Jennifer Greene - Silver and Spice

“It will work.”

Be calm. Anne took a breath and then another, staring in total frustration at the ceiling. “Even you, Jake, cannot expect to just walk in here after three years and-”

“And talk marriage? But I just have, Anne. Because we know each other far too well to pretend time has made any difference. You know it hasn’t.” He reached out, and the pad of his thumb very gently caressed her cheek, a touch as tender as the look in his eyes was determined. “We just proved that,” he said roughly. “We’ve always proved that, every time we touch each other.”

“You think you deserve a gold medal because I still want you?” she demanded. “Rabbits want each other, Jake. You want to hear me say that I missed you? Well, fine. I missed you like hell. And now you can just get the devil out of here.”

Enough was enough. Actually, enough was just past enough, because she could feel an unfamiliar, disgraceful welling of moisture in her eyes. Anne never cried. Turning on her heel, she stalked toward her room.

Jake didn’t follow. In seconds, she’d turned the lock on her bedroom door and leaned back against it, her arms wrapped around her chest, her eyes closed. Waiting for Jake to go.

Moments later, she heard sounds from the other room, but definitely not the sound of the front door closing. It took her five minutes to realize that instead of leaving, he was actually…settling in for the night! She tried to decide whether her fragile poise was up to going back out there and forcing the issue.

Finally moving away from the door, she slowly took off her dress and hung it in the closet. Then she slipped on a long flannel nightgown. Even when the light was off and the comforter up to her chin, she found herself staring at the door in the darkness, waiting for the knob to turn. It didn’t. Eventually, the light under the door went out. If you had a whit of sense you would call the police, a small voice in her head advised.

The thought brought an exhausted though definite hint of a smile to her face. That kind of flamboyant gesture was certainly not her style. Besides, there was no conceivable reason she shouldn’t offer an old friend her couch for the night. And Jake had once been an old friend, an old childhood friend, before they became lovers.

The gold hands on the alarm clock announced 5:07 a.m. An ungodly hour to find oneself staring at the ceiling. Anne finally gave up trying to sleep and threw off the covers. Gathering up underthings from her drawers, she silently unlocked her door and tiptoed out.

Jake was asleep, sprawled on the carpet in the living room. She might have guessed he’d find her couch too confining. He’d found the blankets in the bathroom closet, but his chest and one long leg were uncovered. Jake was out like a light, his silvery hair thick and disheveled on the pillow. Biting her lip at the oddly vulnerable look of him, she tiptoed into the bathroom and flipped on the light, then closed the door.

A stranger sleepily confronted her in the mirror, a wanton mermaid with hair streaming over her breasts, a Lorelei with stormy green eyes and plum-swollen lips…a moral degenerate who’d come close to selling her soul in the middle of the night to have that man share the pillow with her.

She turned her back on Lorelei, peeled off her nightgown and put on a stark white bra and simple bikini underpants. Carefully, she fitted her panty hose to her long, sleek legs, snapping the waistband in place with a vengeance.

She pulled on a plain white slip, then mercilessly applied a brush to her hair. It took ten minutes before the long strands were completely untangled, then another five to pin a figure eight at the nape of her neck. Every strand of ash-blond hair was subdued.

Makeup came next. It wasn’t quite so difficult to face the mirror; Wanton Wanda was fast being replaced by prim and proper Anne. Moisturizer, then foundation…

She and Jake had grown up together in a way. Their grandparents had lived just three doors away from each other, grandparents whom they frequently visited as children and who, by different twists of fate, became their guardians in later years. The friendship had started when Anne was three, wailing her angelic little head off the day she fell off a tricycle. Jake, then six, had vaulted over the forbidden high fences between yards to discover the source of the caterwauling. He’d fixed the trike pedal so a giant couldn’t reach it and was very proud of himself.

Jake was her dark prince from then on. Not that he didn’t have the coloring to be the regular kind of prince, but Jake was clearly never cut out to wear white and ride a white steed. The real Prince Charming would never have gone in for an occasional game of kickball and a lot of swinging on fences and kicking stones at the lakeshore. Jake was capable of merciless teasing, and though Anne was a quiet listener with everyone else in her life, with Jake, she could never seem to stop talking. He was always listening to things she didn’t want anyone to know.

Her father had died when she was five, a major blow to a scrawny little waif with green eyes. Her mother proceeded to search the whole world for another husband, and she found three before Anne reached her early teens. Their lifestyle never lacked the label “advantaged.” Anne, oversensitive and painfully shy, barely survived it.

But you were hardly much of a survivor then, she told her reflection in the mirror, and she brushed faint brown eye shadow on her lids and added an almost imperceptible stroke of eyebrow pencil. Jake’s childhood, like hers, had involved a great deal of travel. His parents simply liked to take to the road. They had a little Cessna…and the plane went down. It happened the year Jake was ten, the same year his grandfather, Gil, had taken him in, the same year he’d managed to run all the way to Tucson before the police caught up with him. Reaction to his parents’ death, the neighbors clucked. Anne knew far better. Jake was born with wanderlust in his soul.

By the time she was eighteen, Anne had long been a permanent resident at her paternal grandmother’s. Anne’s mother had never objected to the relationship between Anne and Jennie. Children were a nuisance. Buffeted too long by fierce, painful, endless winds, Anne was still in shock; her mother had died of pneumonia two weeks earlier. She hadn’t even known her mother was ill. And Jake could not possibly have known; yet he climbed in at the window of her grandmother’s house to comfort her…and he made love to her. Any judge would have sentenced Jake harshly for taking an innocent in a weak moment. Judges knew nothing; Anne couldn’t have survived that moment in her life without Jake. Two weeks later, Jake had a choice between completing his last year at Harvard and embarking on a fishing venture off the coast of Alaska. Why risk graduating with honors? Alaska had won hands down.

Anne whisked blusher on her cheeks. When he’d left she’d felt as if a jagged rock had been torn from her heart. He’d asked her to go with him on that venture. Run off to Alaska at eighteen? No. But her refusal didn’t prevent her from being out of her mind in love with him, nor did it ease the desperate loneliness when he was gone.

Judging from the state of his jeans the next time she saw him, he must have blown his parents’ inheritance in one quick fling. Oil-bearing shale in Montana, was it? Anne was twenty-two, graduating from college, invincible. No one could tell her otherwise. Independence and control and self-sufficiency were her goals; any number of male undergraduates had been foolish enough to try to distract her from those goals. Jake had come back out of the blue and listened as she expounded her philosophy of never needing anyone, as she told him how she would never be vulnerable again. He’d listened, all the way to bed, for almost two solid months.