Silver and Spice

didn’t want anyone to know.

Her father had died when she was five, a major blow to a scrawny little waif with green eyes. Her mother proceeded to search the whole world for another husband, and she found three before Anne reached her early teens. Their lifestyle never lacked the label “advantaged.” Anne, oversensitive and painfully shy, barely survived it.

But you were hardly much of a survivor then, she told her reflection in the mirror, and she brushed faint brown eye shadow on her lids and added an almost imperceptible stroke of eyebrow pencil. Jake’s childhood, like hers, had involved a great deal of travel. His parents simply liked to take to the road. They had a little Cessna…and the plane went down. It happened the year Jake was ten, the same year his grandfather, Gil, had taken him in, the same year he’d managed to run all the way to Tucson before the police caught up with him. Reaction to his parents’ death, the neighbors clucked. Anne knew far better. Jake was born with wanderlust in his soul.

By the time she was eighteen, Anne had long been a permanent resident at her paternal grandmother’s. Anne’s mother had never objected to the relationship between Anne and Jennie. Children were a nuisance. Buffeted too long by fierce, painful, endless winds, Anne was still in shock; her mother had died of pneumonia two weeks earlier. She hadn’t even known her mother was ill. And Jake could not possibly have known; yet he climbed in at the window of her grandmother’s house to comfort her…and he made love to her. Any judge would have sentenced Jake harshly for taking an innocent in a weak moment. Judges knew nothing; Anne couldn’t have survived that moment in her life without Jake. Two weeks later, Jake had a choice between completing his last year at Harvard and embarking on a fishing venture off the coast of Alaska. Why risk graduating with honors? Alaska had won hands down.

Anne whisked blusher on her cheeks. When he’d left she’d felt as if a jagged rock had been torn from her heart. He’d asked her to go with him on that venture. Run off to Alaska at eighteen? No. But her refusal didn’t prevent her from being out of her mind in love with him, nor did it ease the desperate loneliness when he was gone.

Judging from the state of his jeans the next time she saw him, he must have blown his parents’ inheritance in one quick fling. Oil-bearing shale in Montana, was it? Anne was twenty-two, graduating from college, invincible. No one could tell her otherwise. Independence and control and self-sufficiency were her goals; any number of male undergraduates had been foolish enough to try to distract her from those goals. Jake had come back out of the blue and listened as she expounded her philosophy of never needing anyone, as she told him how she would never be vulnerable again. He’d listened, all the way to bed, for almost two solid months.

That affair had left her bruised and worse, because they’d fought terribly at the end. He wanted her to go with him. She wanted him to stay. He’d split for Tulsa, something to do with telecommunications. For months, she saw his face in every crowd, jumped every time the phone rang… But by the age of twenty-four, she was completely over him. Completely. Serious about banking by then, involved, busy, her own woman. She was home with the flu the day he walked in. No doctor would have forced her to stay in bed as long as he did. The hours went far too swiftly; they couldn’t even spare the time to argue…

Anne washed her hands, switched off the light and tiptoed back to her bedroom. The faintest gray dawn light was coming in at the windows. She switched on the closet light and pulled a mauve blouse from its hanger. The fabric was silky to the touch but totally plain, with a stand-up collar and long sleeves.

At twenty-seven, she’d been close to marrying a man named Jim Hollinger. There was no possible way Jake could have known that, no possible reason for him to show up at such a critical time. She’d had to give back Jim’s ring, and Lord, she’d been ashamed. Jim was a true-blue nice man. Jake was an impulsive, wandering rogue, and he was never going to change. He’d stayed four months. At the end of that time, he was still wearing ragged jeans and didn’t have any idea where he was headed. She’d told him never to come back. And meant it. Lord, she’d meant it. Every single time he’d shown up in her life, she’d fallen-hook, line, sinker, soul, fingernails, toes. And every time he left, there was a terrible yawning gap, a wrenching loneliness, an ache in her heart that would never ease.

She tucked the blouse into a heather pin-striped straight skirt. Its matching jacket followed, a designer label, severely tailored. Spectator pumps, a slim bracelet-style gold watch…the austere image was not a disguise, but Anne. Polish and perfection and a control she valued. She went out regularly on Saturday nights, with men who wanted and respected the kind of woman who looked good and talked well and could hold up her head in any social gathering. Jake couldn’t care less about all of that. Because her childhood had been chaos, Anne had patterned her adult life on very different lines. Jake had always been the only zigzag in the pattern…

There was no sound from the doorway. She didn’t know why she suddenly glanced up…to find him there, all scraggly brows and leonine mane, the bold line of his shoulders clearly defined under the sheet he had carelessly draped around himself. Sleepy eyes were busy surveying Anne, from her figure-eight coil to her spectator pumps.

“Your slip is showing,” he remarked idly.

She was too smart to jump. “Since I know you will anyway, make yourself a cup of coffee. I have to go to work.” He said nothing. Wariness prickled her nerve endings as she bent to add lipstick and a handkerchief to her purse. The feeling of vulnerability was suddenly there again, unwanted and upsetting.

“The image just doesn’t always work the way I think you want it to, princess,” he murmured thoughtfully. “You’re a striking woman, no matter how you dress. Sometimes I like the formal Anne best, actually. All marble surface, all softness underneath. A contrast that very honestly reflects the lady… Anne?”

She was picking up her briefcase from beside her small desk. “Hmm?” His comment confused her. He’d always mocked her clothing styles, always teased her about them.

“I really have come back to marry you.”

Her heart stopped. She took a silent breath. “Last night I had a few glasses of champagne. This morning I won’t be so easily rattled, Jake. You can take your insanity-and your suitcase-over to your grandfather’s, after you’ve had your coffee.”

“Very assertive,” Jake admired gravely.

In spite of herself, Anne’s lips curled in a smile. “Thank you so much.”

“I haven’t decided whether to try for a long, drawn-out battle or to play low-down and dirty. Do you have a preference?”

“Only for you to move away from the door.”

“Low-down and dirty then,” Jake decided absently.

“But it takes two to play, and one of us isn’t playing.” She brushed past him, her eyes averted from the mat of masculine hair on his chest. The smell of his sleep-warm flesh assaulted her nostrils. She headed rapidly for the door.

“Anne?”

“No,” she called back to him. That seemed to cover everything.

“I love you to distraction.”

In less than a minute, she’d snatched up her coat and let herself out the front door. Crisp September air greeted her, a dew-drenched lawn, and the special silence of the morning. She was far too early for work, but she could always pick up a cup of coffee and a newspaper somewhere… Her heels click-clicked on the pavement as she strode toward her MG, shivering just a little from the morning chill. She slid into the driver’s seat, stuck the key into the ignition and started the engine. For just an instant, she caught her reflection in the tiny rearview mirror. A suspicious brightness glittered in her eyes. And her fingers were trembling annoyingly on the wheel.

She and Jake were chalk and cheese. She valued stability; he was a hopeless rover. He was lazy-sleep-in to her rise-and-shine, jeans to her business suits, lackadaisical chaos to her well-ordered world. She knew exactly what she required in order to survive; she had learned the lessons when she was very young, and the lessons had been very hard and very painful.

It was not amusing to have fallen in love with the wrong man.

Slipping the car into reverse, she backed out of the drive. You’re thirty-one, Anne reminded herself. Mature enough to know certain relationships can go only so far. Plenty mature enough to say no to a dead-end physical relationship that has already brought more than enough heartache.

Again her eyes met their reflection in the mirror; this time there was a trace of humor in their haunted green depths. Mature? Jake could bring out the terrible two’s in a hundred-year-old saint. Anne had lost control the