Rain began to pour down. Ben took her by one hand, then ducked into the small tent. Charlotte refused to follow—considering her attitude toward Jake, it didn’t seem right to take refuge in what passed for his home. Ben scowled up at her and tugged. “Wet and cranky or dry and cranky,” he called over the sound of the rain. “It’s your choice.”
She scrambled inside. They sat side by side on a sleeping bag atop an air mattress. She shivered, and Ben put his arm around her wet shoulders. “Relax,” he whispered. “Think about what I’m thinking about. It’ll warm you up.”
Charlotte gave in and leaned against him. “That’s an understatement. We might start to steam.”
She glanced around with gloomy curiosity. A lantern hung from the center of the ceiling supports. Various belongings of Jake’s—a mining pick, clothes, canned food—protruded from small canvas bags. She spied a closed bag.
She dragged it into her lap. It was enticingly bulky. She fiddled with the knotted ties. “What are you doing?” Ben asked sternly.
“I’m an inspector for the Boy and Girl Scouts Alumni Association.” She pointed to the ties. “Now, I’d say this square knot doesn’t meet our standards.”
He clamped a hand over hers. “Scouts don’t tamper with other people’s private possessions.”
Charlotte met his reproachful stare. “You’re right. It’s disgusting.” After a steely pause she added, “Unless it’s for a good cause.”
“Charlotte,” he said in a warning tone.
“Maybe there’s some clue to Jake’s behavior in this bag. One hint that he still loves my sister. Something I could tell her about that would cheer her up. Doesn’t she deserve that?”
Ben sighed. “That noise you hear,” he said slowly, “is my conscience being throttled by situational ethics.”
“You’re a wonderful man, Benjamin. Remind me to massage your conscience later.” She quickly unfastened the bag and opened it. “Okay, one dog-eared Bible. Spiritual reading material. That’s a good sign.” She laid the Bible on her knees. “One package of pipe tobacco. One long-stemmed stone pipe …” Charlotte’s voice trailed away. She cradled the pipe in her hand, gazing sadly at the ring of tiny garnets that circled the base of the bowl.
Ben leaned closer. “What?”
“This belonged to Dr. Raincrow. I remember it.”
“Another good sign,” Ben said gruffly. She laid the tobacco pouch and pipe atop the Bible. “One … whatever this is.” She studied a wrinkled manila envelope that bulged with soft contents. The metal wings of the fastener had broken off from repeated use. She eased a folded sheaf of glossy magazine pages out. Like the envelope, they were rumpled from much handling. Each bore a tattered edge where it had been torn from the magazine binding. “Ah-hah. Let’s see what interested him so much that he’d swipe pages from the prison magazine collection.” Her pulse thready, she unfolded the stack.
She and Ben peered at the page on top. Ben grunted. “An ad for denture cream? I believe Jake has all his own teeth.”
Charlotte froze. “Those are Sammie’s hands holding the tube.” She and Ben traded an incredulous look. “How could he know that?” Ben asked.
Charlotte shook her head. She flipped through the rest of the pages. An array of products, everything from fine jewelry to monkey wrenches, each posed gracefully in Sammie’s hands. “All of these are ads with Sammie’s hands in them!”
Ben took them from her and went through the collection again. “There couldn’t be too many hand models in the country. The odds are good that Jake would come across ads with Sam’s—”
“But there’s not one in here that isn’t her.” Charlotte poked a shaky fingertip at the bottom of the pages. “And look at the dates. He started collecting these right after he went to prison.” Her voice choked up. “Oh, Ben.”
Ben folded the pages gently and slid them back into the envelope. “However he knew it was her work, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the reason, and that reason doesn’t surprise me. I told you he never stopped loving her.” Ben laid the envelope in her lap. “Any more doubt?”
Charlotte sagged a little. “I don’t know what to think. If he loves her, why is he treating her so badly? Why won’t he tell her how he feels?”
“I don’t know that myself.” Ben hesitated. “But then, I waited a long time to tell you my feelings.” He cleared his throat. “And I have menus from every restaurant you ever worked for.”
After a stunned, melting moment, Charlotte kissed him. “I stole one of your personalized notepads and a handful of your business cards. I still have them.”
Ben looked delighted but shocked. “How did you manage to get that? You came to my office only once—the day we met. The day Sam hired me.”
She nodded somberly. “Yeah. That was the day. I was just sixteen. Jailbait. It was a good thing you didn’t suspect.” She paused. “I didn’t understand it myself.”
Ben leaned his forehead against hers. “I tried my damnedest to treat you like an obnoxious kid sister. But the sister image never took, kid dropped out of my mind a few years later, and then—”
“I was just obnoxious, hmmm?”
“Too late. I was already hooked.”
“Me too.” She put an arm around his neck. “We better get out of here because I’m awfully tempted to wrestle you to the mat again. This ain’t Jake’s spare bedroom. It’s his whole house.”
Ben kissed her. “I’ll race you home.”
They eased apart and looked at the items jumbled in her lap. “I’ll tell Sammie about the magazine pages,” Charlotte said softly. “It’ll mean a lot to her.”
“You win. Prowling proved to be justified. This once.”
Charlotte tucked the envelope back into the bag, then realized something else still remained in the bottom. “Remember you said that.” She pulled a thick file folder out. Ben groaned. “Enough. Don’t look at it. I mean it—”
“Hold your conscience down for a few more seconds.” She flung the folder open. A mound of newspaper articles met her startled gaze. Some were yellowed with age; some were just text, the black ink smeared by Jake’s fingers. Others included photographs. She flipped through them. Dread and shock washed over her.
Every one of them concerned Aunt Alex or Tim.
Ben forgot his protests and bent over them. “What the hell?”
Charlotte began to tremble. “He’s keeping track of them. He doesn’t trust them. I’m not the only one who thinks they’ll never leave us alone. Oh, God, maybe that’s why he acts the way he does toward Sammie.”
She looked at Ben frantically. Even he seemed troubled. “I’ll talk to him.”
“No. You can’t tell him we went through his things. It might make him less inclined to explain, and that wouldn’t help anything. And don’t tell Sammie what we found. Please. I’m going to see what I can learn about this—quietly. Maybe this time I can solve a problem for her instead of being a problem.”
Ben touched her face soothingly. His eyes darkened. “All right. But you have to let me help you.”
“No, no—”
“It’s too late to shut me out again. That plateau you wanted us to perch on just turned into a cliff.”
He wasn’t going to relent. She’d keep tiptoeing around her secrets as long as she could. Hopefully, forever. Charlotte bent her head. “Any ideas where we should start climbing?”
He fanned the articles across his thighs. “Look at this.”
It was a group photograph taken at some charity ball. Orrin, and Alexandra, and Tim. And beside Tim, holding his arm and looking at the camera with a tight smile, was his wife. Ex-wife now, Charlotte recalled.
Jake had drawn a circle around her.
Jake hadn’t said a dozen words to her during the long ride back. Most of the time she hadn’t even been certain he was listening. Sam was still in shock. There was a huge blind spot in what she knew about him—and obviously a blind spot in what he knew about her.
They’d loved ea
ch other since childhood. He’d trusted her with everything but the part of himself that defined him more than any other. Why?
Since he wouldn’t tell her what she desperately wanted to know, she’d decided to tell him every detail about her life during his time in prison—a nonstop monologue that had gone on for hours. She hoped he’d heard the unspoken message in it.
I don’t have anything to hide from you.
The night was bleak. The Cove closed around them like a dark, rainy tunnel. Sam drove slowly along the narrow gravel road, dreading the trip’s end. Jake would disappear into the night without admitting anything.
Bo, curled up in the backseat, gave a raspy cough. “Bo’s catching cold,” Sam announced. “And he moves like the Tin Man with a bad case of rust. You shouldn’t take him to the tent with you. It’s too wet and cool.”
Jake stirred as if waking up. “He can stay with you tonight.”
“Good. But you know how Bo is. The second you leave, he’ll start clawing the door.” I might do the same thing, she added silently. Sam took a deep breath. “Your clothes are damp and dirty, and you haven’t slept on a real mattress in weeks. It would make sense for you to stay at the house too.” She added quickly, “The bed in the spare room is already made up.”
“I’m used to the tent.”
She turned the car up the drive to the house. “We haven’t eaten any dinner. You can’t heat a can of pork and beans over a wet pile of logs. I expect Charlotte made her daily food run while we were gone. Remember what I told you about the way I pigged out for a few years? Please help me plow through a few surplus casseroles. I don’t want to get fat again.”
“No reason to think you will. No point in it anymore. No pretty-boy models to worry about.”
Sam mulled over that strange comment. “I don’t recall telling you I had a reason for gaining weight.”
He shifted in his seat. She could almost feel him frowning. “Well, did you?”
“You tell me. Tell me how you determined that I stuffed myself to keep men from flirting with me.”
“Watched a few million Oprah shows in the prison TV room,” he tossed back. “Picked up a lot of female psychology.”
They reached the house. Rain drizzled from the eaves. He had not given her an answer about staying the night. She cut the engine and turned toward him. “Look, Dr. Freud, I’m offering you a hot shower, a good meal, and a dry bed. Any ulterior motives are in your own over-Oprahed imagination. Bo needs a decent night’s rest. He won’t rest unless he knows you’re within licking distance.” She paused. “And all right, I promise not to regale you with any more passages from my oral diary. We have a big house. You can pretend I’m not around.”
“I doubt it. I couldn’t when you were on the other side of the country.”
He didn’t give her a chance to respond to that bone-melting statement. He got out of the car and opened the back door. Bo grunted but wouldn’t budge. Jake carried him to the porch.
Sam hurried after them and unlocked the front door. Excitement made her giddy.
He was going to spend the night.
Jake stepped into their darkened house with her for the first time in ten years. The air seemed to vibrate with expectation. He’s home. He’s really home now, Sam told herself. She flicked the hall light switch and looked up at him happily, but there was no surrender in him. “I’ll take a shower,” he said without a trace of emotion. “And stay until Bo’s sound asleep.”
He used cold water. It numbed the outer sensations but couldn’t chill the turmoil inside him. Just being inside these walls again, feeling every old desire and warm memory, tormented his willpower.
It was good to be home. It was good to be with Samantha. Too damned good. He was sinking quickly.
He dried himself with a huge white towel that had been one of their wedding gifts. He stood on a bath rug she’d woven during the first few weeks of their marriage. Even this narrow little bathroom off the guest room was hard to take. If he’d let her talk him into using the shower off their own bedroom, he’d be kissing the walls.
Jake shivered. He’d felt less threatened in prison baths, surrounded by men with nicknames like Sweetheart and Dong.
He walked out of the bathroom in a hurry to get dressed. Damp, dirty clothes were an armor he needed. He’d left them in a pile in the floor.
They were gone. A long, luxurious, burgundy robe lay across the turned-down bedspread.
Just a robe.
Maybe he’d be angry. Maybe he’d take the hint. Either way, Sam was through playing easy-to-ignore.
Bo was stretched out on an old blanket in front of the fire. Sam prodded him gently with her bare toes. Wake up. Look restless. He snored.
She leaned back on the couch and tried to appear relaxed, though every nerve was on alert. A log sizzled and popped. On the coffee table sat two glasses and a bottle of champagne in a stoneware cooler filled with ice. The bottle shifted noisily in its melting bed. The fluorescent bulb of the lamp on the end table gave off a low humming sound along with seductive light.
There were only two silent hot spots in the whole house. The guest bedroom, and her body.
She was holding her breath. She’d jumped in over her head. She wore the white silk nightgown and matching robe she’d made for their wedding night. It would be either a life preserver or a cement overcoat, depending on his reaction.
She heard him walking swiftly up the back hall. Since she’d swiped his boots too, his bare feet made mellow thuds on the smooth wood floor. She hoped the rest of him was mellow.
“Samantha, goddammit,” he called loudly on his way into the living room. He strode through the doorway. The robe fit beautifully. Oh, how it fit. “Get my clothes—” he began. That was as far as he got. He halted, staring at her. So many emotions merged in one paralyzed moment. She wasn’t drowning alone.
Sam rose as gracefully as she could. Her legs shook. She moved toward him, hands clenched by her sides. He would have to touch her first. That was the only rule she wouldn’t break. “We never got to the champagne on our wedding night,” she told him in a ragged whisper. “Let’s forget about it tonight too.”
He was shaking as badly as she. He raised an arm across his chest, the back of his hand turned toward her. It was a far more self-protective gesture than threatening. Sam stopped close enough for him to slap her. She could barely speak. “You could hit me, but you’d never do that,” she told him. “I know it. Nothing you’ve hidden from me, nothing you think I can’t accept, can change what I know best about you. I love you. I will never stop loving you. And all I really need to know is that you still love me too.”
Ten years of separation shattered in a heartbeat as he pulled her to him.
The morning sun drew water from the soaked earth and turned it into a shimmering mist above the forest floor. Jake sat by his grandmother’s spring, blanketed in the floating silver haze, his bare arms propped on his knees. He wore only his jeans. He should have been fully dressed. He was sitting there as if the night had never happened, when he should have walked deep into the mountains. He should have bathed the heavy tenderness from his muscles, washed Samantha’s wonderful scent from his skin, her taste from his mouth. But he hadn’t.
He had broken promises to himself and to her, though she didn’t know it. The old, harsh voice inside him said nothing had really changed. They weren’t safe until the past was finished.
What line could he walk now? Half in darkness, half in light, unable to give up either one. Jake put his head in his hands.
He heard the front door slam open. He heard her shout his name brokenly—once, then again, agonized and searching. She thought he’d left her again.
He bolted to his feet and ran up the path. She was crumpled on the porch steps, the white silk robe sliding down her naked back and shoulders, her face hidden inside one tightly curled arm. She beat one fist against the porch floor. Her body shook with silent sobs.
The light was too strong now. He coul
dn’t do this to her.
She jerked upright at the sound of his footsteps. Jake fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her. The relief in her eyes made him give a hoarse cry of apology. She took his face between her perfect hands and kissed him.
Wedged between the bottom of the sun-warmed steps and the cool, steaming earth, they held each other and rocked slowly, balanced for now, at least, on faith.
“Let go of my … hmmm, all right, don’t let go, but I am going to call Sammie this time.” Charlotte willed one hand away from the back of Ben’s head and searched for the portable phone again. It was lost somewhere in his bed. One of his more provocative activities made her take a quick, helpless breath and arch against him. Her shoulder pressed down into hard plastic, and the phone beeped shrilly.
“I shouldn’t have bought a model with a paging feature,” Ben grumbled. He raised his head from the general vicinity of her navel and squinted at her with mild reproach. “It’s not even eight o’clock. You’ll wake her up.”
Charlotte frowned and tapped a fingertip against his lips. “Here we are, going at it like wild bunnies, and I don’t even know if she came home last night. If she doesn’t answer the phone this time, I’m heading over there. Besides which, we’ve got to get out of this bed and talk about what we’re going to do. About those newspaper clippings of Jake’s.”
“We can discuss them in bed.”
“My dear Mr. Dreyfus, we’ve said maybe two coherent words to each other since we got here yesterday.”
“Well, more and yes are two of my favorite words.”
She smiled. “Set your broth on simmer for a minute.”
He propped himself on one elbow, gallantly slid the phone from beneath her shoulder, and presented it to her. “Hurry. I think my thermostat is broken.”
Her smile faded. As she punched the Cove’s number into the phone, she looked at him wistfully. “My sister deserves this kind of morning. She’s still sitting in the middle of the woods with nothing but her pillows to hug. It’s not fair.”
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