It was very definitely a statement, not a question. She couldn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. He smoothed back her hair, his expression grave.
The touch of his palm was suddenly possessive and disturbing. She reached for his wrist and dragged his hand down to his side. “You know more about futures and margins than I do, don’t you, Jake? Yet you let me talk on and on.”
A spark of humor glinted in his eyes. They both relaxed. “Now, Anne. I never-”
“Don’t you now, Anne me. You’ve done an outstanding job over the years of presenting yourself as devil-may-care, move-on-a-whim Jake, never staying anywhere long enough to get deeply involved in anything.”
“I did that?” He made the effort to look surprised. “Maybe the lady was always a little too serious. Maybe it was fun to incite her to laughter, to shock her just a little.” He reached up for the lantern. “And keeping in character, honey, I think it’s time we hit my ghost town.”
His ghost town was perfectly awful.
Anne stood with hands on slim hips, staring in all directions around her. The drive from the mine to here hadn’t taken long, just twenty minutes of suicidal hairpin turns-she was getting used to those-and then a cow path behind another fence. A steel fence this time, marked well and locked. Anne pivoted to face him. “You actually live here for weeks at a time?” she questioned casually.
Jake, his hands lazily jammed into his jeans pockets, had found a shady chestnut to lean against, out of the hot sun. His face was in shadow, though she knew he was watching her. “This is where I generally set up the motor home, yes. Weekends I drive the Jeep back and forth to Coeur d’Alene, and during the week when I can, but it’s not always possible.” He paused. “Rugby was the name of this town. It lived and died all within the decade of the 1890s. About the 1920s there was a short revival. Didn’t last long.” Jake gestured. “I own the whole town, from that crag-” he gestured again “-to that peak.”
Her heart sank. Perhaps unconsciously Anne had been praying for a miracle, a place she could live in, particularly after realizing that Jake was seriously committed to his silver.
The meadow was lovely. Lush, low grasses whispered in the sun. The town was high…so high that the pure air almost hurt her lungs, so high that the tree-softened peaks on all sides of their private little valley seemed part of the sky. Clouds were touchably close. A gurgling stream rushed near her feet, the sun glinting clearly on its stone bed, and aspens clustered near Jake’s chestnut tree. Their leaves were tinged with gold and fluttered even without a breeze, showing off their gilded decorations.
It was almost a magical place, and the three structures standing in the distance only added to that mystical quality. As ghost towns went, this was no metropolis. One of the frame structures housed Jake’s Jeep. The other two were as old and as ghostly and deserted as the rest of the town. Both were two-story frame buildings, with wildflowers clustered near their doors, creeping over the windows as if they had slowly but surely decided to hide the buildings completely, along with their owners’ secrets. Anne itched to explore, to get inside the buildings and imagine what it must have felt like to be the wife of a miner, to know that her dreams depended on the secrets of those mountains…
Reality was knowing it was forty miles down to the corner grocery store-forty miles down that killer road. Neighbors, schools, culture-even a drive-in movie-simply weren’t. The water from the stream was undoubtedly pure and delicious, if one wanted to lug buckets of it from the stream to the house. Electricity might reach the area in the next century. The landscape was lovely, yes, and ideal for a nature girl who delighted in stepping outside in the morning to say hello to her friendly local bear. Or cougar. Or wolf. Very nice.
Anne knew she couldn’t live here in a thousand years.
Chapter 10
Jake draped an arm over her shoulder, brushing a kiss on the crown of her head. “You like my ghost town?”
“It’s beautiful. Like a corner of the world no one has ever seen. I can see why you love it, Jake. The peace and privacy…”
His chin nuzzled the top of her head. “Now let’s not panic until we see Coeur d’Alene, shall we?”
Anne stiffened. “I wasn’t panicking,” she protested. “If you want to spend the rest of our two weeks here, it’s fine with me. Really it is, Jake…”
“You’re fibbing.” He turned her slowly to face him, and locked her in a loose embrace with his arms on her shoulders. “Know how I can tell? Even when you tell a little white lie, that pulse in your throat works like a jackhammer.”
Perhaps. Anne flashed him a rueful smile that gradually died. She could feel a different mood sweep over both of them, like the tick of a clock in the night. Jake was close, more than close. The sun was bearing down on both of them, and she could smell the sweet grasses and tangy pines, and Jake, the warmth of him. His eyes held wanting, and his finger slowly touched the errant pulse in her throat. “A few days here and there…you’d like Idaho on that basis, Anne. Not to romp and stomp like a weekend backpacker, but because you-like me-need a haven from time to time. I didn’t buy this particular piece of land for its silver, or its real-estate value. I bought it for its silence. But as for living here permanently-you don’t need to lie. You’ve never needed to lie-not to me.”
“I thought…it mattered to you,” she said gently.
He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to tell you for a very long time that there’s only one thing that matters to me.” His look said, You, Anne. She closed her eyes, feeling his fingers ever so gently thread through the loose coil at the nape of her neck as his mouth came down on hers. His lips tasted so sweet, so warm and smooth. She heard his indrawn breath against her mouth as her long silken tresses cascaded into his hands. The light-headed feeling that surged through her was partly real and partly a lush feminine fantasy taking on life. Jake seemed to catch fire when her hair was unbound.
The caution of years slipped from her. Her hands swept over his hard forearms and shoulders, memorizing them. Bittersweet emotions reverberated in her soul. She’d come with him…to find answers she already knew. A place she couldn’t live in, a lifestyle she just couldn’t accept…and feelings that just wouldn’t die. Her fingers shifted to the front of his shirt. One by one, the buttons loosened. Her lips touched down, each time; first on his throat, then in the curling mat of hair on his chest, then over his heartbeat…
“Anne,” Jake murmured.
She paid no attention. Jake was new each time; that was part of it. Never mind that they’d known each other ultimately before; he was still new to her, all over again. Every single time, she was surprised at the breadth of shoulder, at the haphazard spray of hair on his chest, at muscles that never showed beneath his clothes, at ribs that led down to a ridiculously lean waist; she had wider hips than he did, though she was slim. His flesh turned warm under her fingertips; that always surprised her.
He captured her wandering hands, forced them around his neck, and his lips sealed hers with fierce, delicious pressure. She nearly drowned before he let her up for air. “You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble, Anne,” he informed her huskily.
Now that she’d known from the day they’d met. A faint smile touched her lips as she lifted her face. How could it possibly be so hot on an autumn day? Sunlight washed over Jake’s jagged, familiar features, for a moment mesmerizing her. He was working the buttons at the back of her blouse, one by one. Silently, she reached up to unfasten the tiny clasp of the silver necklace, and folded the precious gift carefully into the pocket of his chamois shirt. She took extra care as she pushed the shirt from his shoulders. In a moment, her blouse joined his shirt on the grass, and the sun-stroked warmth on her bare shoulders.