Jennifer Greene - Silver and Spice

The condo was dark, with only the pale light from the small lamp falling on the pair of white velvet couches with their scattering of shocking pink pillows. Her fig tree was getting huge, playing a marvelous game of Shadows on the thick white carpet. The chrome and pewter appointments gleamed, giving evidence of her meticulous care. Magazines were neatly aligned on small, elegant tables. Somewhere along the way she seemed to have accumulated a collection of marble eggs; their pearly pink surfaces shone from the far corner of the French bookcase. Everything was in its place, all feminine perfection. She loved the look of the room.

Usually.

Switching off the small lamp, Anne ran her fingers back through her hair with a little sigh. A desperate feeling of disappointment came from nowhere to clutch at her heart. The chase had set off a confused kaleidoscope of emotions, none of which she wanted to deal with. Taking a brush from her purse, she restored at least basic order to her hair as she wandered into the kitchen. Suddenly thirsty, she took a long drink of water and listened, for a moment, to the lonely silence. A neighbor’s light went off in the distance across the courtyard, the only other light that had been on besides her own.

Slowly, she made her way to the bedroom and pushed open the door.

He was there. Lying back against her pillows, his shoes off and the tux jacket opened, his unbuttoned shirt baring several inches of that sand-silver mat of hair on his chest.

Her heart skipped two beats and then raced; a small fist clenched in the folds of her skirt. “To begin with, there isn’t any possible way you could have gotten here ahead of me, and don’t even tell me how you got in,” she said furiously. “And to end with, Jake, the answer is no. Not again. Not this time.”

“Now, Anne.” His tone was coaxing, lazy. Slowly, he swung his legs over the side of her bed, taking three long strides before he reached her, her silver sandals dangling by their straps from one finger. “You didn’t really think the dead bolt would keep me out?” The hardness left his eyes, taking in that odd blend of vulnerability and stubborn determination that was Anne. “I’ve come better than two thousand miles to tell you I think it’s about time we got married,” he told her. “Let’s not start off with a quarrel.”

Anne heard him; she even had a vagrant urge to try a swinging left hook to wipe the uneven grin off his face. For one helpless moment, though, she couldn’t stop herself from making a quick, fierce study of the man. Her eyes swept over the familiar planes of Jake’s face, resenting the new, unexplained crease between his brows, scanning the hook nose and sensual mouth and the chin so inevitably peppered with evening stubble. If there had been the slightest sign that he had been ill over the past three years; if by any chance he had been ill and she hadn’t known… Jake was such a terrible fool when it came to taking care of himself.

About the instant her eyes were finally reassured that he was perfectly fine, she was uncomfortably aware that the devilish spark in his own eyes had increased to a full-fledged flame. Clearly, he was delighted by whatever emotions her transparent face had given away. And about that same instant, the word married finally registered in her brain like the surprise little bomb that it was.

“Married?” she echoed lightly. Her vulnerable eyes turned cool, and her tone deliberately radiated concern. “So you’ve finally flipped out, have you, Jake?”

He chuckled as he handed her the sandals. She wasted no time putting them on. His hand on her shoulder was undoubtedly intended to offer her balance…except that the feel of that hand threw her off balance. Behind all the lazy laughter in his eyes was a stark, steady glint of determination. “Now, don’t get scared,” he said teasingly.

“Scared?”

“Like the little girl who’s lying in bed waiting for the alligators under the mattress to come and get her. Marriage doesn’t have to be like that, honey.” Absently, Jake pushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture that failed to restore order of any kind. “I figured it was about time I came home and finally did something about you, Anne. You’re thirty-one. A female bachelor, getting fussier and more set in your ways every day. Pretty soon you’ll be over the hill-”

“True.” She added with a remarkable amount of compassion, “Perhaps age is your problem, too? Maybe you’re going through a midlife crisis, Jake. I think you can get pills for that.”

“Not until I’m forty. I still have six years to go. Speaking of pills, are you taking any?”

“Brewer’s yeast,” she said sweetly. “And occasionally wheat germ.”

Damn that crooked smile of his. It was the sexy eyes that had initially led her down the primrose path to his bed a very long time ago, but it was the impossibly crooked smile that had made her fall in love with him. Memories flooded her consciousness as if a dam had burst.

She plugged the hole in the dike and headed for the door. “Out you go,” she said cheerfully. “It’s been a wonderful conversation, Jake, after not seeing you for three whole years. I won’t even mention that it’s two in the morning, that you had no right to pick my locks-”

“Window.”

“Pardon?”

“I came in through the window.”

“What-?” But it was obvious which window he had come in-the one near the bed where the curtains were fluttering in the night breeze. Anne found herself staring, suddenly lost. Jake had climbed in another window another time, when she was eighteen. And made love and made love and made love and… She lifted her face to his, jade eyes turned emerald. “Go away, Jake. Just go completely away.”

“Now, Anne.” Jake’s hand brushed the small of her back as he urged her through the door. “You know we’re both dying for a cup of coffee.”

“You are not staying.”

“Of course not.”

Despite the seeming meekness of his tone, Jake’s words echoed in the hall with the reverberation of a detonated grenade. Anne had waged war with Jake before. She wavered momentarily, weighing the dangers of spending fifteen minutes with Jake over a cup of coffee in the same way a general might calculate the risk of sending his troops over a minefield. A good general, of course, would send the troops around the minefield.

Anne let out a breath. “One cup of coffee,” she said flatly. “Only so you can tell me what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into the last few years.”

“Lots,” he assured her. His slashed-on smile was her reward. Jake always rewarded terrible judgment.

Her unwilling heart turned a cartwheel. Her heart had turned cartwheels for those special private smiles three other times in her life-not counting that first time Jake had loved her and left her, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. “I’ll just bet you have,” she said lightly. “So where have you been raising hell this time?”

“Idaho. Northern Idaho, where the mountains are so steep they can barely build roads. Where the whole area’s deserted. You can walk for hours and have the feeling no one has ever been there before you.”

“Sounds perfectly dreadful.” They fell into old habits in the kitchen. Jake opened cupboards and drawers, finally finding the instant coffee and cups.

“A minute,” she told him when the cups were filled and he was staring at the dials on her microwave oven.

He punched the button. “This is nicer than your last place.”

“I like it,” she agreed, trailing after him with spoons, place mats, napkins, cream in a sterling pitcher and a matching sugar bowl. All the things she considered appropriate for serving coffee, knowing full well Jake would have been content to sit near a campfire with a mug.