“So, can I, huh? Can I go to the movies, Jake?” Lee prodded.
Jake all but snarled, “Make it a double feature.”
“With Tommy?” she teased, getting up to give her brother a kiss. “I’m sure something could be worked out.”
He just sighed as she trotted out of the room.
Amanda refilled their coffee and sat back down. “I’m amazed you don’t have more gray hair.”
Jake scowled. “I don’t have any gray hair.”
“Of course you do,” Lee assured him, sweeping back into the kitchen with jeans jacket and purse in hand. “You got it when you taught me to drive. Can I have the pickup?”
“Take the Jimmy,” Jake told her. “I don’t trust you in my good truck.”
“His good truck,” Lee gloated over to Amanda as she slipped into her jacket and bent to kiss her brother goodbye in one fluid movement. “That truck’s damn near as old as I am.”
“And where did you start using language like that?” he demanded. “You learn that from Amanda, too?”
“Heck, no,” Lee assured him, already at the door for quick escape. “Hers is much more colorful. I learned mine from you.”
He barely lasted long enough for Lee to get out the door before he began pacing. Amanda kept her seat in the kitchen, ostensibly concentrating on her coffee and the last few crumbs of the cake she kept picking at as she listened to the retreating growl of the Jimmy and the agitated echo of boots trailing up and down the floor.
She should go back up to the cabin. She should have never come down, wouldn’t have if Lee hadn’t been so adamant. The tension couldn’t get worse in the house unless Gen and Zeke walked in.
Amanda knew that just her presence was forcing Jake to a decision. She knew what he had to overcome to get there. She knew the dread of humiliation he battled. So she sipped her coffee and watched a flock of birds sail across the mottled, gilded sky and waited there if he needed her, aching for him with a fierce regret that could never show on her face.
“I can’t live like this,” he suddenly announced from the doorway.
Amanda looked up to see the naked pain in his eyes and got to her feet. “Wanna talk?”
He shook his head. He dragged his hands through his hair. “I think you need to leave.”
She went very still. “Tonight?”
Jake faced her, and Amanda saw the weight of his decision, saw the urge to flee, the fear, the anger, the hurt. “For good. I can’t keep this up, Amanda, with you here every day. I’m having trouble enough just knowing that you…that you know. But trying to go on pretending that nothing’s changed—” He shook his head again, his movements jerky and desperate. “I can’t even face Lee anymore.”
Amanda walked up to him, needing to be close, wishing desperately for the right words to get him past this point—to get them both past it.
“She knows something’s wrong,” Amanda told him. “They all do.”
“Well, hell, of course they do. I’ve been as surly as Sidewinder since she’s been home.”
Amanda shook her head. “Not just now,” she retorted softly. “They’ve felt it for a long time now. Lee told me that they’re all worried about you.”
Jake spun on his heel and headed back into the living room. Amanda followed, keeping a careful distance. He didn’t need to be crowded right now. He needed to be helped.
“It doesn’t matter,” he argued, stopping over by the dark fireplace, his head down, his hands clenched. “I can’t do it.”
“What can’t you do?” Amanda asked gently, her own hands clasped together to keep them to herself. God, how she wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and nestle his head against her where he’d be safe, where he’d be protected and comforted. But that was the last thing Jake Kendall would be able to stand right now. “Learn?”
“I can’t face them,” he admitted, his voice raw with anguish. “I can’t—I look at Lee here now, and I see that the hard work I’ve done with her is paying off. She’s smart and sassy and independent. But how can I send her back out into the world with the knowledge that I’ve been lying to her all these years?”
“Jake,” Amanda protested. “She loves you. She’d do anything to see you happy, don’t you understand?”
“No,” he argued, swinging around on her. “Youdon’t understand. I can’t stand the idea of seeing the look on her face when she finds out that I haven’t been able to read one of the letters she’s sent me. Not one. Not even the cards she wrote me in school and those little notes she used to slip into my dresser when she thought I wasn’t looking. I still don’t know what those ever said!”
“Don’t you want the chance to read her letters now?” Amanda challenged. “And Gen’s and Zeke’s?”
