Chapter 4
“She wants towhat?”
Clovis twisted his hat a little tighter in his hands. “Well, I didn’t think it was such a awful idea, boss.”
Jake took a step toward his foreman and thought better of it. If he killed him, he’d never get the rest of the foals safely born or breed the mares for next year’s crop.
“Of all the harebrained, addle-minded—”
The little man straightened to his full height, bristling with good intentions. “Well, it makes sense. She’s writin’ a book about the West. How’s she supposed to do that if she can’t even sit a horse proper?”
“The same way you talk about all those women you say you’ve known over the years,” Jake snarled. “She makes it up.”
Clovis’s face crumpled noticeably. If Jake had been feeling any more charitable—or had managed more than fifteen minutes’ solid sleep the night before—he might have regretted his outburst. As it was, he’d been spending all his free time trying to figure out a way to get Amanda Marlow away from him, and Clovis was sabotaging him behind his back.
“And just when were you planning on doing this?” he demanded, glaring down at his foreman. “We have ten horses ready for heavy training, seven more mares just about ready to drop and a couple already back in season. We have a herd that’s just about ready to be moved out into spring pasture and fences that need to be mended. You want me to go on?”
“I get some time off every day,” Clovis defended himself. “Or were you gonna take that away, just so you ain’t bothered? And what are you gonna tell Lee when she comes home, expectin’ us to have been taking care of her friend?”
“That she should know better this time of year.”
Clovis faced his boss with impunity. “Any time of year, more likely,” he snapped and turned away.
Jake sighed in frustration. “Just don’t let those mares suffer,” he said.
Clovis almost came to another halt. It had been a peace offering. Unfortunately, it smacked as the deadliest of insults. Clovis would have starved himself rather than let his mares suffer so much as an inconvenience, and Jake knew it.
The little man spun around, his voice echoing along the barn. “What do you have against that girl, anyway?”
Jake had been all set to lead Joker out for exercising. Clovis’s words brought him to a halt. They loosened the sick shame and dread that he’d been fighting to keep at bay for so long.
“I think she’s a pampered rich girl without enough to do,” Jake snapped instinctively to cover his real reasons, the real fears and loathings.
Clovis snorted. “Shows you what you know. She didn’t even wear shoes till she was eight.”
And without another word, he stalked off.
Jake couldn’t quite turn back to his work. Suddenly, on top of everything else, he was fighting jealousy. What right did Clovis have to that kind of information? Why should Amanda feel so comfortable with him that she’d offer up something so personal? No woman decked out in cashmere and tweed could possibly be proud of the fact that she’d spent her childhood barefoot.
Or could she?
Jake spun on his heel then, spooking the buckskin alongside him. Joker shied and snorted, his ears flattening at the sudden movement. Instinctively Jake scratched his withers and murmured to him. But he didn’t realize that what he was murmuring was, “Doesn’t make any difference. Doesn’t make any damn difference, at all.”
Amanda had lied. Well, she hadn’t told the entire truth. She’d said that she wasn’t used to the silence just yet, which was why she kept showing up at the Diamond K’s front door. The truth of the matter was that shewasused to it. Not the sweet, free silence of the mountains that could almost refresh a soul single-handedly. The kind of silence that was born of isolation. The kind that sounded the same whether you were sitting alone in a wide open meadow with no more company than a hawk, or a fourth-floor efficiency in the middle of the busiest city on earth.
Amanda was lonely. Desperately and definitely, isolated at first by her upbringing and then by her sudden, surprising fame. Fawned over when all she needed to be was incorporated. Examined and critiqued when she’d needed to be introduced.
Amanda had reached college on a scholarship, uncertain of herself, of her experience and worth, a country girl from the deepest backwoods of the Appalachians fired with curiosity and purpose. She’d worked three jobs to bring in enough money to spend the rest of her time in libraries and classrooms satiating the greatest addiction known to man, the thirst for knowledge. But somewhere in those cluttered, noisy halls of campus, sometime during those long, hard hours of struggle, she’d disappeared so neatly into the fabric of the school that no one had really known her.
Until her first book had been a surprise, runaway bestseller. Suddenly interviewers dug up professors who glowed about their special student and fellow students who had been privileged enough to sit in on rap sessions with her.
Still, no one had come forward to get to knowher.They’d only shown up on her doorstep to be knownbyher. And so, writing had become her escape and her prison. Colleges, competing to add her name to their rosters, had courted her. And Amanda, so far away from home and forever cut off from it, a changeling caught between two worlds, had traveled from one college to another in the hopes of finding some kind of place she could feel comfortable.
The Diamond K was the closest she’d ever felt to that. No one cared who she was or what film stars were fighting to play the lead in the movie based on her book. The people of Lost Ridge saw her as Lee’s friend, and that was enough. Betty offered coffee and conversation, Clovis offered horseback riding lessons, and Jake...Jake offered something even an award-winning author couldn’t quite give words to yet. A new restlessness, a heightened physical awareness, a gnawing deep inside where the memories of her family lived and all their dreams still lay implanted. Deeper where her own dreams had struggled to survive amid all the noise and confusion.
Jake Kendall pulled at her in a way no one and nothing had in her life. He had what her Uncle Mick had called grit and gumption. Jake stalked her dreams and haunted her days, the feel of his callused hand against her cheek, the steel of his eyes and the uncompromising individuality of his stance.
And yet, hidden where no one who knew Jake Kendall thought to look, lay ghosts that looked a lot like Amanda’s. Ghosts of loneliness, of frustration and need. Imprisoned there behind that steel-trap jaw and laconic attitude was a hunger that could well have frightened her if she let it, because it was a hunger that made hers pale in comparison.
