you wearing the camisole I gave you?”
“I returned it,” she snapped through gritted teeth. “I told you that.”
“Fib. I saw it buried in your bottom drawer when I was helping you pack-or trying to. You brought it along, didn’t you?”
One of Jake’s many character flaws was that he thought he knew so much. Anne declined to answer. He started to climb, and she followed silently. The land was veined like old leather, oddly giving beneath her feet, the dusty yellow soil like hard-packed sand but without substance beneath. She reached out and clutched his hand, only because instinct kept telling her that somehow the land wouldn’t hold her. Jake moved like an animal, sure-footed and silent, leading them into a crevice between two steep rock walls. For Anne, it was a far different kind of exercise than standing in line to buy tickets to a symphony concert.
“Look,” Jake said suddenly.
She looked, and backed promptly into the wall of his chest. She was staring at a set of teeth embedded in the rock.
“Fossils are all over this route,” Jake commented, clearly fascinated by the dental display. He tugged at her hand. “There are a thousand things I’d like to tell you about this place, but we haven’t got much time. Idaho’s still five hundred miles from here, and I’m determined to get there in the next twenty-four hours. But you have to see this-”
What he evidently wanted her to see was a ledge where one step in the wrong direction could result in an instant plunge of several hundred feet. Wonderful view, Anne thought fleetingly. They seemed to be in hell. Jake’s arms draped around her waist and pulled her back against him, providing the only familiar, solid thing to hold on to anywhere in sight. Her eyes skimmed over the scene. Barren cliffs dropped below to a gaunt, lonely terrain of scalloped ridges and mystical shapes. Fire could have raced through this land and never made a difference. Fire, ice, storm…
Jake loved this land? She hated it. It was just one more example of the differences between them… She suddenly caught sight of a single flower, a purple burst of softness growing from a crack in the rock. Then she had a glimpse of the strange prism of rainbow colors on the cliffs, breathtakingly brilliant hues accented by sun and shade.
Jake’s chin nuzzled the crown of her head. “I’ve heard many stories about this place. A group of people were trying to cross here around a century ago, and they didn’t have enough water. They buried two of their party in the sand up to their necks, to preserve what body moisture they had.” His arms tightened around her waist. “They survived, Anne, but that’s what it took to survive.”
She shuddered expressively, leaning back closer against him.
“Then there was an outlaw named Joaquin,” Jake drawled. “He hated miners. His bride was Antonia, a sweet, innocent, lovely woman. While he was out one day, a group of miners assaulted his wife. Joaquin was very young, Anne, not more than twenty, and he turned killer after that, killer and thief, with a reputation that surpassed that of any other outlaw in the West.” Jake hesitated. “I think of that story every time I come back out here.”
An icy chill touched her spine. “Not a very cheerful tale, is it? Thank heavens that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”
“And we’re all civilized now?” Jake shook his head as he slowly turned her around to face him. “You think so, Anne? He was a man alone in a hostile world, who saw only one way to get back at life. I can understand that,” he said quietly, holding her closer. “Haven’t you ever felt helpless? Powerless to control things that were happening to you? As a little kid, didn’t you ever feel rage that people were hurting you and you couldn’t stop them?”
“No. Of course not.” She slipped quickly from his arms and started the climb down to the motor home. Suddenly, she couldn’t get inside the vehicle fast enough. The land was damned. Desolate and hostile, the kind of place that bred outlaws. She wanted her peppermint tea and a twentieth-century chair and a reassuring book about stocks and bonds. She stepped up and into the motor home, out of breath. Only Jake would be demented enough to see a similarity between the feelings of some long-dead outlaw and those of an innocent child.
Some minutes later, Jake silently vaulted into the driver’s seat, and they headed back onto the road. After a time, Anne moved up to the passenger seat with a fresh cup of tea warming her hands. She kept as silent as he was. From nowhere, she had a sudden mental image of a five-year-old girl, green-eyed and blond and innocent… desperately shaking her most precious doll.
It was the day her dad died, a memory buried so deep she hadn’t known it was still there. As a little girl she’d had no idea how to deal with so much anger.
Rage had no place in Anne’s adult life; she’d put all that behind her. Everything had changed, anyway, once her grandmother had taken her in. Jennie Blake was stern but loving, a wonderfully strong woman whose home had been a haven. Anne had clung to the stability of household rules and discipline as to a lifeline. There was no more helpless anger. But Jake had touched some very old scars just now, reopened some very deep wounds…
Jake’s eyes suddenly flashed to hers, a flicker of dark gray compassion, of the kind of understanding that was just part of Jake. “Maybe I
“I thought you would.” He turned back to the road. “You weren’t the only one buffeted around as a child, honey.”
She averted her eyes, painfully aware of what different roads they’d taken to overcome those uncertain beginnings. “You look tired,” she said briskly. “Don’t you think it’s time I took a turn at the wheel?”
She drove all afternoon. Jake slept in the back of the motor home. And all afternoon, she was haunted by images of his young outlaw. The one who was so very much in love with his innocent, sweet wife. And she thought of Jake, who’d never cared if he had two nickels to rub together…but heaven help anyone who tried to harm anything he
Buttes gave way to steep hills by midafternoon. A huge, low violet cloud ahead of her kept growing larger on the horizon, as the road continued to dip and curve and climb. Only late in the afternoon did she realize that it wasn’t a cloud at all, but mountains that reached for the sky in front of her, snow-peaked and craggy, proud and royal purple.
“We’ll be in the heart of the Bighorns by nightfall.” Jake suddenly yawned from behind her, then moved forward to crouch down on his haunches between the seats. “Would you believe there’s snow predicted in the Bighorns tonight, yet it’ll be seventy degrees tomorrow in Idaho? That’s
She didn’t particularly feel ready for anything. This strange, unpredictable landscape frightened her, evoked odd and uncomfortable feelings. Awareness of things she hadn’t thought of in years, didn’t really want to think of…yet her eyes were captivated by those mountains, and she risked a quick glance at Jake after maneuvering the motor home around a treacherous turn. “
He was.
Jake drove two forked sticks into the ground, then took out a pocket knife and started to whittle the bark off the spit that was to lie between them. The fire, dancing and crackling, was waiting for him. “The thing with yellow- jacket soup,” he said gravely, “is to find the yellow jackets’ ground nest when it’s full of grubs. And this is all going to be very difficult to explain if you don’t wipe that cheeky grin off your face.”
“I’m so sorry.” Anne’s eyes flashed merriment. “Most recipes start with ‘Preheat the oven,’ but all right, Jake. Then what?”
“You’re imagining it,” she assured him.
“How are you coming there?”
