Silver and Spice (12 page)

“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.”

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 potato salad. For heaven’s sake, keep me company…”

The kitchen was no less chaotic than the rest of the comfortable house. Two high school boys with their father’s jowls were stomping in the back door, peeking at sealed containers on the crowded counters as they sauntered through. A woman with stern features and a smile of pure sunshine started a second conversation with Anne as Carla continued chattering. Anne caught her name—Alice. Carla placed some deviled eggs in front of her, to be transferred to a serving plate, and tied an apron around her waist. They had shouted down her earlier offers to help, but this just wasn’t the kind of household where one could sit on the sidelines and worry about being shy.

Gradually, Anne sorted out what was happening. When Reed’s mine was open, he and Carla celebrated Thursdays. The people in the other rooms were their kids and neighbors, miners, people who worked in the town. Two were mining professors from Spokane; another was a doctor. They all seemed to get together regularly once a week. Each guest brought a dish to pass and a six-pack of beer.

“Usually the beer is warm, since my fridge’ll only hold so much,” Carla admitted. She leveled a worried stare at Anne. “You like the punch? It’s a mixture of crushed apples and cherries. I made it myself in the fall, but it doesn’t turn out the same way every year.”

“It’s delicious,” Anne said truthfully. The drink was tangy and cool; her throat was parched, and she’d drunk two glasses already.

Dinner was set out haphazardly on the kitchen table, to be collected in equally haphazard fashion and eaten wherever one could find a seat. The menu was simple: ham, potato salad, bright red Jell-O, sweet potatoes in a hickory-nut sauce, chestnut bread. Anne caught a glimpse of Jake an hour later, when he came in to get a plate—and, perhaps, to check up on her. His palm made a circle at the small of her back. “Doing okay?”

“Absolutely fine.” Her smile was meant to tell him she didn’t need taking care of. She’d seen he was engrossed in a nonstop conversation with one of the mining professors and a burly man she assumed was a miner.

“Anne?”

She glanced up from filling her plate.

“Watch the punch, honey.”

She glanced at the table and noticed that the punch bowl was almost empty and that her hostess had her hands full. When she’d found the pitcher in the refrigerator and refilled the bowl, Anne meant to sit next to Jake, but Reed claimed her, steering her to a seat next to him in the already crowded living room.

“He’ll talk your ear off,” Carla warned Anne. “When you’ve had enough, just call out for Jake.”

“We’re going to talk about our divorce,” Reed informed his wife.

“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been promising me that for eighteen years.” Carla handed her husband her plate and went to retrieve a sprawling six-year-old from the top of the bookcase. Carla then reclaimed her own dinner and wandered among guests, a bright red bird with ceaseless energy.

“I love that woman,” Reed informed Anne.

Anne chuckled as she speared a forkful of food. “Have you two always lived here?”

“Our families have been here four generations. Always the silver… Once it gets in your blood, it’s damn hard to get it out.” He gestured in Jake’s general direction. “He’s the exception to the rule. Most times we’re friendly people here, but to have someone new arrive and try to settle down as one of us…” He shook his head. “Just doesn’t happen. He’s nothing like the rest of us, but he still fits in, if you get my meaning. You going to marry him?”

“Mmm,” Anne said expressively—savoring the taste of the ham.

Reed nodded to his eldest son, who filled Anne’s glass yet another time with Carla’s delightful punch. The room grew increasingly warm; Anne grew increasingly thirsty. Talk finally turned to mining. Anne had the feeling that was inevitable. She settled back next to her host once she’d finished her dinner.

This mine was open; that one just closed; Harvey had been hurt; there had been an explosion and a fire… Anne listened, feeling like a foreigner trying to absorb the flavor of their lives. The men lived with real danger day by day in the mines. There was always the chance that a mine would close when the economy shifted or a vein ran out. No one ever considered leaving, though. Even Harvey, who’d been hurt, would stay in the mining community; they would care for him until he was well enough to get a job. These people cared for their own, and had for generations. Their loyalty to one another touched her heart.

Reed kept reaching over to pat her knee.
You’re accepted,
said the gesture. He delivered the same proprietary pat periodically to the fanny of his passing six-year-old. The thought made her unexpectedly feel like giggling. Jake had been engrossed for the hour and a half since dinner in a conversation with three men, but he shot her an occasional glance.
Are you still doing all right?
Certainly, certainly, certainly. She felt like laughing again.

“You sure can hold your wine, can’t you, sweetheart?” Reed patted her knee yet another time. “I respect a woman who can hold her liquor.”

“Me, too,” Anne answered blankly, wondering what on earth he was talking about. She hadn’t drunk anything but cherry punch…but even as a sudden, alarming thought registered, Reed’s eldest son was in front of her again, filling her glass to the brim and sending her a twinkling grin. She made a hurried attempt to count exactly how many times she’d seen that twinkling grin…when a hiccup erupted from her throat. Anne turned tomato-red.

“I should have known any woman of Jake’s could drink ’em under the table,” Reed roared in approval.

“Enough of this mining talk. Music, everybody. You have any favorite songs, darlin’?”

“Thousands,” Anne agreed brightly. She loved music. From across the room, Jake’s pewter-colored eyes suddenly came into focus. He looked distressed. Distressed? She waved a vague reassurance in his direction.

“Rafe and Benjy!” Two men got up to take their fiddles from their cases, with laughter and clapping approval from the rest. “Stand up, honey,” Reed ordered her.

Anne obediently stood, for the first time in two hours. Jake’s face went out of focus, but that really didn’t matter. Everyone was laughing. Laughing and happy. The fiddlers’ bows were dancing lightly over the strings.

“You first, darlin’. What do you want to sing?” Reed asked her.

The question made no sense. Anne cleared her throat. “Not sure I understand,” she admitted happily.

“We play Round the Horn. All of us get a chance to sing our favorite tune. Doesn’t matter what kind of music you like—anything goes. Here, honey.” Reed handed her another full glass of Carla’s delightfully refreshing cherry punch.

Jake was suddenly, miraculously by her side, apparently having traveled at the speed of light. He intercepted the glass. Anne looked at him in surprise, took her punch back and leaned contentedly against his shoulder. “Jake wants to sing first,” she told Reed, and took another sip of the homemade nectar. Was she really going to have to sing in front of all these people? Normally, the thought would have struck an appalling note of panic in her. Regardless, she was certainly in a mood to hear everyone else. Especially Jake. He was handsome as the very devil, an oddly watchful spark in his eyes for Anne as he took up the challenge, clearly having been through this before.

Leaning back against the edge of the couch, he took Anne with him; an iron hand crept around her waist. Which was nice, because her knees suddenly felt like Jell-O, and being locked between his thighs was not unpleasant. She took just one more sip from her glass before he started to sing. She seemed to have been dying of thirst all evening. In the meantime, Jake’s first song fell flat. “Violets for Her Furs,” an old jazz melody. It failed because no one else could conceivably know the connotation but Anne, and secondly because Jake, sad but true, was tone-deaf. His second song enjoyed a better reception.

It was “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain When She Comes,” except that Jake’s verse had nothing to do with chicken ’n’ dumplings. “She’ll be teasing up a tempest when she comes” was how it started—and it deteriorated drastically from there.

These people liked their songs ribald. Lord, they went crazy, stomping their feet and laughing. They were really a hard-drinking bunch, Anne thought vaguely, although Jake, behind her, was still nursing the beer he’d started out with. The man to the left of Jake sang a mountain tune about a nubile young lass. The lyrics turned his wife’s ears red; but then, she certainly had a song to match his for lewdness. Carla, the sweet homemaker, came up with a Western melody about cowboys and what they did on lonely nights. As each person took a turn, the tunes grew even lustier. The fiddles had everyone’s feet stomping.

One by one, around the circle of the room, all of the guests offered songs. Anne’s cheeks were flushed from laughter and heat when Reed thumped her shoulder. “Your turn, darlin’.”

With her limbs sheer liquid, Anne was not about to spoil the party. But what song did she know of that nature? She handed Jake her empty glass, ignoring the message he was trying to send her with his eyes. She certainly had no intention of letting him down. The old fear that she could never fit into Jake’s life… Well, one could get tired of being pegged as inhibited and proper.