the window. The colors were incredible, strata of almost bright pink and yellow. The rock formed men and elephants and buildings, and almost any other shape the mind could imagine.
“All kinds of dinosaurs used to romp around here,” Jake remarked. “Fox-sized horses and saber-toothed cats, too. Three thousand years ago, nomads hunted this land, finding caves where they could build their fires for the night… Would you like to get out?”
Intrigued, she nodded, and set down her cup. When he pulled the motor home to the side of the road, she reached for the door handle.
“Anne?”
She glanced back.
“There’s very little chance we’ll run into anyone, and it certainly doesn’t matter to me. But you might want to put on shoes, honey.”
She let go of the door handle as if it were a hot potato. “I was hardly going outside in my nightgown.”
“Of course you weren’t.”
Six and a half minutes later, she emerged flushed and breathless from the back door, wearing a red turtleneck sweater tucked into navy wool culottes, nylons and a pair of sturdy walking shoes. She had twisted her hair hastily into the untidiest coil she’d ever accomplished in her life, and her makeup consisted only of blusher and lipstick. She was exceedingly pleased with what she’d achieved in six minutes; Jake’s responsive chuckle was unnerving. “Break down and tell me the truth, now, Anne. Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
“Where I grew up, you didn’t travel in jeans,” she said flatly, thoroughly irritated that her appearance didn’t pass muster. It was useless to remember that she’d deliberately packed with the thought of playing stiff, formal lady to Jake’s devil-may-care vagabond, because at the moment she felt distinctly like a violinist at a rock concert. Truthfully, jeans wouldn’t have helped her anyway. She could never fit in here as Jake so easily did, with his hands on denim-clad hips against a backdrop of those jagged peaks, up and down, up and down, like sharp Ms across the sky. With his silvery hair and stubborn square chin and rugged profile, Jake could easily have been one of the original pioneers…the kind who made it.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward a steep rock formation.
“Look,” she started unhappily.
“Now don’t get all touchy. I love your taste in
clothes. I only make fun because you just beg to be teased. Are you wearing the camisole I gave you?”
“I returned it,” she snapped through gritted teeth. “I told you that.”
“Fib. I saw it buried in your bottom drawer when I was helping you pack—or trying to. You brought it along, didn’t you?”
One of Jake’s many character flaws was that he thought he knew so much. Anne declined to answer. He started to climb, and she followed silently. The land was veined like old leather, oddly giving beneath her feet, the dusty yellow soil like hard-packed sand but without substance beneath. She reached out and clutched his hand, only because instinct kept telling her that somehow the land wouldn’t hold her. Jake moved like an animal, sure-footed and silent, leading them into a crevice between two steep rock walls. For Anne, it was a far different kind of exercise than standing in line to buy tickets to a symphony concert.
“Look,” Jake said suddenly.
She looked, and backed promptly into the wall of his chest. She was staring at a set of teeth embedded in the rock.
Real
teeth!
“Fossils are all over this route,” Jake commented, clearly fascinated by the dental display. He tugged at her hand. “There are a thousand things I’d like to tell you about this place, but we haven’t got much time. Idaho’s still five hundred miles from here, and I’m determined to get there in the next twenty-four hours. But you have to see this—”
What he evidently wanted her to see was a ledge where one step in the wrong direction could result in an instant plunge of several hundred feet. Wonderful view, Anne thought fleetingly. They seemed to be in hell. Jake’s arms draped around her waist and pulled her back against him, providing the only familiar, solid thing to hold on to anywhere in sight. Her eyes skimmed over the scene. Barren cliffs dropped below to a gaunt, lonely terrain of scalloped ridges and mystical shapes. Fire could have raced through this land and never made a difference. Fire, ice, storm…
Jake loved this land? She hated it. It was just one more example of the differences between them… She suddenly caught sight of a single flower, a purple burst of softness growing from a crack in the rock. Then she had a glimpse of the strange prism of rainbow colors on the cliffs, breathtakingly brilliant hues accented by sun and shade.
Jake’s chin nuzzled the crown of her head. “I’ve heard many stories about this place. A group of people were trying to cross here around a century ago, and they didn’t have enough water. They buried two of their party in the sand up to their necks, to preserve what body moisture they had.” His arms tightened around her waist. “They survived, Anne, but that’s what it took to survive.”
She shuddered expressively, leaning back closer against him.
“Then there was an outlaw named Joaquin,” Jake drawled. “He hated miners. His bride was Antonia, a sweet, innocent, lovely woman. While he was out one day, a group of miners assaulted his wife. Joaquin was very young, Anne, not more than twenty, and he turned killer after that, killer and thief, with a reputation that surpassed that of any other outlaw in the West.” Jake hesitated. “I think of that story every time I come back out here.”
An icy chill touched her spine. “Not a very cheerful tale, is it? Thank heavens that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”
“And we’re all civilized now?” Jake shook his head as he slowly turned her around to face him. “You think so, Anne? He was a man alone in a hostile world, who saw only one way to
get back at life. I can understand that,” he said quietly, holding her closer. “Haven’t you ever felt helpless? Powerless to control things that were happening to you? As a little kid, didn’t you ever feel rage that people were hurting you and you couldn’t stop them?”
“No. Of course not.” She slipped quickly from his arms and started the climb down to the motor home. Suddenly, she couldn’t get inside the vehicle fast enough. The land was damned. Desolate and hostile, the kind of place that bred outlaws. She wanted her peppermint tea and a twentieth-century chair and a reassuring book about stocks and bonds. She stepped up and into the motor home, out of breath. Only Jake would be demented enough to see a similarity between the feelings of some long-dead outlaw and those of an innocent child.
Some minutes later, Jake silently vaulted into the driver’s seat, and they headed back onto the road. After a time, Anne moved up to the passenger seat with a fresh cup of tea warming her hands. She kept as silent as he was. From nowhere, she had a sudden mental image of a five-year-old girl, green-eyed and blond and innocent…desperately shaking her most precious doll.
It was the day her dad died, a memory buried so deep she hadn’t known it was still there. As a little girl she’d had no idea how to deal with so much anger.
How dare he die, how dare he die, how dare he never hold me again…
More images flooded her mind. Marriages, and more marriages, and more marriages. How very adept she’d become at being flower girl at her mother’s impulsive weddings. But the image Anne remembered most vividly was of herself hurling pillows and books and pencils. She didn’t
want
to go to another school! She’d just made friends at the old one. No one had asked a seven-year-old-child if she wanted to be so joltingly uprooted, if she minded changing schools four more times in the next four years. Boarding school had been Ralph’s idea; he was her third stepfather. Her childhood had been a horror of loneliness, a long, disjointed train of
in media res
starts and abrupt finishes and never knowing where anyone was going.
Rage had no place in Anne’s adult life; she’d put all that behind her. Everything had changed, anyway, once her grandmother had taken her in. Jennie Blake was stern but loving, a wonderfully strong woman whose home had been a haven. Anne had clung to the stability of household rules and discipline as to a lifeline. There was no more helpless anger. But Jake had touched some very old scars just now, reopened some very deep wounds…
Jake’s eyes suddenly flashed to hers, a flicker of dark gray compassion, of the kind of understanding that was just part of Jake. “Maybe I
can
understand your outlaw,” she offered quietly.
“I thought you would.” He turned back to the road. “You weren’t the only one buffeted around as a child, honey.”
She averted her eyes, painfully aware of what different roads they’d taken to overcome those uncertain beginnings. “You look tired,” she said briskly. “Don’t you think it’s time I took a turn at the wheel?”
She drove all afternoon. Jake slept in the back of the motor home. And all afternoon, she was haunted by images of his young outlaw. The one who was so very much in love with his innocent, sweet wife. And she thought of Jake, who’d never cared if he had two nickels to rub together…but heaven help anyone who tried to harm anything he
did
care about.