Amanda tried not to stumble over the sick dread in her stomach. “What?” she asked. “You don’t like it?”
But Jake was already shaking his head. “There’s more to it than Chinese food and New York, Amanda, and you damn well know it. Don’t you understand yet? I can’t give you the life you want.”
Amanda’s heart threatened to stop. “Who says?”
He glared at her, his armor thick, his anger old. “Are you prepared to spend your life with a man who can’t talk about any more than a horse’s bloodline? Who hasn’t been out of town in five years, even to see his own sisters and brother? Who wouldn’t be able to go with you to your award ceremonies or sit in your classes or even stand up with you at a party of people who are important to you? You might fit into my life, Amanda, but I don’t fit into yours.”
“I want you there, Jake.”
The chair scraped in protest as Jake lurched to his feet. “But I don’t belong there,” he insisted, tall, rigid, threatening. “I’m a rancher, damn it, not some literary critic. Just what do you think would happen when you try and tell me all about the plays you saw, or the books you read or the research you were doing? Do you think I could really talk to you about those? Do you think I’d even know what the hell you were talking about?”
“A step at a time,” she begged, hands on the table, desperate to stand, knowing her legs wouldn’t hold her. Terrified of the next few minutes. “Please, Jake. Just don’t say no.”
“What do you want me to say?” he demanded, and she heard the raw ache in his voice. “That I’d be happy embarrassing you for the rest of your life?”
Thatdidbring her to her feet. “Embarrassing me?” she retorted, sincerely outraged. “Jake Kendall, I never want to hear that from you as long as you live.”
“Look at me,” he challenged, the bowls on the table clinking at his sudden movement. “I don’t own a suit, Amanda. I’ve never owned a pair of shoes that didn’t have pointed toes and heels for riding. I drive around in a fifteen-year-old pickup truck with a gun rack in the back.’
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I do!”
That was when Amanda knew there was no turning back. Jake pulled away from the table and stalked off, and she knew he was hiding from her. Hiding the shame he’d hidden for so long. Hiding the truth that he thought she couldn’t bear. She followed right after him, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor, her heart slamming into her ribs.
“Answer me one question,” she said, both of them faltering to a stop by the fireplace, where the molten light softened the stark emptiness of a room decorated in denial.
He refused to turn to her. She kept her distance, the sight of his taut, dark features tearing at her.
“What?”
And so she asked, “Do you love me?”
For a moment, silence held suspended between them. The world slowed to an uneasy pause, the air in the house heavy and still, the fire the only punctuation. Amanda could barely hear it for the blood rushing in her ears.
And then, Jake answered. “Yes,” he said, the raw torment in his voice more answer than his words. “I love you, Amanda.”
She should have wilted with relief. The tension still mounted, inexorably, stifling her, stealing her air. “Then sit down with me for a minute. I have a confession to make.”
Jake turned on her, his hard eyes gleaming oddly in the half light, his jaw hard enough to shatter a glass. Amanda reached out a hand to that jaw, tested its strength, its defiance. To fortify herself on the hard, proud life it protected.
“Please,” she asked again, gently, simply.
He surrendered to her plea and lifted a hand to hers. His hand trembled, too. His heart thundered just as hard. Amanda thought her heart would break now, even before she did what she’d come to do. She didn’t have the strength for this, not again, not with this man who was the sum and total of a well-deserved pride.
They sat together on the couch, Jake still silent and formal, Amanda folded into herself, trying to gather her courage.
“I found your magazines,” she said, not quite brave enough to face him. “The ones you hide in your room.”
The silence shifted, chilled. Amanda wanted to shut her eyes from it. From him.
“So?”
She took a breath. “You remember my telling you about how much you remind me of my Uncle Mick?” she asked. “Well, Uncle Mick used to keep magazines.National Geographies.He loved to look at the pictures of the world, places he knew he’d never see. He said that it was going to be the best he could manage. He kept those magazines like a prized collection in a gallery, and knew just what pictures were in each one. I’d walk into his house and find him fingering those pictures like he could transport himself there just by touching them.”
Amanda fought the words, the poignancy of old memories, the fear of a tenuous future. She curled her hands in her lap, holding on to her purpose like a gift clasped in sweaty palms for a very special guest. And then, because she knew she had to, she turned to face Jake with the rest.
“Uncle Mick used to have me do his writing for him. Applications, letters, things like that. He said he had terrible handwriting, and if you ever saw his signature, you’d believe it. He couldn’t read from a book to me because his eyes were bad and he just kept forgetting to get in to town to get glasses. Uncle Mick never went anywhere,” she said, seeing the dawning apprehension in Jake’s eyes and dying inside, “not even into Wheeling, because he said that crowds bothered him.” Jake knew what she was going to say before she said it. Amanda said it, anyway. “I was fifteen before I realized that the reason he’d never gone anywhere was because he couldn’t read the street signs. He was trapped in a little town of a hundred people, on a farm where he couldn’t raise anything, by a problem he was too ashamed to admit.”
Jake’s facade was crumbling, and beneath it Amanda saw the most terrible grief, a raw, frightening kind of shame she’d never known, even walking into class that first day at university with her secondhand dress and West Virginia accent. Desperate to reach out to him, to let him know how she felt, still Amanda held herself apart, knowing that that more than anything else in the world would shove him away.
“Nobody knows,” she said, her voice soft. “Do they?”
She held her breath for reprieve, and in the end, got none. Jake’s eyes iced over and his voice carried her sentence. “That I’m illiterate? No, Amanda. Nobody knows. Now, if you’re quite finished, I think it’s time to go.”
