by Nora Roberts
“Keep pushing, and I’ll finish it. We rented a house.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our own little love nest, sugarplum. Punch me with that fist and I might just change my policy on hitting women.” He started the car. “The motel rooms are too small, and too inconvenient. The team needs a local base.”
She’d been thinking the same herself, but it annoyed her he’d gotten to the details of it quicker. “We’ll be shutting down for the season in a few months. The motel’s cheap, and it’s only you, me and Rosie who’re staying there nightly.”
“And all three of us need more room to work. Dory, Bill and Matt will be bunking there, too. And we got us a pair of horny kids from West Virginia this afternoon.”
“And these horny kids are going to . . .”
“Bang each other as often as possible. He’s got some digs under his belt, and he’s working on his master’s. Anthro. She’s green as grass, but willing to do what she’s told.”
She propped her feet on the dash and thought about it. “Well, we need the hands.”
“We do indeed. And Leo could use a place to stay if and when he needs one. Temporary or visiting diggers and specialists can use it. We need storage. We need a kitchen.”
He headed out of town knowing she was stewing and trying to think of a better argument.
“And,” he added, “you need a base here after the season. We’ve got other digging to do.”
“We?”
“I said I was going to help you. So we’ll have a base of operations for that, too.”
She frowned as he turned off the road onto a bumpy gravel lane. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of you, Jake. One minute you’re the same annoying jackass you always were, and the next you’re an annoying jackass who’s trying to be nice.” She tipped down her glasses, peered at him over the rims. “You gaslighting me?”
He only smiled and gestured by jerking up his chin. “What do you think?”
It was big, and sheltered by trees. Part of the creek snaked alongside it. An active part, Callie thought as she got out of the car and heard the water gurgling. It was a frame structure that looked as if it had been built in three parts. A basic sort of ranch style, then the second-story addition, then an offshoot to the side that boasted a short deck.
The lawn needed to be mowed. The grass brushed her ankles as she walked across it toward the front of the house.
“Where’d you find it?”
“One of the towners who came by to see the dig mentioned it to Leo. It’s her sister’s place. Marriage busted up a few months ago, and they’re renting the house until they figure out what they want to do. There’s some furniture. It’s not much, just stuff neither of them took. We got a six-month lease that comes in cheaper than the motel.”
She liked the feel of the place, but wasn’t ready to admit it. “How far are we from the site? I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Six miles.”
“Not bad.” She strolled, casually, to the door, tried to turn the knob. “Got the key?”
“Where’d I put that?” He came up behind her, showed her an empty hand, snapped his wrist, showed her the key.
He tugged a reluctant grin out of her. “Just open the door, Houdini.”
Jake unlocked the door, then once again scooped her off her feet.
“What is with you?”
“Never did carry you across the threshold.” He closed his mouth over hers for ten hot, humming seconds.
“Cut it out. And we didn’t have a threshold.” Her stomach muscles were balled into a knot, and she shoved against him. “The hotel room in Vegas where we spent our wedding night doesn’t count.”
“I don’t know. I’ve got some fond memories of that hotel room. The big, heart-shaped tub, the mirror over the bed, the—”
“I remember it.”
“I remember you, lying in that tub with bubbles up to your chin and singing ‘I’m Too Sexy.’ ”
“I was drunk.”
“Yeah, you were plowed. I’ve had a soft spot for that song ever since.” He dropped her to her feet, gave her butt a casual pat. “So what we’ve got is the living room—common area—here.”
“What the hell happened to that sofa?”
He glanced toward the shredded arm of a couch covered with a brown, beige and red checked print. “They had cats. It was in the half-finished family room downstairs. Kitchen’s back there, appliances come with it. There’s an eating area. Bath and a half on this level, another upstairs along with three bedrooms. Another bedroom or office space over there, and over here . . .”
He crossed the living room, turned and gestured toward a good-sized room with a sliding glass door and the pretty little deck beyond it. Even as Callie opened her mouth, he shook his head.
“Too late, babe. I already called dibs on this.”
“Bastard.”
“Nice, especially after I saved you the biggest bedroom upstairs. We can move in tomorrow.”
“Fine.” She walked through the room and onto the deck. “Quiet here.”
“It won’t be once we’re in it.”
It felt normal, she realized. Weird as it was, this felt normal after the hour in Lana’s office. “Remember that place we stayed in outside Cairo? We were only there a few weeks.”
“A few too many.”
“It was only a little snake.”
“It didn’t look so little when it slithered into the bathroom with me.”
“You screamed like a girl.”
“I certainly did not. I bellowed like a man. And though I was bare-assed naked, I dispatched it with my bare hands.”
“You beat it to a pulp with a towel rod.”
“Which I ripped from the wall with my bare hands. Same thing.”
She could still see him, gloriously naked, not a little wild-eyed, with the limp snake draped over the towel bar.
Those were the days.
“We had a good time, anyway. We had some good times.”
“Plenty of them.” He laid a hand on the base of her neck. “Why don’t you let it out, Callie? Why do you have such a hard time letting anything out but your mad?”
“I don’t know. She fell apart, Jake. She just went to pieces up there in Lana’s office. She was holding on to me so tight I could barely breathe. I don’t know what I felt, what I feel. I can’t identify it. But I started thinking, what would they be like, what would my parents be like, what would I be like if none of this had happened? If she hadn’t turned away for that few seconds, and I’d grown up . . . here.”
When she started to move away, Jake tightened his grip, held her in place. “Just keep talking. Pretend I’m not here.”
“That minor in psych’s showing,” she told him. “I just wondered, that’s all. What if I’d grown up Jessica? Jessica Lynn Cullen would have a keen fashion sense. She’d drive a minivan. Probably working on her second kid by now. Maybe a fine arts degree, which she uses to decorate her house, tastefully. She thinks she’ll go back to work when the kids are older, but for now she’s president of the PTA and that’s enough for her. Or maybe she’s Jessie. Maybe Jessie stuck. That’d be different.”
“How?”
“Jessie, she’d have been a cheerleader. Bound to be. Captain of the squad. Probably had a crush on the captain of the football team, and they were a pretty hot item through high school, but it didn’t last. Jessie, she’d’ve married her college sweetheart, picking him out of the several guys who liked to sniff around her because she was so exuberant and fun. Jessie keeps scrapbooks and works part-time, retail, to help supplement the income. She’s got a kid, too, and enough energy to handle all the balls she has to juggle.”
“Is she happy?”
“Sure. Why not? But neither of those women would spend hours digging, or know how to identify a six-thousand-year-old tibia. They wouldn’t have a scar on their left shoulder where they fell on a rock in Wyoming when they were twenty. They sure as hell wouldn’t have marri
ed you—points for them.”
She glanced back over her shoulder. “You’d have scared the shit out of them. And for all those reasons, including having the bad judgment to marry you, I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be either one of them. I could think that even when Suzanne was sobbing in my arms. I’m glad I’m who I am.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Yeah, but we’re not very nice people. Suzanne wants one of those two women—her Jessica, her Jessie. More, she wants the child back. I’m using that to push her to help me get the answers I need.”
“She needs them, too.”
“I hope she understands that when we get them.”
Fourteen
Callie worked like a demon, logging ten-hour days in the sweltering heat, probing, brushing, detailing. She dug in the muck churned up by a vicious thunderstorm and stewed in the summer soup August poured into Maryland.
At night she composed reports, outlined hypotheses, studied and sketched sealed artifacts before they were shipped to the Baltimore lab. She had a room of her own, with a sleeping bag tossed on the floor, a desk she’d picked up at a flea market, a Superman lamp she’d snagged from a yard sale, her laptop, her mountain of notes and her cello.
She had everything she needed.
She didn’t spend much time downstairs in what they called the common area. It was, she’d decided, just a little too cozy. As most of the team spent evenings in town or at the site, Rosie tended to make herself scarce—obviously and regularly—leaving Callie alone with Jake.
It was just a bit too much like playing house, just a bit too much the way it had once been when they’d burrowed in together in a rental or a motel during a dig.
Her feelings for him were much closer to the surface than she’d wanted to admit. And managed to be dug deeper as well. The fact was, she realized, she’d never gotten over Jacob Graystone.
He was, unfortunately, the love of her life.
The son of a bitch.
She’d known they’d be tossed together again on a dig. It was inevitable. But she’d thought she’d have more time to resolve her emotions where he was concerned, and she’d been so sure she could handle those emotions. Handle Jake.
But he’d stirred up everything again, then added the unexpected to the mix. He was offering friendship.
His own brand of friendship, she mused as she doodled on a pad. You could never be sure if he’d pick on you, kiss you or pat your head as if you were a child. But it was a different path from the one they’d traveled before.
Maybe it was because of all that had happened to her since coming here, but she wondered where she and Jake might have ended up if they’d tried a couple of other paths the first time around. If they’d taken time to be friends, to talk about who they were instead of assuming they knew.
A single moment could change a life. She knew that firsthand now. What if instead of that last blowup where they’d accused each other of everything from stupidity to unfaithfulness, where they’d slapped the word divorce in each other’s faces before he’d stormed off, they’d stuck it out?
If they’d passed through that one moment together, would they have fought for their marriage, or stepped back from it?
No way to know for sure, but she could speculate, just as she speculated about the tribe who’d built their settlement along the creek. As she speculated about what turns her life might have taken if she’d grown up with the Cullens.
If she and Jake had gotten through that moment intact, if they’d continued to scrape at the surface, digging down, they might have found something worth keeping.
Marriage, family, partnership and yes, even the friendship he seemed determined to forge this time around.
She hadn’t trusted him, she admitted now. Not where other women were concerned. He’d had a reputation with women. She’d heard of “Jake the Rake” before she met him.
It wasn’t something she’d held against him until she’d fallen for him. Then, she admitted, it had become something lodged in her mind, something she hadn’t been able to pry out and discard.
She hadn’t believed he loved her, not as much as she loved him. And that had made her crazy.
Because, she thought with a sigh, if she loved him more, it gave him more control. It gave him the power. So she’d pushed, determined to make him prove he loved her. And every time he’d come up short, she’d pushed harder.
But who could blame her? The close-mouthed son of a bitch had never told her. Not straight out, not plain and simple. He’d never once said the words.
Thank God the whole thing had been his fault.
Since the conclusion made her feel better, she worked another thirty minutes before her stomach announced the can of Hormel’s chili she’d nuked for dinner had worn off.
She glanced at her watch and slipped downstairs to see what she could grab for her habitual midnight snack.
She didn’t switch on any lights. There was enough of a moon to guide her and she’d always had good instincts where food was concerned.
She padded barefoot into the kitchen on a direct line with the fridge. As she reached for the handle, the lights flashed on.
Her heart leaped up to her throat and popped out of her mouth in a thin scream. She managed to turn it into a curse.
“Goddamn it, Graystone,” she said as she whirled on him. “What’s the matter with you? Why’d you do that?”
“Why are you skulking around in the dark?”
“I’m not skulking. I’m moving quietly in consideration of others as I seek food.”
“Yeah.” He glanced at his watch. “Twelve-ten. You’re a creature of habit, Dunbrook.”
“So what?” Spotting a bag of Suzanne’s Kitchen chunky-chip cookies on the counter, she bypassed the fridge and snatched them up.
“Hey, I bought those.”
“Bill me,” she mumbled with her mouth full.
She pulled open the fridge, took out a jug of orange juice. He waited while she poured a glass, washed down the first cookie.
“You know, that’s a revolting combination. Why don’t you drink milk?”
“I don’t like it.”
“You should learn. Give me the cookies.”
She wrapped her arms around the bag possessively. “I’ll buy the next bag.”
“Give me a damn cookie.” He pulled the bag away, dug in.
With one clamped between his teeth, he got out the milk, poured a short glass.
He was wearing nothing but black boxers. She wasn’t going to mention it or complain. Even an ex-wife was entitled to enjoy the view. He had some build on him, she thought. Lanky and tough at the same time, with a few interesting scars to keep it from being too pretty.
And she knew he was that same dusky gold color all over.
There’d been a time when she wouldn’t have resisted—couldn’t have resisted—jumping him at a moment like this and sinking her teeth into whatever spot was the handiest.
Then they’d have made love on the kitchen table, or the floor, or if they’d been feeling a little more civilized, they’d have dragged each other into bed.
Now she grabbed the bag back, ate another cookie and congratulated herself on her stupendous personal control.
“Come take a look at this,” he told her and started out of the kitchen. “Bring the cookies.”
She didn’t want to go with him, to be around him at midnight when he was all but naked and the smell of him had her system quivering. But banking on that stupendous personal control, she followed him into his makeshift office.
He hadn’t gone for a desk, but had jury-rigged a long work space out of a sheet of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. He’d set