So, Jake, too, was suddenly aware they were outside-not a convenient place at all, not at all what either of them had intended. Yet a sudden thread of desperation laced through her bloodstream. Never to touch him again? Never to know him again? Anne, being Anne, knew this was the precise time to buy a plane ticket for home. So obviously it must be someone else unbuckling Jake’s well-worn belt, pulling it through the loops on his jeans…
His hands made a game of slowly chasing her skirt down over her silk-clad hips, then slowly pushing the half-slip down, then her stockings and panties, and then there was nothing to chase but flesh, and he played that game, too. By the time they were both naked, years seemed to have passed, years of playing those languid, lazy games. Anne’s knees felt weak; it was so much easier to sink down.
The long, tall grass yielded beneath her weight, making a strange bed; a silky blouse for a pillow, crinkling jeans under her back, sun-warmed earth and grass beneath her calves. Sunlight flashed in front of her eyes, and the flickering gold leaves of the trees. Jake’s face, grainy and tan, was just above her, his eyes savoring the fevered brilliance in hers, the slight trembling of her mouth, the glow of sun and desire that seemed to heat her skin. “I could look at you forever,” he murmured.
But he seemed to have sweeter tortures in mind. Slowly, he rained light kisses along her ribs and navel and the inside of her arm, the underside of her chin, settling finally on the hollow between her breasts. The creamy globes were swollen, aching, waiting, and her whole body trembled when his tongue lapped first at one nipple, then the other.
She stroked his length in turn. Slowly. Her fingernails lightly scored his skin; then her gentle hands kneaded the flesh of his shoulders, his back, lower. Her fingertips could reach the backs of his thighs if she arched her whole body just so, if she moved her lips just so, if she flattened her breasts against his chest, nipple to nipple…
Jake sucked in breath he never seemed to let out again, his mouth hovering over hers. “Anne.” His kiss was hard and almost rough, and then there was another, and another. “If by some remote chance you’re harboring a hope that we’re going to make it to the motor home…”
A terrible idea. She eased one leg between his in answer, sealing him closer. The sun made her eyes ache, and she closed them. Urgency seemed suddenly to claim them both. Their mattress of jeans and silk was gone; they were rolling over and over in the grass, grass that smelled so sweet, that tickled them as it crackled and yielded under their weight. She seemed to be a part of the earth, giving and warm, rich and fertile. Somewhere nearby was the gurgling stream, and the sun kept beating down…
He took her, a sharp, welcome intrusion into the most private part of Anne. She wrapped her legs around him, her fevered green eyes intense on his. The power of her own feelings frightened her; her need and love for this man were open, and she was suddenly aware of the impermanence of their love, the illusiveness of their future. Then his lips captured hers, locking out the bitter and leaving only the sweet.
She’d made love with him before; it had been glorious, yet never like this, like a strong wind that would have its way, all the wild, fierce rush of a storm, all the gentleness of a breeze. Jake was so tender, teasing her higher, and all around her were the crushed grasses and the smells of autumn and sun and earth. The sensations seemed magnified, sweet and primitive, special. Then they were gone, and there was only Jake. The world could have been spinning in circles, but she knew only Jake. Desire ripped through her like a sharp, desperate pain, a rhythm gone too far to stop, a ruby-red promise of something she so frantically needed and could never have named or asked for…
The sun exploded in front of her eyes.
***
She held on to Jake, shuddering, gradually aware that he was kissing her forehead and her cheek and her throat, tender, soothing kisses. His palm stroked her hair over and over. “Shift just a little, honey,” he murmured.
She couldn’t seem to obey; she was far too content as she lay with her cheek in the hollow of his shoulder. With a smile, he reached over her and dragged his chamois shirt closer, tugging it under her to make a soft nest for her on the crushed grass. “Better?” he murmured.
“I have no idea,” she murmured back.
He smiled again. So very busy he was, stretched out next to her, taking one strand of her hair at a time and lifting it to his shoulders. It took a very long time, yet eventually the entire rest of the world was sealed out by a silvery blond curtain. “I would have waited, Anne,” he said quietly. “I would have waited as long as you wanted me to.”
Her lashes whispered down on her cheeks. He’d wanted to wait, to show her they had more than sex. She’d hurt him, she knew, when she’d said that. She’d never meant to hurt him. She opened her eyes, needing to tell him exactly what her dark prince had meant to her over the years…but not quite able to. They’d filled such a unique, such an oh-so-special niche for each other for so very long that even the word love seemed inadequate. What they had was infinitely precious to Anne, as fragile as it was real…but that was not all he was looking for. And she couldn’t hurt him again, not now. Her hand stroked his cheek, her palm soft against the afternoon beard that was already starting to roughen his skin. Her limbs felt like butter, yet her heart had already picked up an uneven beat. Despair…out of nowhere.
“You’ve certainly changed over the years,” he said casually. “At eighteen you all but asked me to make love to you, wiggling your hips around in a miniskirt…”
“I beg your pardon.” Her eyes flickered wide.
He nodded sadly. “But you’ve become inhibited, Anne. Particularly since you passed thirty. I mean, look at this…” He plucked a blade of grass from her hair, waving it in front of her nose.
She snatched the offending wisp of grass, her lips fighting the tug of a smile.
“I’m really not sure there’s any hope for you,” he said thoughtfully. He found another piece of grass and decorated the crevice between her breasts with it. Then another. “You’re a sad case. You have no interest in sex, no desire. Honey, it’s going to take a lot of work to get you back in shape…”
Her fingers curled in the hair on his chest and pulled. “So you weren’t satisfied, Mr. Rivard? You dragged me out here in the middle of nowhere to get grass stains on my bare back-”
“I was perfectly satisfied,” he assured her readily. His eyes seared hers and held them a moment. Long enough. “It’s you I was worried about,” he said quietly.
“You have no need to be worried,” she whispered.
“But I am. I am very worried.” Gently, he pushed her cheek to his chest so he could lean over her, and then he brushed off the bits of ticklish grass and earth that seemed to have molded themselves to her slender back. Three more blades of grass he found in her hair; he showed her all three of them as if he were showing off trophies. “We’re going to have to undertake a long reeducation where you’re concerned. With constant work and effort, I’m almost certain we’ll be able to rekindle some kind of sexual feelings in time…”
Anne snatched his hands before he had the chance to find any more trophies, locked them firmly around her waist and raised her parted lips to his. “Jake,” she said gravely, “maybe you could stop talking for a minute and a half and get on with the lesson.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
He shook his head, his eyes full of laughter. “I have a headache. And besides, I really don’t think you fully realize where you are. What kind of behavior is this, lying naked beneath the sun, not a mattress in sight? It’s not even night-”
A small pinch on his backside shut him up. A rain of grass on his face, and suddenly they were on their feet, and he was chasing her, a race full of laughter through the meadow with her arms flung wide, embracing the day and the sun and, shortly, the man.
***
It was midafternoon, another somnolent, Indian summer day, with a warm breeze just barely lifting the leaves in the distance. Anne
stepped out of the motor home with a shallow black pan in her hands, headed toward the stream. In the last three days since she and Jake had made love in the meadow, her appearance had gone through some drastic changes, none more apparent than at the moment.
She was wearing a skirt, a typical Anne tweed, and a delicate blouse with a lace-banded collar. Which was fine, except that the blouse was hanging outside the waistband of her skirt, its sleeves carelessly rolled up to her elbows. Her legs were bare, and on her feet she wore Jake’s black boots. Her hair was coiled, but only because long, loose hair would have been constantly in her way. She had tacked the coil in place loosely with tortoiseshell combs and a few pins, but long, free strands fluttered around her face and curled under her chin in the breeze.
Jake, behind her, was laughing.
“We’ve been here three whole days, and you never once mentioned that your creek runs gold,” she scolded over her shoulder.
“I must have told you ninety-nine times. You don’t suppose you were preoccupied with other things?”
She would have told him which one of them was preoccupied, except that she nearly slipped as she neared the jumble of wet rocks near the bank of the creek. “Let’s get businesslike here,” she said absently.
“By all means.”
Gingerly, she stepped into the low, rushing stream. The clear water gurgled and danced around the ankles of the huge boots; she could feel the cold-but not the dampness-in her toes. “Ready. Now what do I do?”
He came up from behind her and stood on the creek bank. “First, give us a kiss.”
She offered her face up to the sun as he waded into the creek and planted a swift peck on the tip of her nose. Jake just looked at her with that crooked smile of his, then took the pan from her hands and crouched down on his haunches. Anne did likewise, and immediately felt a dozen intimate muscles vibrate; those intimate muscles were feeling just a little sore. A love hangover, she thought ruefully, and changed positions so that she was bending over from the waist next to him.
“Now, before I show you how to pan for gold,” Jake said gravely, “I need another kiss.”
She shook her head. “You’re getting no more kisses, you greedy man. On with it!”
“I must remind you that all you can hope for is about three-tenths of a troy ounce of gold for every ton of sand and gravel you pan. And that this stream has been worked and reworked for over a century-”
“All these irrelevant details,” she told the sky disgustedly.
“All right, all right.” He dug the pan into the streambed, brought some fine sand up from the bottom and started swirling it slowly. “It’s a question of weight. Gold will settle on the bottom because it’s heavier than sand. Did you know that any good miner names his placer deposit after a woman? That’s a fact. A deposit named for a woman will yield higher dollar value.”
“You didn’t tell me that, but I’m certainly not surprised.” She took the pan from his hands, swirling it the way he did.
“Now, don’t look for glitter-that would just be fool’s gold. You’re looking for yellow-”
She waved him back to his blanket on the grass. Jake could be a terribly distracting man. And then, he’d made merciless fun of her ever since she’d told him she intended to look for gold.
She must have chosen an unfortunate place to begin, as there was neither yellow nor glitter, just brown. Tan-brown sand. A strand of hair dropped in front of her eyes; she whipped it back.
An hour later, she’d tried four different places in the stream. Her coil of hair had come completely undone, the hot mountain sun had stolen between her breasts and was baking her, and she was laughing as she stepped precariously between stones to get out of the stream. Jake was stretched out on the soft, grassy bank, leaning back on his elbows, the sun rinsing a pale yellow in his hair and giving a pewter luster to his eyes as he watched her approach. “What have you got this time?”
She dumped her yield on the growing pile next to him, tossed down the pan, slipped off the boots and collapsed, her head in his lap. “I’m exhausted.”
“I can see why.” Jake respectfully fingered the nugget she’d brought him, then motioned to the rest. “Quite a little cache you’ve accumulated there. A little quartz. A little sylvanite. A little copper. A lot of just plain rock…”
“Plain rock!” she protested, and held one of her treasures to the sun. The gray pebble had a vein of glittery white, as if someone had etched a picture on it, almost in the shape of a tree.
“Definitely not plain rock,” Jake agreed hastily. He tugged her up next to him, his shoulder providing a much better pillow than the unyielding muscles in his thigh. Anne leaned back contentedly, happier yet when Jake’s face leaned over hers, blocking out the ever-beating sun.
“You’re barefoot,” he whispered.
“I know that.”
He shook his head, his fingers aimlessly trying to restore order. “Your hair is a terrible mess.”
“I know that, too.” Jake and immaculate grooming didn’t mesh, not at the intimate level their relationship had established itself on. One had to make allowances for a man who thought a silver filigree necklace looked just as good on bare skin as against a backdrop of expensive fabric.
“You look beautiful, Anne. So very, very lovely…” His finger slowly traced her profile, from her forehead to her lips. His eyes were suddenly grave on hers, as grave as she’d ever seen them. “Ready to go back down that killer road?”
Ready to face some semblance of reality?
Anne shook her head, instantly feeling uncomfortable pricklings. She wanted to stay here with Jake, making love day and night, eating and laughing with him in their private meadow high in the mountains… She wanted to savor every remaining minute of her two weeks with him. At the end of that time-she refused to think about that. Her heart knew only that she wanted to treasure every second, every moment, that she didn’t even want to waste time sleeping.
“I’ve got more to show you,” he whispered persuasively. “Some people I want you to meet, and then we’ll go to Coeur d’Alene, Anne. I have something very special to show you there.”
“Do you have business to take care of?” she inquired carefully. “Because I could stay here, Jake. You can go do whatever you have to do-”
“Nope.” He lurched up to a standing position and reached for her hand. “We’ll come back here, Anne.” He pulled her next to him…very close to him, thigh to thigh. “But I’d like to think I can keep my hands off you, for a few hours at least.”
Two hours later, as they got into his Jeep, Anne looked behind her, memorizing the valley and the stream and the look of the mountains in Jake’s ghost town. She had the sudden stricken thought that she would never see it again.
Chapter 11
“Shouldn’t you have called them, Jake? It’s not polite to drop in on people when they don’t know you’re coming…” Anne smoothed down her skirt, a houndstooth A-line paired with a black short-sleeved cashmere sweater. Her hands were still shaking from the harrowing ride down the mountain. Belted into the Jeep, she’d felt as if she were riding on the Ferris wheel at a carnival, only at suicidal speeds.
“Reed and Carla wouldn’t know what to do if someone called them ahead of time before dropping in. They’re not mere friends, Anne, more like adopted family. Reed was the one who filled me in when I came here, told me everything about the area.”
“But what if they’re not home?” She snatched her purse and stepped out of the Jeep as Jake did.
“It’s Thursday night.” Jake took her arm as they followed a narrow cobblestone walk. They had left the Jeep behind a gas station; there was no other place to park. The narrow streets of Wallace barely allowed room for drivers, much less parking spots, and as she’d already noticed, there was no room to put additional parking space unless it was carved out of a mountainside. “Thursday night?” she echoed back.
“Reed’s a big believer in celebrating the day before Friday.”
He stopped on the walk, turning toward her with a smile. Dressed in jeans and a blue-striped shirt, he looked irrepressibly Jake, casual and comfortable no matter what he wore.
“I’m dressed wrong,” she said unhappily.
Those shaggy eyebrows of his flickered up, perusing the soft black sweater and impeccable houndstooth skirt. “You look terrific.”
“And…silly. The thing is, when I packed to come with you-”
His hand curled around hers. “Honey, when you’re alone with me, I like you without clothes. When you’re with other people, you dress the way you feel comfortable. Your natural style is more formal than mine, which is perfectly fine. Is it any more complicated than that?”
Not when he put it that way, although Anne had the fleeting thought that a fashion designer would blacklist Jake for life. They climbed to the third tier of houses and stopped at the doorway of a tall, dark green two-story house. The man who answered the door had jowls like a basset hound’s, big, warm, friendly eyes, a thatch of unruly black-gray hair, and a can of beer in his hand. “Jake! I didn’t expect you back for another week at least. And you, darlin’-”
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