Chapter 7
Amanda stalked the early morning hours like a caged animal, her bare feet padding across the hardwood, her one hand holding coffee, the other hand spiking through her hair. The radio was giving out farm reports, and the horses were beginning to wander toward breakfast. It was going to be another beautiful morning, the sky softened with low clouds and the snow line creeping back toward the mountains. It was the kind of morning she liked to stand by a window and watch the world come alive, to wake slowly, like the mist clearing off the meadow.
This morning she had no patience for the mist or the snow. She had no thought for the wonder of nature. This morning she was still awake from last night. She was still locked out of Jake’s room. She was still reeling from the admissions he’d made in the dim, dark hours before dawn.
He wanted her.
Should she have been so surprised? She’d sensed it in him the minute they’d met, that dark desire, like liquid smoke in his eyes, that crackle of tension that leapt between them the minute they got closer than a corral apart. She’d felt it in her chest, like an inflating balloon. She’d felt it in her belly, a slow fire that never quite banked.
She’d admitted it to herself. Even now her palms sweated with it. Her heart stumbled, and her thoughts skittered out of control, harassed by images of Jake threatening to kiss her, his fingers in her hair. Jake battling that horse into submission, his body taut, his eyes sparking fire. Jake standing before her in the darkness, his body draped in shadow, his fury sounding too much like anguish, his hands trembling.
Even so, Amanda still couldn’t quite believe that Jake had said it. Amanda had only known him a matter of days, but she knew the kind of control he kept. Jake was a man who held his thoughts to himself, who held his most special memories locked in his room. He was a man who let his actions speak for him, who had friends and neighbors who respected and liked him, but didn’t really know him.
She’d left. She’d left, and he hadn’t. God, Amanda wished she knew what he’d meant by that. Did he think she’d sold out, somehow? That she wasn’t good enough because she’d tried her best to make her way in the world away from the Appalachians?
How could he? He’d sent his own sisters and brother away. He’d badgered them and bullied them and financed them through the best schools, so that now they were spread over the country.
Amanda was so tired. She was so confused. If only she had somebody to talk to, someone she could trust. But it was another legacy of the traveling years. The closest she’d come to a friendship had been with Lee, and she certainly didn’t want to talk to Jake’s sister about her less than cerebral problem.
If only it were glands, she thought miserably, it might be easier. But it wasn’t. It had gone way past that the moment Jake had first reined in in front of that cabin.
If it were just glands, she would have spent far fewer nights alone in her hotel room in Los Angeles, where the offers hadn’t come with conditions. No, she thought, with a sad shake of her head as she dumped sugar into her latest cup of coffee, there had been conditions. In Los Angeles men had wanted to bed her because of the person she’d become. Jake refused for the same reason.
Sometimes you simply couldn’t win. She couldn’t change, and he undoubtedly wouldn’t, and suddenly Amanda wasn’t at all sure she’d get any more of a chance to discover those secrets he buried beneath all that harsh discipline.
“Has he given you much trouble?”
Amanda shot up so fast she nearly hit her head on the range hood.
“Betty, don’t do that,” she protested, once she could breathe again.
The secretary stepped on into the kitchen, her crepe-soled shoes whispering over the tile. Hanging her coat up in the mud room, she turned for a cup of coffee to find only dregs left. She turned a quizzical eye on Amanda.
Amanda proffered a grimace. “He locked himself in his room about four. For all I know, he could have been dead since four-thirty. No, I take that back. I did hear him cursing in there along about five. I think he was trying to turn over.”
“You mean you haven’t gotten any sleep?”
Amanda lifted her coffee to punctuate. “I was afraid of ambush. You forgot to mention how surly he gets.”
Betty actually looked penitent as she rattled around starting another pot. “It’s the only way I can get people to stay. Jake doesn’t take to being an invalid well.”
“You do have a way with an understatement, Betty. He does this often, doe she?”
The taciturn woman shrugged. “He works with horses that weigh half a ton and sometimes don’t take much to humans. It’s bound to happen once in a while.”
“Well, I hope you have better luck with him than I did,” Amanda retorted, taking a very large sip of coffee. “I couldn’t talk him into taking his medicine or answering any of the questions or even admitting that he hurt.”
“Did you check his pupils, like I said?”
“Don’t be silly. I wasn’t about to get that close.” For more reasons than one, but Betty didn’t need to know about that. Amanda hid her reaction behind another sip of coffee.
She was seeing Jake again, dark and ferocious and overpowering in the throbbing silence of his room. Jake, threatening her composure and invading her sleep. Jake, who didn’t want her here.
Jake, who hid brightly colored magazines back where nobody should be able to find them.
“Y’ know, I was thinking,” she mused as nonchalantly as she could, “with Jake recovering and Lee coming in, maybe they could take some time off and visit Zeke out on that dig he’s doing down at the Navajo reservation. Lee said she hadn’t seen him since the spring.”
Betty’s laughter was a bark of surprise. “Not likely.”
