“Betty, you’re makin’ my head hurt.”
She snorted again.
“I’ll do it,” Amanda offered.
Jake’s head came up fast. It went back down even faster.
“No,” he snapped on the end of a stifled groan. “I don’t need you.”
“I know you don’t,” she acknowledged with a grin she knew he wouldn’t see. “But I’m a bigger sucker for missions of mercy than Lila is.”
“Go find a pagan baby or something. Leave me alone.”
But Betty was already moving. “I’ll show you the girls’ old room,” she said. “You want one of the boys to get you some stuff from the cabin?”
Amanda shook her head, wishing that her chest didn’t feel quite so tight. “I’ll get it before you leave.”
“Nobody’s staying!” Jake yelled without moving.
“Pay no attention to him,” Betty suggested. “He’s bein’ stupid again.”
He’d had better days. He’d had worse ones, too, but that was usually hard to remember at two in the morning. His ribs scraped every time he moved. His head was pounding like a brass band, churning up his stomach and playing havoc with his balance.
Jake had been kicked in the head before, knew what a concussion felt like. Just because he did, didn’t mean he liked it any better. All he had to do was get through the night and back on his feet tomorrow, and the worst would be over. He’d be back on schedule, back in control.
He’d have Amanda back out of his house again.
He wouldn’t smell her faint perfume as she walked by or hear the throaty music of her humming as she clattered away on that computer of hers out in the kitchen. He wouldn’t have to let her pace his room and acquaint herself with his life. He wouldn’t open his eyes to see her smiling at him.
The moon was out, hovering in the sky right outside his window, like an insistent visitor. A quiet reminder of everything he had in his life, the mountains, the pastures, the silent Wyoming sky—and of everything he didn’t have.
“Jake?”
Her whisper was like the breeze through the grass. Even aching and sore and sick, Jake couldn’t help reacting to it. He turned from the moonlight to see her standing next to his bed, her hair tumbling wild and gleaming around her shoulder, her nightgown as white as moonlight in the dim room. He couldn’t quite see her eyes, though. He had to imagine the quick life there, the hungry intelligence that was so like Lee’s, but more formidable. More mesmerizing. More threatening.
“I’m awake,” he said.
“What day is it?”
His smile was wry. Not the question he wanted from a beautiful woman at two o’clock on a moonlit morning.
“The same day I lost that argument with Sidewinder,” he said, rubbing a little at the stitches that still burned across his forehead. It was that or clench his hands together. She moved a little, and her hair drifted like smoke around her pale face. It made him want to winnow his fingers through it, to test the softest skin there at the back of her neck and see what he found when he brushed that pale flannel from her shoulders.
“Where are you?” she asked, just as she had the last two times she’d been in, right on the schedule Betty had seen fit to set up. Time, place and person, something he’d forgotten completely for a minute lying out there on the ground. Amanda had stopped asking who was president along about midnight when Jake had assured her that he didn’t care enough to remember. He wasn’t any more patient this time.
He might have had a lot more success in fighting their little plan if he’d been able to get back up from that table this afternoon without immediately falling into Amanda’s arms. He might have even succeeded then if when they’d asked him what was wrong, he hadn’t been too distracted to answer.
God, her hair had smelled so good.
“At the Beverly Hills Hotel, having drinks by the pool.”
“Jake—”
“Aren’t you a little overdressed for a swim?”
She scowled at him. “I’m the poolside bartender.”
Jake couldn’t help a grin. “Then make mine a double.”
