Jennifer Greene - Silver and Spice

“I was perfectly satisfied,” he assured her readily. His eyes seared hers and held them a moment. Long enough. “It’s you I was worried about,” he said quietly.

“You have no need to be worried,” she whispered.

“But I am. I am very worried.” Gently, he pushed her cheek to his chest so he could lean over her, and then he brushed off the bits of ticklish grass and earth that seemed to have molded themselves to her slender back. Three more blades of grass he found in her hair; he showed her all three of them as if he were showing off trophies. “We’re going to have to undertake a long reeducation where you’re concerned. With constant work and effort, I’m almost certain we’ll be able to rekindle some kind of sexual feelings in time…”

Anne snatched his hands before he had the chance to find any more trophies, locked them firmly around her waist and raised her parted lips to his. “Jake,” she said gravely, “maybe you could stop talking for a minute and a half and get on with the lesson.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

He shook his head, his eyes full of laughter. “I have a headache. And besides, I really don’t think you fully realize where you are. What kind of behavior is this, lying naked beneath the sun, not a mattress in sight? It’s not even night-”

A small pinch on his backside shut him up. A rain of grass on his face, and suddenly they were on their feet, and he was chasing her, a race full of laughter through the meadow with her arms flung wide, embracing the day and the sun and, shortly, the man.

***

It was midafternoon, another somnolent, Indian summer day, with a warm breeze just barely lifting the leaves in the distance. Anne stepped out of the motor home with a shallow black pan in her hands, headed toward the stream. In the last three days since she and Jake had made love in the meadow, her appearance had gone through some drastic changes, none more apparent than at the moment.

She was wearing a skirt, a typical Anne tweed, and a delicate blouse with a lace-banded collar. Which was fine, except that the blouse was hanging outside the waistband of her skirt, its sleeves carelessly rolled up to her elbows. Her legs were bare, and on her feet she wore Jake’s black boots. Her hair was coiled, but only because long, loose hair would have been constantly in her way. She had tacked the coil in place loosely with tortoiseshell combs and a few pins, but long, free strands fluttered around her face and curled under her chin in the breeze.

Jake, behind her, was laughing.

“We’ve been here three whole days, and you never once mentioned that your creek runs gold,” she scolded over her shoulder.

“I must have told you ninety-nine times. You don’t suppose you were preoccupied with other things?”

She would have told him which one of them was preoccupied, except that she nearly slipped as she neared the jumble of wet rocks near the bank of the creek. “Let’s get businesslike here,” she said absently.

“By all means.”

Gingerly, she stepped into the low, rushing stream. The clear water gurgled and danced around the ankles of the huge boots; she could feel the cold-but not the dampness-in her toes. “Ready. Now what do I do?”

He came up from behind her and stood on the creek bank. “First, give us a kiss.”

She offered her face up to the sun as he waded into the creek and planted a swift peck on the tip of her nose. Jake just looked at her with that crooked smile of his, then took the pan from her hands and crouched down on his haunches. Anne did likewise, and immediately felt a dozen intimate muscles vibrate; those intimate muscles were feeling just a little sore. A love hangover, she thought ruefully, and changed positions so that she was bending over from the waist next to him.

“Now, before I show you how to pan for gold,” Jake said gravely, “I need another kiss.”

She shook her head. “You’re getting no more kisses, you greedy man. On with it!”

“I must remind you that all you can hope for is about three-tenths of a troy ounce of gold for every ton of sand and gravel you pan. And that this stream has been worked and reworked for over a century-”

“All these irrelevant details,” she told the sky disgustedly.

“All right, all right.” He dug the pan into the streambed, brought some fine sand up from the bottom and started swirling it slowly. “It’s a question of weight. Gold will settle on the bottom because it’s heavier than sand. Did you know that any good miner names his placer deposit after a woman? That’s a fact. A deposit named for a woman will yield higher dollar value.”

“You didn’t tell me that, but I’m certainly not surprised.” She took the pan from his hands, swirling it the way he did.

“Now, don’t look for glitter-that would just be fool’s gold. You’re looking for yellow-”

She waved him back to his blanket on the grass. Jake could be a terribly distracting man. And then, he’d made merciless fun of her ever since she’d told him she intended to look for gold.

She must have chosen an unfortunate place to begin, as there was neither yellow nor glitter, just brown. Tan-brown sand. A strand of hair dropped in front of her eyes; she whipped it back.

An hour later, she’d tried four different places in the stream. Her coil of hair had come completely undone, the hot mountain sun had stolen between her breasts and was baking her, and she was laughing as she stepped 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.

“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.”