This Love Will Go On

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.  Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored on a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission by the author.

Originally published in 1984 under the title,

To Touch the Fire.

Revised and edited by the author and copyright holder.

Text copyright C 2015 Shirley Larson

Published by Shirley Larson

Jade was hot and sweaty from wrestling calves to the ground for branding.  He rode into the yard and dismounted from his palomino.  While Raine stood in the barn door and watched, he strode to the horse trough, snatched off his shirt and ducked under the pump to splash water on his head.  When he straightened, there he was, dripping wet, naked to the waist, all tanned skin and hard muscles and a flat abdomen, and so attractive that her fingers curled inside themselves, they wanted to touch him so badly.  The buckle at his jeans shone gold and the bulge below proclaimed him to be a well-endowed man. 

He saw her then and when she blushed, he laughed.  He was a healthy male in the prime of his life.  Wherever he walked with his booted feet, he owned the land.  She was sixteen and she’d been on the verge of falling in love with him, but she’d never seen him half naked.  Now she fell over the precipice into an aching abyss from which there would be no escape.  For Jade was her sister’s husband.

Raine Taylor braced herself against the force of the May wind blowing free and strong across the South Dakota prairie and pushed open the door of the school building.  Her waist-length hair, its caramel sheen glowing in the sun whipped around her face.  Both hair and face were reflected in the glass portion of the door but it wasn’t her reflection that caught her attention.  It was her hands, splayed out at eye level against the dark door frame.  Raine frowned.  Her nails were clipped short and she’d spent a good five minutes scrubbing them but the dark shadow of printer’s ink still made a tiny black half-moon under her nails.  That’s how printer’s ink gets in your blood.  Direct transference from the
Verylon Appeal.

     As if they were painted on the glass in front of her, her sister’s hands flashed into her mind.  This morning, Michele’s well-groomed fingers had gripped Raine’s arm in pleading and the nails, long and sleek with plum polish had gleamed like out of place jewels on Raine’s ink-spattered smock.

Michele. 
During the day, working at the print shop and fighting with the ancient Linotype machine, Raine had kept her worries at bay.  But now, as she climbed the steps, those worries built into a tidal wave of tension that centered in the pit of her stomach.  What was she going to say to Jade?

Raine reached the top of the stairs and turned right.  With any luck at all, the kindergarten class would be five minutes into their show and she wouldn’t have to say anything.

She stood in the doorway and scanned the room anxiously.  Sure enough, the play had begun.  Tate, his curly hair ruffled above smooth cheeks pink with excitement stood holding a giant black letter L printed on an eight-by-fourteen cardboard.  When Raine walked in the door, he beamed with pride.  His eyes searched the space behind her, the hope in them tearing her heart out.  But when he saw his mother wasn’t with her, his face fell.  At that moment, more than anything else in the world, Raine wanted to wring her sister’s neck. 

Samantha Black, the red-haired cherub holding the E had just started to speak.  Tate had assured Raine a hundred times that he knew exactly when to say his poem because they were doing them in “alpha’bat’ical” order.

Well aware that she was earning curious glances from everyone, both because her sister wasn’t with her and because she hadn’t yet seated herself, Raine dragged her eyes away from Tate.  At the back of the room, an empty chair waited…next to Jade.

It was all there, the lazy grace, the tall lean maleness, the hard profile.  He was the only man in the room, but it didn’t bother him.  He sat stretched out on the chair looking supremely at ease and supremely male.  In a room filled with wall-to-wall wriggling children, doting mothers and the pungent aroma of glue, he still had the power to shake Raine to the low heels of her shoes.  The old, familiar warmth tumbled through her bloodstream only to be followed by the old, familiar self-hatred. 
Fool.  Idiot.

“Hello, Mrs. Mitchell,” she whispered to the dark-haired cherub’s grandmother who also wrote the local news items for Julia’s paper.  “Yes, I know I’m late.  I’m terribly sorry.  You know how busy we are on Friday.  May I…please?  Excuse me.”  She squeezed past Mrs. Mitchell’s well-padded knees.

Jade’s eyes matched his name and they shot a look of pure unholy rage at her.  Even before she’d crossed in front of Betty Brightwood, her knees began to shake and Raine was glad to sit down.

Her relief was short-lived.  Jade reached over and grabbed her wrist.  Startled, her eyes locked with his.  He muttered darkly, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered back.  That was the truth…as far as it went.  Patty Harson, a slender intense woman with fire-engine red hair seated in the row ahead of them, turned around and put her fingers to her lips.

“K is for kettle so shiny and bright…”  Kevin Harson grinned a wide grin, crossed his feet at the ankles and sat down on the floor with a plop undoubtedly intended to shake the entire state of South Dakota.

Raine waited in stomach-wrenching suspense for her nephew to say the one line she’d been practicing with him for weeks.  Tate’s voice was soft, but he spoke clearly and well.

“L is for Lantern that shines in the night.” 

Tate sat down, and Raine started to breathe again.  Even at five, he had the lithe compactness, the easy sense of the boundaries of his body that Jade had.  The Kincaid men were born with it, she decided. Tate already rode well.  It was something her sister and Jade had argued about bitterly.

With a stinging awareness of every move he made, Raine felt Jade’s head turn, felt him gaze at her.  Determined not to betray how much he disturbed her, she kept her eyes focused on the front of the room, but she was so overpoweringly conscious of Jade watching her that she didn’t have the vaguest idea what was happening.  She was barely conscious of the children working their way through the rest of the alphabet and then jumping into a large iron kettle made of paper and crying in unison, “We’ve said all our letters in one fell swoop and now we’ve become alphabet soup.” But uppermost in her mind was the scent of Jade’s clean skin and the way he was looking at her.  What was he seeing?  Was he blaming her for his wife’s absence?  Oh, why couldn’t Michele have come back in time?

Then it was over.  Mrs. Dugan, a young, enthusiastic woman who wasn’t much taller than her neophyte students, announced that punch and cookies would be served as soon as she and the children got the refreshments organized.

Tate strolled up to his father.  “Are you staying, Daddy?”

Jade spread his jeaned legs and caught his son between his knees.  His head tipped and his whole attention focused on Tate, Jade was infinitely more appealing than any man had a right to be.  “I don’t know.  Are you sure the food is okay?”

Tate gave him the most scornful look he could manage.  “You know it is, Daddy.  I helped make it.’

“That’s right,” Jade said, heaving a theatrical sigh of relief.  “You did.  I just forgot there for a minute.”

“Did I do okay, Aunt Raine?”

“You did fine, honey.”  She reached out and ruffled his hair.  It smelled fresh and clean; she’d helped him shampoo it that morning.  Afterwards she’d combed it for almost fifteen minutes until he was satisfied with the way it looked.

Now, looking up at her quizzically, he asked the question she’d been dreading.  “Where’s Momma?”

“She…something came up and she had to go into Canton.  She’ll be back in time to fix your supper.”

“I wanted her to see me in our alpha’bat’soup.”

“I know.  I…I’m sorry.  She was sorry to miss it.”

“Don’t lie to him,” Jade said in a low, lethal tone.

Appalled, she shook her head.  “I’m not lying.  She
was
sorry.”

“She went to the tryouts then,” Jade said in that same brutally cold voice.

Raine could only nod.  That was the end of the conversation.

Raine dared to look at him, pleading with her eyes for understanding.  Jade only stared back at her with that impassive face.  Then Tate grabbed his hand and tugged him over toward the long table where the punch bowl sat.  Raine thought she could use some, too.  Her throat was very dry.

When the refreshments had been consumed and the event was over, Raine walked out of the room, Jade and Tate behind her. Jade said nothing as they trooped down the stairs but when they were outside, he said to Tate, “Go see if Lady is all right.”

Lady, Jade’s chestnut mare, stood tethered to the bicycle rack.  Unquestioningly, Tate trotted to the end of the sidewalk and tipped his head to look up at the horse.  At his approach, the mare bobbed her head and whickered.

“You rode in,” Raine said nervously, desperately grasping at conversation to stave off the attack.  It didn’t work.

“She came to the print shop before she left and told you she was going, didn’t she?”

Raine thought of a thousand things she might say but none of them came out.  “Yes.”  In the warm Dakota sun, she felt the heat of the afternoon beating down on her head.  But that other heat, the one inside her, was far more potent.  If Jade had been any other man she would have reached out and touched his arm.  She didn’t.  She was always very careful never to touch Jade.  Half laughing, Raine said cautiously, “She probably won’t get the part anyway and you’re worrying about nothing.”

“She’ll get it,” Jade growled.

“She does have talent,” Raine admitted.  “She used to spend hours pretending she was someone else…”

“She still does.”

At that, Raine ducked her head and hid behind the curtain of hair that fell on each side of her face.  Her thoughts were far too dangerous to let Jade catch a glimpse of them.  When she had herself under control, she lifted her head.  But there was no longer any need to hide.  Jade was gone, striding away from her toward Tate, his back straight and unyielding, an indication of the anger he held inside.

He bent and untied the reins.  She walked down the sidewalk to say goodbye to Tate, unable to take her eyes off Jade.  She’d seen him unhitch a horse and climb into the saddle a million times.  Why was it particularly stirring today?

Seated on the horse, Jade leaned far over to give Tate his hand.  He pulled the boy up into the saddle in front of him and encircled Tate’s waist with one arm.  Tate soberly eyed her from his privileged perch.  She looked up. 

“Did she happen to say what time she might be home?'”

Raine met his eyes, knowing how much male pride it cost Jade to ask that question, knowing how much he would worry for Michele's physical safety until she was home. Even in the summertime, the South Dakota prairie was no place to be at night with a malfunctioning car or a flat tire.  “No. I would have told you if…”

He cut her off.  “Thank your aunt for coming to see you, Tate,” he said, and the boy did as he was told.  Raine listened, her heart aching. With a slight movement of his wrist, Jade guided the chestnut around in a circle. She watched him ride away, his broad back shielding Tate from her sight completely.

Julia was still at work on the Thursday edition of
The Verylon Appeal
when Raine got back.  As she opened the door, the bell on it tinkled and banged, and Julia looked up, the half-glasses she wore for reading perched on her nose, her white hair slightly ruffled. At sixty-two, Julia was a warm, attractive woman. She had taken Michele and Raine into her home ten years before when the girls' parents were killed in an automobile accident.  Julia had done everything humanly possible to ease the pain and loneliness for the two heartsick girls, and Raine loved her dearly.

“You didn't have to come back.  I've got the proofreading almost done.  How was the program?”

“Very nice.” Raine schooled herself to sound normal.  “Tate was the best one there, of course.”

Julia's smile deepened. “Of course. Can you write up a few lines for the paper without revealing your blatant bias?”

Raine smiled.  “I could try.”  Could she? She wasn't sure she remembered anything of what went on.

The shop was quiet, and Raine wandered around restlessly. Finally she went and got the push broom to clean up the slivers of lead that were scattered around the Linotype, like iron filings around a magnet

Julia finished reading and put her arms back and stretched.  “Did Michele say whether or not they can come to your birthday party?”

“I…she wasn't there.”

Julia's arms dropped.  “She wasn't there?”

“She went over to Canton to try out for that community play they've been advertising.”

“Yes, we ran the ad; didn't we? 
Mary, Mary
, isn't that the one they're doing?”

Raine nodded.  “Michele's been practicing for the part of Tiffany.”

“Tiffany?”

“That's the name of a character in the play. She's sort of the other woman, writes with brown ink, and dots her i's with circles.” Julia raised her eyebrows. Raine quickly said, “That's a line in the play.”

“How does Jade feel about all this?”

Raine made a rueful face.  “Do you have to ask? I mean, this may be the age of women's liberation, but Jade hasn't gotten the word.”

“Maybe it's just as well. It's part of his appeal.”

“What is?”

“His refusal to order his life to conform with the rest of the world.  Although,” Julia cocked her head to one side, “I don't suppose Jade cares about the rest of the world. He only cares about Michele.”

“Then wouldn't you think he'd listen to her?”  Raine asked fervently, too fervently she realized as Julia stared at her quizzically.

“I think he has.  But there's no real way they can compromise.  She doesn't want to live here.  He does.  He's a true cowboy, tied to the land.  And he's smart enough to realize it.  Sooner or later…”  Julia shrugged.  “I tried so hard to talk to that girl before they got married.  I knew she wasn't ready to settle down.”  Julia hesitated.  “But I wasn't her mother and that made it difficult.”

It wouldn't have made any difference if she had been Michele’s mother.  Michele was wildly eager to marry Jade and insisted on a huge, splashy wedding paid for by Michele’s share of the trust fund left by their parents, a wedding that the good people of Verylon were still talking about.  “Had to drive all the way over to Yankton and then when we got there, there wasn't a place to park. Too many cars, too many people.”  To the natives of the small town where Raine lived, ten people were a crowd. But Michele adored having people around her. The first year Michele and Jade were married, Raine spent more time out on the ranch than she did at school, until the day Jade told his wife that she was interfering with Raine's education. It was then, during that first year, when Raine was an impressionable sixteen-year-old that she began to feel the pull of Jade's attraction. But shortly after she had discovered her wildly impossible admiration for him, she was instructed to stay away.