Silver and Spice (3 page)

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 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 moment she’d seen him at the party. Mature?

She loved that man. And she heartily wished that he’d never come back.

At midmorning, Anne stepped out of her office with a sheaf of papers in her hand. The trust department of Yale Bank and Trust was carpeted in teal blue and paneled in dark walnut; the mood of the place, particularly on the second floor, was efficient, quiet and formal. It suited Anne. Yale was an old-time, small, well-established bank, not in competition with the major conglomerate banks of the metropolitan area. Its specialty was trusts and estate planning; its assets were varied and closely guarded; and its stock was so zealously held that shares were rarely for sale. Conservative was the name of the game.

Anne had a nice block of that stock, and in the six years she’d been with the bank had acquired more. Trust officers were typically over fifty and balding, a stereotype that was important, actually. Authority and experience were critical to gaining the customers’ trust. Fred Laird would never have given her the title two years ago, no matter how much he respected Anne, if she hadn’t demonstrated her ability to bring in the high-powered accounts that the bank specialized in. Gil Rivard had been her first estate. Jake’s grandfather. Anne had wanted to do that work for him, but had been uncomfortable when he later sent his friends to her. She had too much pride to want anyone’s help, and she wished to owe no one favors.

She no longer needed favors from anyone. Anne was conservative, inventive, knowledgeable, and could find loopholes no one else had ever heard of in the tax laws. One customer had told her jokingly that she was more concerned with his security than he was. True.

Between her peaceful bailiwick and the noise of the new computer at the opposite end of the second floor, there was a central room where three assistantss worked, flanked on three sides by filing cabinets. In principle, the computer was supposed to reduce the number of files required, but banks, Mr. Laird had once told her wryly, have an intrinsic need to justify any transaction they make ten times over. Throwing away anything was anathema, a no-no. The computer regularly spit out reports someone was dying to file, even if they were never read again.

A gross exaggeration, Anne admitted dryly, but judging from the pile of paperwork on Marlene’s desk, not far enough from the truth.

“You need something, Miss Blake?”

“Just a report copied.” Anne waved the brunette back to her chair. “I’ll do it myself—I can see you’re swamped.”

“Typical Monday,” Marlene admitted.

A half-hour later, Anne returned from the first floor’s photocopying room, juggling the folders and two cups of coffee, one of which she left on Marlene’s desk. The girl looked up with a surprised thank-you, but Anne was already passing.

It was not, for Anne, a typical Monday, but she was trying to get through it. At work she invariably projected a smooth, quiet-voiced serenity; she never flaunted her authority, but it was there. She’d earned it. No one could conceivably tell by looking at her that her calculator had come up with whimsical figures all morning, that she’d lost three files, that she’d read and reread emails in her inbox and still didn’t know what was in there. She had snagged her panty hose. Being Anne, she had a replacement pair in her desk drawer, but she spilled coffee on them on her way back from the photocopying room… The day was just not going well.

Distractedly, she pushed open the door to her office. Her eyes were instantly drawn to the silver-wrapped package with its gay streamers of pink ribbons. Frowning, she set down the files and her coffee and closed the office door. An unsteady pulse throbbed in her throat as she slowly started to undo the bright wrappings.

Memories of other surprise gifts through the years raised the color in her cheeks. The presents never arrived on her birthday, never at Christmas. Never when she was expecting them.
Never
anything that was suitable to be opened in one’s office, even if one locked the door and pulled the shades over all the windows…

One peek inside the box and the pulse in her throat went into double time. She glanced up nervously to make sure the door was closed before carefully unfolding the treasure. The camisole was designed like a Victorian corset, the old-fashioned kind that cinched up the figure.

Except that there was no whalebone to viciously sever breath. Just satin, a luscious oyster-colored satin, and a low bodice tucked and gathered to deliberately display the wearer’s breasts so brazenly that she would certainly catch a cold.

Unconsciously, she stroked the soft folds, her palms stroking the luxurious satin, the fabric whispering a subtle, erotic call to her senses. Her rational mind, of course, was already crisply cataloging objections. The gift was terribly inappropriate. Anne’s choice of lingerie was not unfeminine, but always simple and practical. Lace and satin—she just wasn’t the type. Jake
knew
that. And yes, it was from Jake. She didn’t even need to look at the card.

No one else would have given her a gift that was so blatantly a sexual invitation. No one else
persisted
in inviting her to be the kind of woman she simply wasn’t. Very rapidly, she folded the camisole back into the box, feeling oddly breathless. When the lid was back on, she caught her breath again. If anyone had seen him bringing that in…

She buried the wrappings in her wastebasket, praying no one would knock on her door until she was done, and then hastily picked up the envelope. The note had been boldly scrawled in black ink. “Since I must have missed you, love, I went to see your Mr. Laird. All I wanted to know, was if you were free for lunch. He said you were free to come to Idaho with me for two weeks.”

She had to read it twice, because the first time she had obviously misunderstood. Jake would never have gone to see Laird, not even as a joke. Jake was unscrupulous and arrogant and, God knew, impulsive, but their affair had always been strictly private; he had always shown a respect for her that Anne had never questioned. She read the note a third time, sank back in her desk chair, closed her eyes and murmured to herself, “I am a mature, rational, practical woman in full control of my life.” One could not feel stalked unless one allowed oneself to become prey. She was not prey. For anyone. There was no logical reason she should feel a shudder of primitive fear dance up her vertebrae.

The thing to do was…open her eyes. Get up, for heaven’s sake, and hide the camisole in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet, bury the note in her purse… Those things done, she straightened an imperceptible wrinkle in her skirt and opened the office door.

She negotiated carpet, linoleum, elevator and more carpet all in the four and a half minutes it took to reach Mr. Laird’s door, truly a record pace in her high-heeled spectators. Her tap was polite, perfectly in control.

“Come in.”

She felt better the moment Mr. Laird offered her his usual distracted smile. Her boss intimidated half the people in the bank with those ice-blue eyes of his. He tolerated no inefficiency, would fire anyone he knew to be disloyal, and ruthlessly dictated policies that were not always popular. Anne had always gotten along beautifully with him. She also knew him well enough to realize that the distracted smile was a favorable augury. “Actually, I was going to call you earlier, Anne, but then I got hung up with a phone call. The White estate—I liked the way you handled all of it.”

“I…thank you, Mr. Laird.” Anne propped herself on the edge of the leather chair in front of his desk. Her nerves were all set to relax again when her boss handed her the White file, leaned back in his chair and started chuckling.

Mr. Laird was
not
a chuckler. Anne’s headache was instant.

The head of stiff white hair was shaking in disbelief. “But that was
not
what I was going to call you about. Gil Rivard’s grandson was just in here.” Another distinctly rusty chuckle escaped from his throat. “The man is crazy, absolutely crazy. I can’t think of a time I have ever had such an…unusual…conversation.”

Very smoothly and carefully, Anne vaulted out of the chair. “Mr. Laird…”

He waved her back down with that thoroughly uncharacteristic grin. “Here.” He shifted an oblong piece of paper in her direction. “He handed me that, and asked me if I would give it to you. He’s given you power of attorney and wants you to set up some sort of trust for him. Then he sat down for ten minutes, rambled on about the hummingbirds in Idaho, local politics, deep-sea fishing in Tahiti, and left.” Her boss was chuckling again, though one of his eyebrows lurched up in a half-scold. “
If
you have the time? Anne, I think you could at least have mentioned to me that Gil wasn’t the only iron you had in the Rivard fire.”

Anne was staring at the cashier’s check in her hand. Money made Mr. Laird so very happy. He loved it when his vault was chock-full. That slim little piece of paper in her hand bore a six-figure number after the dollar sign. Jake didn’t have two nickels to rub together, the last she’d heard.

“And there’s more that he wants to put away, Anne. For his children, he put it, even though he doesn’t have any yet. He’s got a wife in mind, I gather. Good Lord, though, the man doesn’t even have the least idea of his own assets. He has bank accounts he hasn’t checked up on in years in God knows how many states. And he may stay in Idaho for a few years, but there’s no reason that state needs to benefit rather than Michigan, which is his real home base. He could be anywhere a few years from now.” Mr. Laird peered at Anne through wire-rimmed lenses. “I suggested he hire an accountant to get his financial situation in order, Anne, but he didn’t like that idea. He wants you and no one else. I don’t know what you discussed with him, but I suppose we could stretch our policy a bit to allow you to conduct bank business out of state.”

Anne’s head was spinning. “It would be totally impossible for me to leave right now, anyway…”

“We could arrange something. After all, Gil Rivard has been a loyal customer of this bank for a good many years, and he’s brought us a great deal of business. You’ve got vacation time coming…”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Laird,” Anne sang out cheerfully, “there is
no possible way
I can go to Idaho at this time.”

“He’s kind of a modern-day adventurer, isn’t he?” Her boss glanced at her, then out the window. The September sky was very blue. “His life sounds like a young man’s dream. You’ll probably find this ridiculous, Anne, but when I was a young man…”
 
He focused back on her with a sudden frown. “If your backlog of work is the problem…”

“No, it’s personal,” Anne said. Now
there
was a word designed to catch her boss’s attention. Since she’d never let on to anyone that she had a personal life, it had to come as a little shock. She took advantage of the startled look in his eyes, adding swiftly, “I didn’t mean I wasn’t willing to take care of Jake Rivard’s finances, Mr. Laird. Only I can assure you that travel won’t be necessary under any circumstances.”

He took her meaning a little differently than she’d intended, but Anne left well enough alone. The talk had been interesting, she mused as she walked back to her office. She’d never had the least inkling before that Fred Laird had a secret wish to take off on a slow boat to Tahiti. His wife would be crushed.
Anne
was crushed, to see her normally pompous, conservative and eminently logical boss get taken in by a rogue with a vagabond heart. Frankly, the whole thing was demoralizing…

So was opening up her bottom drawer after lunch to get a file on corporate bond regulations and finding a decadent satin camisole in its place. So was knowing that last night she’d come darn close to tumbling into bed with Jake Rivard about a minute and a half after he’d shown up in her life again.

Around four in the afternoon, Anne was pressing cool, smooth fingertips to her temples, having failed to take care of a single email in her inbox. The only bright spot in the entire day had been whisking Jake’s cashier’s check downstairs and converting it to a nice, safe, invulnerable thirty-day certificate of deposit. Not that she
wanted
to even touch his money, but at least temporarily he couldn’t splurge it on silver mines or wildcat oil or swampland in Florida. It wasn’t her business, of course. And it wasn’t her business that the trust Jake had requested wasn’t necessarily his best choice of investment tool, or that thirty days would allow someone to seriously study his best options.
Someone.
Not Anne. In the meantime, Jake was still wearing the patched jeans she remembered from high school. Over the years he’d neglected to mention that he could afford fourteen-karat-gold patches.

She rubbed her temples harder. Jake had been in town less than twenty-four hours, and already her well-ordered life was disrupted. But that was old news, really. She’d fallen just as hard, just as fast, the other times.

But not this time, Jake, she thought sadly. I tried love with you. Far too many times. More than enough to risk walking on the edge of that cliff again. It’s the hot rush of a drug when you’re here, but then you’re gone. Sweetheart, I’m not suited to lead the life of a nomad.

Jake was waiting for her outside the bank when she left at the end of the day. Somehow, she was not surprised. An hour later, he nodded to a black-suited waiter, who then poured a sparkling Burgundy into their glasses. When the waiter was gone, Jake leaned back in his chair and regarded Anne with a faintly amused smile. “You’re looking a little tired.”

“I am,” she admitted, glancing at the red leather wainscoting of the restaurant he’d chosen. Expensive. Terrifyingly expensive.

“Anything interesting happen at the bank today?”

She smiled sweetly. “Not really. Just a typical Monday.”

With a throaty chuckle, he raised his glass. “To two weeks in the Silver Valley with you, love.”

She raised her glass in return. “They’ll have to ship the coffin.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Mine. I’m not going to Idaho any other way, but you, Jake…” She took a breath, and then a sip of wine. “I will never and have never even considered trying to stop you from going anywhere you wanted to go.”

Jake regarded her thoughtfully. Anne met his look for a moment and then studied the bubbling Burgundy in her glass with fascination. He’d given her fifteen minutes to change at her place before coming here, because she’d asked for that. A pale gold velvet jacket complemented the crimson dress, with its pale gold hem and cowled collar; bone sandals completed the outfit. Not a hair was out of place; her perfume was fresh; she knew she looked her best.