Silver and Spice

precariously between stones to get out of the stream. Jake was stretched out on the soft, grassy bank, leaning back on his elbows, the sun rinsing a pale yellow in his hair and giving a pewter luster to his eyes as he watched her approach. “What have you got this time?”

She dumped her yield on the growing pile next to him, tossed down the pan, slipped off the boots and collapsed, her head in his lap. “I’m exhausted.”

“I can see why.” Jake respectfully fingered the nugget she’d brought him, then motioned to the rest. “Quite a little cache you’ve accumulated there. A little quartz. A little sylvanite. A little copper. A lot of just plain rock…”

“Plain rock!” she protested, and held one of her treasures to the sun. The gray pebble had a vein of glittery white, as if someone had etched a picture on it, almost in the shape of a tree.

“Definitely not plain rock,” Jake agreed hastily. He tugged her up next to him, his shoulder providing a much better pillow than the unyielding muscles in his thigh. Anne leaned back contentedly, happier yet when Jake’s face leaned over hers, blocking out the ever-beating sun.

“You’re barefoot,” he whispered.

“I know that.”

He shook his head, his fingers aimlessly trying to restore order. “Your hair is a terrible mess.”

“I know that, too.” Jake and immaculate grooming didn’t mesh, not at the intimate level their relationship had established itself on. One had to make allowances for a man who thought a silver filigree necklace looked just as good on bare skin as against a backdrop of expensive fabric.

“You look beautiful, Anne. So very, very lovely…” His finger slowly traced her profile, from her forehead to her lips. His eyes were suddenly grave on hers, as grave as she’d ever seen them. “Ready to go back down that killer road?”

Ready to face some semblance of reality?

Anne shook her head, instantly feeling uncomfortable pricklings. She wanted to stay here with Jake, making love day and night, eating and laughing with him in their private meadow high in the mountains… She wanted to savor every remaining minute of her two weeks with him. At the end of that time-she refused to think about that. Her heart knew only that she wanted to treasure every second, every moment, that she didn’t even want to waste time sleeping.

“I’ve got more to show you,” he whispered persuasively. “Some people I want you to meet, and then we’ll go to Coeur d’Alene, Anne. I have something very special to show you there.”

“Do you have business to take care of?” she inquired carefully. “Because I could stay here, Jake. You can go do whatever you have to do-”

“Nope.” He lurched up to a standing position and reached for her hand. “We’ll come back here, Anne.” He pulled her next to him…very close to him, thigh to thigh. “But I’d like to think I can keep my hands off you, for a few hours at least.”

Two hours later, as they got into his Jeep, Anne looked behind her, memorizing the valley and the stream and the look of the mountains in Jake’s ghost town. She had the sudden stricken thought that she would never see it again.

Chapter 11

“Shouldn’t you have called them, Jake? It’s not polite to drop in on people when they don’t know you’re coming…” Anne smoothed down her skirt, a houndstooth A-line paired with a black short-sleeved cashmere sweater. Her hands were still shaking from the harrowing ride down the mountain. Belted into the Jeep, she’d felt as if she were riding on the Ferris wheel at a carnival, only at suicidal speeds.

“Reed and Carla wouldn’t know what to do if someone called them ahead of time before dropping in. They’re not mere friends, Anne, more like adopted family. Reed was the one who filled me in when I came here, told me everything about the area.”

“But what if they’re not home?” She snatched her purse and stepped out of the Jeep as Jake did.

“It’s Thursday night.” Jake took her arm as they followed a narrow cobblestone walk. They had left the Jeep behind a gas station; there was no other place to park. The narrow streets of Wallace barely allowed room for drivers, much less parking spots, and as she’d already noticed, there was no room to put additional parking space unless it was carved out of a mountainside. “Thursday night?” she echoed back.

“Reed’s a big believer in celebrating the day before Friday.”

She chuckled, picturing the character of Jake’s friend rather clearly. But she still felt a little uncomfortable as they started walking. Three tiers of wood-frame houses climbed the hillside to their left, accessible only by stairs. More than half of them, Jake had already told her, were over a century old. Which was interesting, just as she found the whole town of Wallace interesting, but the feeling of being a fish out of water wouldn’t leave her. This was a long way from the world and the people she knew. It wasn’t that she was shy of meeting strangers, she told herself, straightening her sweater for the third time. It was just…she was shy of meeting strangers. She always had been. There had been too many strangers in her life. Her mothers’ husbands, the staff and classmates at each new school… “Jake,” she said hesitantly.

He stopped on the walk, turning toward her with a smile. Dressed in jeans and a blue-striped shirt, he looked irrepressibly Jake, casual and comfortable no matter what he wore.

“I’m dressed wrong,” she said unhappily.

Those shaggy eyebrows of his flickered up, perusing the soft black sweater and impeccable houndstooth skirt. “You look terrific.”

“And…silly. The thing is, when I packed to come with you-”

His hand curled around hers. “Honey, when you’re alone with me, I like you without clothes. When you’re with other people, you dress the way you feel comfortable. Your natural style is more formal than mine, which is perfectly fine. Is it any more complicated than that?”

Not when he put it that way, although Anne had the fleeting thought that a fashion designer would blacklist Jake for life. They climbed to the third tier of houses and stopped at the doorway of a tall, dark green two-story house. The man who answered the door had jowls like a basset hound’s, big, warm, friendly eyes, a thatch of unruly black-gray hair, and a can of beer in his hand. “Jake! I didn’t expect you back for another week at least. And you, darlin’-”

“Anne,” she supplied, already smiling at the homely, cordial features of the big-shouldered man.

“Anne,” he echoed, shooting a stern look at Jake, and threw an arm around her shoulder as he led her inside. “Carla. We’re getting a divorce!” he shouted to someone in another room.

“How about next Tuesday?” a feminine voice shouted back to him.

He paid no attention, his eyes on Anne as he gave her a bear-type hug. “You’re a lot prettier than he ever let on,” Jake’s friend told her, and leveled another threatening stare over her shoulder. “You could have brought her any day but Thursday, when we might have had a chance to get to know her.”

“Anne can cope with the crowd,” Jake assured him.

Reed took it upon himself to ensure that Anne felt comfortable, introducing himself before he rattled off another eight names…eight, nine, ten…of the other people gathered in the two rooms she could see. A beer can was placed in her hand, and just as promptly taken away.

“The ladies are having cherry punch,” a redheaded wisp of a woman informed Reed. She wiped her hands on a dish towel as she rose up on tiptoe to kiss Jake. Rapidly, she scolded a child for turning the sound too high on a TV set in another room, and then extricated Anne from the bearlike grip of her husband. “I’m Carla, Reed’s wife, if you haven’t already guessed. Come on into the kitchen with me. You can’t enter a whole houseful of strange people and sit down by yourself. Who are you going to talk to? I always feel terrible when I have to do that. Reed, you big oaf, bring her some punch. Oh, wait, maybe you’d rather have beer…”

“Punch is fine,” Anne assured her, preferring something nonalcoholic. She added immediately, “But anything is fine.”

“That’s exactly how I feel when I’m making potato salad,” Carla agreed with an impish grin. “I hate making