Silver and Spice

far too painfully…but his lips were so warm, brushing over and over on hers until they trembled, until they parted and his mouth molded itself to hers and his tongue slipped inside. God, she’d missed him. No one had ever even come close to filling the emptiness but Jake. Love, hate, frustration, laughter and sheer wild passion…a thousand emotions were involved in her feelings for her roguish wolf, only half of them pleasant, none of them comfortable, not one of them having the least thing to do with the well-ordered life in which she took such pride and satisfaction.

No, Anne, moaned her very rational brain, which was an expert on survival. Her hands refused to listen, slowly running up his arms, reexploring the mold of his shoulder muscles before she allowed her fingers to curl up in his thick, springy hair. Some of the tension left his body when he felt her acquiesce; his lips again softened on hers.

“I’m never leaving without you again,” he murmured. “Hear me, Anne, because you’re going with me…”

She couldn’t hear anything; in a resounding rush, her heart was pounding out a song she’d heard many times…but never with this particular chorus. Never with this particular need to force his lips back to hers, this ache for the claim of his hand on her breast, this fierce resentment of the intrusion of clothes. She’d thought she would never see him again. The last time, she’d told him never to come back, and meant it. Jake knew she’d meant it. Only now, like a crocus bursting through snow, she felt vulnerable and full of life again and reaching for sunlight and desperately unwilling to let go even for a moment…

“So sweet,” he whispered. “So sweet, Anne.”

His lips dipped into the hollow of her neck and his breath tickled her throat, warm and whispery. His thighs rubbed against hers in an evocative dance. Every movement he made increased the rush of sensations in her body, even his evening beard that chafed like crushed velvet against her soft skin. His hands swept up and down her spine as he trailed haunting slow kisses along the side of her neck. When his lips sought hers again, she was waiting. The pressure she returned was wanton, her fingers raking up through his hair, a fierce, racing, desperate cry of need escaping from her. How she loved this man! How she had longed for the look of him, for his touch and smell and sound and taste… She could feel his pleasure at her ardent response as intimately as she could feel the unmistakable pressure of his arousal against her abdomen. She’d denied her loneliness for so long…too long.

A flush of heat touched her cheeks as his eyes met hers, all silver, all pagan shine. Far too slowly, he wrapped his fingers in her hair to nudge the strands aside. His knuckles grazed the nape of her neck as he sought the hooks at the back of her gown. In a moment, she was naked to the waist.

The next moment he had gathered her so close that neither of them could breathe. Her arms locked around his neck; her lips burrowed in his throat. “This time,” he whispered fiercely, “you’re going to marry me, Anne. This time the ball’s in my court…”

Marry… The word stung like the lash of a whip. Her passion chilled with lightning speed. Shaking, Anne jerked back from him, snatching for the front of her gown. “Dammit, Jake…” Normally it took two fingers to handle the hooks and eyes; now she seemed to have ninety and still couldn’t manage it. “Damn you.” She held the gown up with one hand. Feeling sick and furious, she could barely look him in the eyes. “You started that. You know I never meant to-”

“Yes,” he said shortly, and tugged her trembling cheek to his ruffled shirt front, managing the hooks and eyes himself. When he stepped back from her, he was oddly still, his body radiating none of the tension and frustration that were pulsating through her own. The watchful look in his eyes was unfamiliar, like a terrible new trick, as if he could read her faint trembling, her pale color and porcelain profile, and see things…that just weren’t there.

“Look, I don’t find the subject of marriage very amusing.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“It won’t work,” she said furiously. “And you know that just as well as I do!”

“It will work.”

Be calm. Anne took a breath and then another, staring in total frustration at the ceiling. “Even you, Jake, cannot expect to just walk in here after three years and-”

“And talk marriage? But I just have, Anne. Because we know each other far too well to pretend time has made any difference. You know it hasn’t.” He reached out, and the pad of his thumb very gently caressed her cheek, a touch as tender as the look in his eyes was determined. “We just proved that,” he said roughly. “We’ve always proved that, every time we touch each other.”

“You think you deserve a gold medal because I still want you?” she demanded. “Rabbits want each other, Jake. You want to hear me say that I missed you? Well, fine. I missed you like hell. And now you can just get the devil out of here.”

Enough was enough. Actually, enough was just past enough, because she could feel an unfamiliar, disgraceful welling of moisture in her eyes. Anne never cried. Turning on her heel, she stalked toward her room.

Jake didn’t follow. In seconds, she’d turned the lock on her bedroom door and leaned back against it, her arms wrapped around her chest, her eyes closed. Waiting for Jake to go.

Moments later, she heard sounds from the other room, but definitely not the sound of the front door closing. It took her five minutes to realize that instead of leaving, he was actually…settling in for the night! She tried to decide whether her fragile poise was up to going back out there and forcing the issue.

Finally moving away from the door, she slowly took off her dress and hung it in the closet. Then she slipped on a long flannel nightgown. Even when the light was off and the comforter up to her chin, she found herself staring at the door in the darkness, waiting for the knob to turn. It didn’t. Eventually, the light under the door went out. If you had a whit of sense you would call the police, a small voice in her head advised.

The thought brought an exhausted though definite hint of a smile to her face. That kind of flamboyant gesture was certainly not her style. Besides, there was no conceivable reason she shouldn’t offer an old friend her couch for the night. And Jake had once been an old friend, an old childhood friend, before they became lovers.

The gold hands on the alarm clock announced 5:07 a.m. An ungodly hour to find oneself staring at the ceiling. Anne finally gave up trying to sleep and threw off the covers. Gathering up underthings from her drawers, she silently unlocked her door and tiptoed out.

Jake was asleep, sprawled on the carpet in the living room. She might have guessed he’d find her couch too confining. He’d found the blankets in the bathroom closet, but his chest and one long leg were uncovered. Jake was out like a light, his silvery hair thick and disheveled on the pillow. Biting her lip at the oddly vulnerable look of him, she tiptoed into the bathroom and flipped on the light, then closed the door.

A stranger sleepily confronted her in the mirror, a wanton mermaid with hair streaming over her breasts, a Lorelei with stormy green eyes and plum-swollen lips…a moral degenerate who’d come close to selling her soul in the middle of the night to have that man share the pillow with her.

She turned her back on Lorelei, peeled off her nightgown and put on a stark white bra and simple bikini underpants. Carefully, she fitted her panty hose to her long, sleek legs, snapping the waistband in place with a vengeance.

She pulled on a plain white slip, then mercilessly applied a brush to her hair. It took ten minutes before the long strands were completely untangled, then another five to pin a figure eight at the nape of her neck. Every strand of ash-blond hair was subdued.

Makeup came next. It wasn’t quite so difficult to face the mirror; Wanton Wanda was fast being replaced by prim and proper Anne. Moisturizer, then foundation…

She and Jake had grown up together in a way. Their grandparents had lived just three doors away from each other, grandparents whom they frequently visited as children and who, by different twists of fate, became their guardians in later years. The friendship had started when Anne was three, wailing her angelic little head off the day she fell off a tricycle. Jake, then six, had vaulted over the forbidden high fences between yards to discover the source of the caterwauling. He’d fixed the trike pedal so a giant couldn’t reach it and was very proud of himself.

Jake was her dark prince from then on. Not that he didn’t have the coloring to be the regular kind of prince, but Jake was clearly never cut out to wear white and ride a white steed. The real Prince Charming would never have gone in for an occasional game of kickball and a lot of swinging on fences and kicking stones at the lakeshore. Jake was capable of merciless teasing, and though Anne was a quiet listener with everyone else in her life, with Jake, she could never seem to stop talking. He was always listening to things she