“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.
“Anne?” Jake’s voice came from behind her.
All regal pride, she turned with the utmost patience.
“I’m leaving the motor home here, so you can put your clothes and things in place.”
“You can’t park here. The condo rules-”
“I fixed that.”
She sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”
Jake had his hand on the door. His silver wolverine eyes held hers, and she felt all the fascination of captured prey. “Run your tub full of very hot water, Anne,” he tossed after her thoughtfully. “I want you completely naked, darling. Leave all the lights off. Just darkness, just those petals floating all around you, clinging to that ivory skin of yours…”
He slowly shook his head, obviously in reverent appreciation of his fantasy, then closed the door. Thankfully, Anne noted, with him on the inside. She suddenly found herself staring at her neighbor, who was just as intently staring back at her, wide-eyed.
“He’s a total stranger,” Anne said weakly. “I’ve never met that man before in my life.”
Her neighbor nodded.
Mesmerized, Anne stared at the ocean of slow-waving corn that rippled on all sides from east to west, north to south. There was nothing else. Just the black strip of road, a blue sky that kept on coming, and the endless cornfields. It wasn’t a view she’d expected when they’d started out at two that morning.
“You haven’t said a word in an hour,” Jake remarked to her from the driver’s seat.
Absently, she fingered the lace ruffle at the throat of her pale blue blouse. “I’ve either fallen in love with Iowa or I’m suffering from culture shock.” Glancing at Jake, she smiled ruefully. “I just keep looking out there… Somewhere down those side roads are the people who feed this country. Survivors. And suddenly I feel like a parasite.”
“Because you work at a bank?” His brows shot up.
“Because I just sit at a bank, and usually think of corn as a commodity that fluctuates on the market. Of course, banking is exactly what I want to do, but I never considered how far removed my life really is from…I don’t know…real work.”
He shook his head. “You do real work, foolish one. You make it possible for that farmer out there to buy his farm, to keep operating through the bad years, to build up a heritage for his kids.”
His instant defense of her work surprised her; she’d always thought Jake felt more amusement than respect for anyone who worked at a desk. “That was almost a nice thing to say,” she ventured casually.
Jake shot her a crooked grin. “You love what you do, and you’re good at it. Did you think I never noticed?”
“Good Lord, I think that was another nice thing to say.”
Jake chuckled. “Maybe you could blend both worlds, and open up your bank vault in bib overalls.”
Anne smoothed her mauve wool skirt and thought, We have to stop having these nice, easy conversations. She’d chattered to him all morning, laughing over absolutely nothing, forgetting completely that it wasn’t just Jake next to her, but Jake-who-came-back-threatening-marriage-this-time. “Do you want a snack?” she asked suddenly.
“Restless, Anne?”
“Terribly,” she lied, as she got up, ducking under the overhead berth to head to the back of the motor home. “I warned you I wasn’t a very good traveler, Jake, much less a camper. I can’t imagine where we’re going to find a place to stay in country like this tonight.”
“Fildekirky, Iowa,” Jake called back to her.
In spite of herself, she chuckled at the sound of the name, and started opening cupboards.
“If you find a doughnut back there…”
She brought him a bag of dried pineapple slices, which would be much better for him than a doughnut and would still satisfy his sweet tooth, then returned to the miniature kitchen to make herself a cup of peppermint tea. It still amazed her that she could get up anytime she liked and make a cup of peppermint tea while driving.
A moment later, she took a sip of her brew, glancing around before going back to sit by Jake. The motor home, she decided, was a symbol of the impermanence of Jake’s lifestyle. It represented the unbridgeable distance between them…but she seemed to be falling in love with the darned thing. Everything was so meticulously neat; there was a place for everything, home comforts begging to be taken advantage of.
She’d had three days to rearrange everything, of course. Her yogurt had joined his beer, fresh fruits and vegetables supplemented his canned goods, sleeping bags had been replaced by percale sheets on both the double bed and her berth. Next to his paper plates and plastic forks were china and sterling. Her wardrobe provided a contrast to his; traveling suits to his jeans, high-heeled shoes to his tennies.
She’d deliberately gone overboard, right down to the brands of toothpaste she’d chosen, in an effort to impress Jake that their values were terribly different even in the little things. Taking a minute to reapply lipstick in their tiny bathroom, Anne took in her reflection, from the high-throated blouse and modest violet skirt to the prim coil of hair at the nape of her neck. The image was honestly Anne, soft fabrics and gentle colors and classic styles. She was not flamboyant and never would be; she was not at all the kind of woman she expected Jake to end up with.
Fleetingly, her soft jade eyes met their reflection in the mirror; her expression was oddly distressed at that moment. Surprisingly, she was happy to be with Jake. She had always been all too happy to be with Jake, at least until he’d brought up the subject of marriage. She knew that yogurt versus beer wasn’t the issue; rather, the crux of the matter was their different systems of values. Her craving for roots and stability and order… Lord, you’re boring, she told the mirror wryly.
And the man hadn’t touched her since she’d agreed to the trip. His restraint was making her nervous. She’d heard what he said about proving they had something more than sex between them, but Jake’s blood had certainly never run tepid before… You’re supposed to be boring him, she reminded herself. You should be happy he’s keeping his hands to himself.
Still, though, a little kiss wouldn’t cost him much, her libido grumbled. Would you stop that? Grabbing a newspaper, she walked back to the captain’s chair next to Jake, wearing her most formal, boring smile. “I’m going to read aloud to you from the Wall Street Journal so you won’t get restless,” she announced to him cheerfully. “Do you want to hear about common stocks or blue chips first, Jake?”
His crooked grin had a little too much Chesire cat in it for Anne to feel comfortable. She decided on blue chips. Most days, they even bored her.
The dot on the map for Fildekirky was an overstatement. Anne, buried under campground directories and road maps, was by now heartily sick of cornfields. Once she’d directed Jake to the expressway exit he wanted, her nerves quieted down with an expectation that never materialized.
“This is it?” she asked him unbelievingly.
A shabby little diner sat on one corner, a gas station on another. Three pickup trucks took up the restaurant’s parking lot, such as it was. A mongrel dog wandered along the middle of the main street. Late afternoon sun was pouring down in long yellow rays on the silence.
“I had a feeling your love affair with Iowa wouldn’t last,” Jake said lazily. “Not that you can judge any state by the view from its highways. Tomorrow will be quite different, Anne, but I have a feeling the campground will surprise you. I’ve been here before.”
The campground did surprise her. There were trees.
Gingerly, Anne stepped out of the motor home as Jake sauntered into a wooden A-frame building to check in. She felt like a toddler just learning to walk as her feet touched solid ground.
The A-frame and huge maples blocked her view of the actual campground. She’d already decided the trees were imported. Across the road were another five trillion acres of farmland and nothing else. At least there was a huge green tractor to relieve the monotony, but she had no real hope for the view behind t
he thick row of bushes and maple trees.
She glanced toward the door of the A-frame. Jake was taking forever. Smells assaulted her nostrils, the scents of rich brown earth and green leaves, not unpleasant. Rubbing at a kink in her neck from all the traveling, she wandered around one side of the building. A cool breeze had picked up the hint of a September night; a few of the maple leaves had started to turn gold and russet. The campground owners had planted a wild profusion of marigolds and asters, their perky colors splashing over the stone walk as she meandered farther. The place wasn’t totally uncivilized…
A fat white duck suddenly waddled in her direction, squawking belligerently. Startled, Anne glanced up. Her eyes widened in surprise. A narrow creek wandered like a serpent between shaded campsites; in the middle of the creek was a strange redwood structure that looked like a miniature fort mounted on wooden stilts with a rustic ladder leading up to its entrance. The place was almost pretty; the ambience had clearly been created to provide a quiet night’s rest for a stranger…barring the ducks.
White duck had friends. All of them seemed to catch sight of her at the same time, and instantly waddled forward to welcome her. There seemed to be thousands of them… Well, four dozen, anyway. Fat ducks, skinny ones, some white and some brightly feathered, all quacking unlyrically. Laughing helplessly, Anne bent down to pet one, and found a dozen yellow beaks very gently trying to devour her hand.
“It sounds good, but don’t believe a word you hear,” Jake suggested dryly from behind her.
“They’re obviously hungry.” She blinked. The squawking cacophony reached a dangerous decibel level. “Jake, they’re terribly hungry…”
Silver and Spice Page 7
