“I didn’t invite you here,” he reminded her, pulling out the handkerchief and giving his face a swipe with it.
“You missed a spot,” Amanda instinctively offered.
He stopped. “What?”
She didn’t know why she did it. She certainly couldn’t excuse her action, simply because she’d been fantasizing about it. Grabbing his handkerchief out of his hand, she reached up and wiped away the last trace of grease from his jaw.
What she’d done seemed to cause a reflexive tightening in him. In her, it provoked a delicious chill that was dangerous.
She did her best to smile past both their discomfort. “I straighten pictures on walls, too,” she apologized, handing back his cloth with fingers that trembled just a little. “Sorry.”
He smelled like work. Like fuel and exertion and sunshine. Warm sunshine. Amanda fought to keep her eyes up and swore she’d never give in to impulse again.
“You were saying,” she said with a small smile, unable to keep from thinking that faded jeans were an absolute work of art. Faded, soft, well-worn jeans that fit like a tight hug. A very tight hug.
It took him a minute to speak. “I said, you showed up at the worst time of the year expecting to be baby-sat, and that’s just not going to happen. Besides, you got Clovis to fetch and carry for you.”
She tilted her head, just a little. “Jealous?”
Amanda wasn’t sure what kind of reaction she’d expected. Jake glared at her, his posture rigid, his jaw like steel. Amanda saw fury, frustration and something else—something even darker.
That something passed before she could even name it, and Jake whirled back around on the engine he was dismantling.
“I’m busy,” he snarled.
Amanda shook her head and looked around her. They were out behind one of the outbuildings, and she could see a corner of one of the fields where some of the horses were gathered. She could see the stretch of plain that carried the stream. There were wildflowers peeking out this morning. The aspen would soon be budding. On the ranch, the new cycle of life had already started. Jake and his men spent their days working hard with their hands, building something tangible, something precious that no trendsetter or analyst or company CEO could take away from them. They worked with integrity and trust and loyalty, and Amanda had been too long away from those qualities not to taste them again like the first honey of spring. She yearned for them almost as much as she yearned for the man who didn’t seem to see anything unusual about his adherence to them.
And she, the writer, the award winner, didn’t know how to tell him. So she told him a story instead.
“My daddy worked in the mines,” she said. “Him and his two brothers, Earl and Ralph, and my brother William Paul. Got up every morning at four to get to the mine for his shift, and came home so tired all he could do was eat dinner and fall asleep in his chair. My mama would take us little ones over to her brother Mick’s, who scraped a living out on a dirt farm nearby. Only man in the family that didn’t trust to the mines. He died without a dime, just like my daddy and his brothers, and my brother William Paul. But Uncle Mick had his stories, the ones his father and grandfather before him had handed down. He had something that nobody from Washington or the bank or the state capital could take away from him. And when he died, he had so many people in the chapel at Salt Lick, that you couldn’t get in. It didn’t matter that he never knew what indoor plumbing was, or electricity. He was a great man. And you don’t get many people like that in your life.”
Amanda faced Jake now, her expression gentle. Jake straightened again, stiff and uncomfortable with the picture she’d painted, as if he’d just been caught trespassing.
“All I’ve heard about from Lee is her big brother,” she continued carefully. “Now, I’ve heard a lot of little sisters boast on big brothers, but this was something different. If you want the truth, it was one of the reasons I took her up on her offer. I wanted to see if Jake Kendall could really remind me of my Uncle Mick so much. If he really did have all that honor and honesty and integrity that you just can’t buy with a three-piece suit.” Amanda was trying so hard, knowing that she wasn’t saying it correctly. It was something so deep in her, so ingrained, that she’d only put it into manuscripts before. “Well, you make me miss him all over again. I just thought you should know that.”
Amanda’s heart thudded. She wrapped her hands into fists and hugged them to her, protecting her from the raw emotion in Jake’s eyes. She’d meant to bridge the gap between them, and somehow had driven them further apart. Something in her words had ravaged him, and she wasn’t sure what. Something ignited a harsh reaction that smelled like grief. He stood before her, the wrench clenched in his hand almost like a weapon, and didn’t answer. And Amanda didn’t know what to do.
“I’m sorry,” she conceded. “I was hoping we could be friends. Maybe noncombatants, anyway. I’ll try and stay out of your way.”
She was turning to go when she heard him move, an abrupt sound, as if he were stumbling to life.
“Where the hell’s Salt Lick?” he demanded.
Amanda didn’t turn back. “West Virginia,” she acknowledged. “It’s just about as big as Lost Ridge, but poorer. Nobody would have been able to afford Stilwell’s.”
“Aren’t you just a little out of place when you go home looking like that?”
Now it was Amanda’s turn. She stopped, lifted her head to the glorious blue of a mountain sky and battled the old pains. “I don’t go home anymore.”
“Ashamed of them?”
She turned on him, but it was pain she saw in his eyes, not challenge.
“They’re all dead,” she said. “And I’ve changed too much for everybody else to be comfortable with me.” She didn’t realize how lonely her smile looked. “They don’t think they can talk to me anymore, now that I’ve left.”
“I can see why,” he countered, “if you show up looking like you do here.”
“I don’t apologize for what I am, Jake. I can’t go back to being barefoot even if I wanted to.”
