Jake didn’t catch up with her until she was in the motor home, reaching in a drawer for her hair dryer. Her hair was drenched and took a long time to dry.
Jake took the dryer from her hand and dried her hair for her. Over the steady whine of the hair dryer, she gradually calmed down, not really from discipline but rather from exhaustion. If Jake had said one word…but he said nothing at all. Once her hair was dry, he pulled a nightgown over her head, helped her into the upper berth and tucked her into her own pink comforter. “You’re not going home,” he whispered. “I know exactly what you have in mind at the end of the two weeks, Anne-leaving. All right-if that’s how you feel then. But you’re not going home before the two weeks are up. Hear me?”
She heard him.
Chapter 7
Lazily, Anne’s lashes fluttered open. A thin band of sunlight stole through the curtains surrounding her upper berth. The droning of the engine told her that the motor home was on the road. Groggily, she rolled over, tugging her comforter with her, and with a sleepy yawn parted the curtains enough to see out.
The rich, black farmland and the cornfields had disappeared, as had the gentle, long rolls of western Iowa. Pale wheat now stretched along both sides of the serpentine road, except where a gnarled gray butte jutted up from nowhere. The arid landscape was strangely colorless, stark and bleak. Fences suggested cattle land, yet she saw no sign of life. Or houses. Or even trees… Then suddenly a clump of cottonwoods whizzed by as Jake took a curve. The trees were beaten and bent by the kind of wind Anne could only imagine might blow through here and never stop.
She climbed down from the bunk and went to stand behind Jake. “Good Lord, where are we? How on
“Since two this morning. I had in mind your seeing the Badlands by dawn, but couldn’t quite make that. On the other hand, you slept in to just about the right time.” His eyes flickered up to meet her gaze in the rearview mirror, and he immediately flashed her a crooked smile. “When you get around to it, I’d sell my soul for a cup of coffee.”
“Would you, now?” She yawned and shook herself sleepily, still half immersed in the crazy dream she’d awakened from. She’d been standing stark-naked in a room, explaining to the silver-eyed rogue in front of her the futility of investing in high-risk, low-yield stocks, and he’d been listening, dressed in a gray flannel suit, interrupting her only to mention that he wanted to live in a two-story brick house in the country. She yawned again. The dream vaguely irritated her. She expected even her unconscious to have better sense, and Freud could take a hike.
Her bare toes sank into the lush blue carpet as Anne rapidly disappeared into the bathroom, splashed her face with cool water and stared sleepy-eyed at the mouth that had all but begged Jake to take her the night before. She splashed more cold water on her face.
Distress didn’t seem to wash off that easily. The lingering image of the child who had appeared toward the end of the dream was even more disturbing. A little boy with Jake’s special eyes… Anne compressed her lips. Old pains were very good erasers; so was an intense determination to make sure no child of hers would ever experience the insecurities and instabilities that had marked her own childhood. Hurriedly, she ran a brush through her hair. Last night had been a narrow escape, but she
A few moments later, she removed a steaming cup of coffee from the microwave oven, set it in the console next to Jake, then moved rapidly back to get her own cup. “I’ll drive for a while,” she called to him. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”
“Stop worrying about your clothes and come here.”
She brought her cup, vaguely miffed at the order, very definitely startled that the man’s attitude this morning so blatantly lacked the lover’s seductive skill of the night before, and peered out the window where he motioned. Rather abruptly, she sank down in the passenger seat. The wheat fields, just that quickly, had changed again.
The road ran precariously along a ledge high above a bottomless gorge that yawned threateningly below them. Pink cliffs lined the lonely horizon with strange, contrasting striated lines of crimson and yellow. Pinnacles and buttes jutted up from the gorge below, some shaped like needle-slim knives aimed skyward. In places, the limestone was formed into mystical castles, complete with turrets and waterless moats. In other places, the wind had worn perfect circular holes, caves or giant mushroom-shaped ledges into the rock. The twisting gorge seemed to gnarl and turn for endless miles; the knifelike peaks stretched high, and the sun streaming onto those desolate rock formations brought out a rainbow spectrum of colors. Pink and blue and green, colors that didn’t belong in rock.
“This is one of my favorite places on earth,” Jake murmured. He reached for his coffee, glancing only once at her. Through shuttered eyes, he took in the high-necked flannel nightgown, the fair hair loosely coiled over one shoulder, the complexion all rose and cream. Before her nerves could register that intimate perusal, he was turning away. “The Sioux called this land Mako Sica-Bad Land-but they found a harmony with it. The white settlers in such a hurry to get across to find their gold and silver must have called it hell-those that survived.”
Anne held her cup in both hands to keep the coffee from spilling as Jake negotiated the twisting uphill road. She immediately decided that this landscape was one of her least favorite places on earth. The land was terrifying, with its gutted hollows and lonely spires. She couldn’t imagine how any living thing could survive here. No trees, no water, rock faces too steep to climb; just endless mazes of stone in shadow.
Yet, mesmerized, she couldn’t seem to turn away from the window. The colors were incredible, strata of almost bright pink and yellow. The rock formed men and elephants and buildings, and almost any other shape the mind could imagine.
“All kinds of dinosaurs used to romp around here,” Jake remarked. “Fox-sized horses and saber-toothed cats, too. Three thousand years ago, nomads hunted this land, finding caves where they could build their fires for the night… Would you like to get out?”
Intrigued, she nodded, and set down her cup. When he pulled the motor home to the side of the road, she reached for the door handle.
“Anne?”
She glanced back.
“There’s very little chance we’ll run into anyone, and it certainly doesn’t matter to me. But you might want to put on shoes, honey.”
She let go of the door handle as if it were a hot potato. “I was hardly going outside in my nightgown.”
“Of course you weren’t.”
Six and a half minutes later, she emerged flushed and breathless from the back door, wearing a red turtleneck sweater tucked into navy wool culottes, nylons and a pair of sturdy walking shoes. She had twisted her hair hastily into the untidiest coil she’d ever accomplished in her life, and her makeup consisted only of blusher and lipstick. She was exceedingly pleased with what she’d achieved in six minutes; Jake’s responsive chuckle was unnerving. “Break down and tell me the truth, now, Anne. Do you even own a pair of jeans?”
“Where I grew up, you didn’t travel in jeans,” she said flatly, thoroughly irritated that her appearance didn’t pass muster. It was useless to remember that she’d deliberately packed with the thought of playing stiff, formal lady to Jake’s devil-may-care vagabond, because at the moment she felt distinctly like a violinist at a rock concert. Truthfully, jeans wouldn’t have helped her anyway. She could never fit in here as Jake so easily did, with his hands on denim-clad hips against a backdrop of those jagged peaks, up and down, up and down, like sharp Ms across the sky. With his silvery hair and stubborn square chin and rugged profile, Jake could easily have been one of the original pioneers…the kind who made it.
He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward a steep rock formation.
“Look,” she started unhappily.
“Now don’t get all touchy. I love your taste in clothes. I only make fun because you just beg to be teased. Are
