quartz. The ore’s rich-it’s where I got the silver your necklace is made from-but it yields only a few ounces of silver for every ton of ore. That’s why…”
Jake stepped into the dark hollow in the mountain, still holding Anne’s hand. As she followed him, she shivered suddenly in the cold, dank air. He released her hand and took a lantern from a hook. She watched him light it and hold it high so that they could see the passageway ahead of them.
“Are you listening, Anne?”
“Yes.” She was listening, though not entirely to the lecture on silver. She was listening to a side of Jake she’d never heard before. Nothing in heaven or on earth could convince her that silver would provide a practical, stable livelihood, but for the moment that wasn’t the point. For a man who had roamed lackadaisically from one project to another all his life, Jake clearly had learned a great deal about Idaho…and silver.
He’d changed, she thought fleetingly. Or had she misunderstood the man in the past? She watched his face, so full of animation, his silvery eyes picking up the flickering reflections from the lantern’s light. She couldn’t possibly follow everything he was talking about. “They grind it into dust…loosen it from the rock, submerge it in tanks of foaming water… Tailings…ash-gray sludge…then the refinery process…” He was really irresistibly handsome, all shoulders in the chamois shirt, all lithe grace and tawny head and sheer brazen male every time he moved.
Finally, Jake stopped leading her through the labyrinthine passageway with its floor of small, gritty rocks. “There.” He motioned.
Her eyes were reluctantly diverted from his profile to the strange walls of the cave. She’d been so busy, between studying Jake and trying to keep from stumbling on the uneven ground, that she had really barely looked at their surroundings.
Moisture dripped slowly down the rough, craggy walls. When Jake lifted the lantern just so, the inside of his mountain took on color-the greenish gleam of copper, the translucent sheen of marble, the threads of pale yellow, and last-and brightest-a long streak of pure silver.
“If there were lead in the vein, the silver would have shown up as black. That’s why I wanted you to see it pure, Anne.”
Tentatively, she reached out to touch the gleaming vein. The cave was dark and damp and claustrophobic…but the silver thread beneath her fingers felt soft, smooth and uniquely alive. Its pure beauty didn’t belong here at all. Unwillingly, she felt Jake’s enthusiasm suddenly catch up with her. Not that she would ever, ever become involved in anything so foolhardy…
Jake hung the lantern on a hook in the cave’s ceiling and turned Anne to face him, capturing the fingers that had been slowly following the silver vein. “You’re catching it, aren’t you?” he murmured. Laughter was in his eyes, laughter…and something else. He pulled her arms around his neck and leaned down to touch his forehead to hers. “Silver fever. Not the greed
Anne shook her head, suddenly feeling shaky. “Jake-”
“We’re only talking about silver, Anne. And mountains. Relax.” He tipped her face up, and lowered his lips to hers, pulling her into the promise of riches he offered. Not silver, not metals, not wealth, but adventure and softness and wild, wild dreams… Her fingers got lost in the thick texture of his hair, splaying on his scalp, pulling him closer. She rose up on tiptoe in the oversized boots; the silky Victorian blouse molded ever so willingly to his chest.
A kiss intended as a moment’s sharing seemed to change its mind. Jake’s arms tightened on her back, moving slowly down the supple shape of her. She no longer felt the chill of the cave. Silver was running in her veins. Molten silver, smooth and hot and shiny. And suddenly Jake was kissing her again, over and over, rough, drugging kisses.
Her hands traced the feel of sinew and flesh, from his neck to his spine to the small of his back. As though some wanton fire had bewitched them, her fingers tightened on his hips, inviting the intimacy, deliberately provocative.
So slowly his lips lifted from hers, his eyes never leaving her face. His profile would have looked jagged and harsh if those eyes hadn’t been filled with the same warm wanting as her own. “No more waiting, Anne,” he said quietly.
It was very definitely a statement, not a question. She couldn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. He smoothed back her hair, his expression grave.
The touch of his palm was suddenly possessive and disturbing. She reached for his wrist and dragged his hand down to his side. “You know more about futures and margins than I do, don’t you, Jake? Yet you let me talk on and on.”
A spark of humor glinted in his eyes. They both relaxed. “Now, Anne. I never-”
“Don’t you
“I did that?” He made the effort to look surprised. “Maybe the lady was always a little too serious. Maybe it was fun to incite her to laughter, to shock her just a little.” He reached up for the lantern. “And keeping in character, honey, I think it’s time we hit my ghost town.”
His ghost town was perfectly awful.
Anne stood with hands on slim hips, staring in all directions around her. The drive from the mine to here hadn’t taken long, just twenty minutes of suicidal hairpin turns-she was getting used to those-and then a cow path behind another fence. A steel fence this time, marked well and locked. Anne pivoted to face him. “You actually live here for weeks at a time?” she questioned casually.
Jake, his hands lazily jammed into his jeans pockets, had found a shady chestnut to lean against, out of the hot sun. His face was in shadow, though she knew he was watching her. “This is where I generally set up the motor home, yes. Weekends I drive the Jeep back and forth to Coeur d’Alene, and during the week when I can, but it’s not always possible.” He paused. “Rugby was the name of this town. It lived and died all within the decade of the 1890s. About the 1920s there was a short revival. Didn’t last long.” Jake gestured. “I own the whole town, from that crag-” he gestured again “-to that peak.”
Her heart sank. Perhaps unconsciously Anne had been praying for a miracle, a place she could live in, particularly after realizing that Jake was seriously committed to his silver.
The meadow was lovely. Lush, low grasses whispered in the sun. The town was high…so high that the pure air almost hurt her lungs, so high that the tree-softened peaks on all sides of their private little valley seemed part of the sky. Clouds were touchably close. A gurgling stream rushed near her feet, the sun glinting clearly on its stone bed, and aspens clustered near Jake’s chestnut tree. Their leaves were tinged with gold and fluttered even without a breeze, showing off their gilded decorations.
It was almost a magical place, and the three structures standing in the distance only added to that mystical quality. As ghost towns went, this was no metropolis. One of the frame structures housed Jake’s Jeep. The other two were as old and as ghostly and deserted as the rest of the town. Both were two-story frame buildings, with wildflowers clustered near their doors, creeping over the windows as if they had slowly but surely decided to hide the buildings completely, along with their owners’ secrets. Anne itched to explore, to get inside the buildings and imagine what it must have felt like to be the wife of a miner, to know that her dreams depended on the secrets of those mountains…
Reality was knowing it was forty miles down to the corner grocery store-forty miles down that killer road. Neighbors, schools, culture-even a drive-in movie-simply weren’t. The water from the stream was undoubtedly pure and delicious, if one wanted to lug buckets of it from the stream to the house. Electricity might reach the area in the next century. The landscape was lovely, yes, and ideal for a nature girl who delighted in stepping outside in the
