by Cara Colter
“You might as well come with me,” he said, as if it was his idea, as if she was not already stuck to his heels like glue. “There are other things we might need from the shed.”
She followed him outside into the morning. She stopped for a minute, gulping in the freshness, the call of the birds, the chatter of an indignant chipmunk.
At the shed door, he stopped and looked back at her.
“Something else?” he said quietly. “He’s not coming for you here. And if he did, he’d have to get past me. And you know what?”
She shook her head.
“He’s no match for me.”
And she knew, looking up at him, that that was absolutely true. She knew why she had been reassured instead of appalled by that dreadful word he had said.
Because in that single syllable had been this message.
Jefferson Stone would lay down his life for her. And though Angie had lost the lovely sensation of fearless that she had felt over the past few days, something in her relaxed as she watched him fling open the shed door.
“There it is.”
She saw the red handles of a dolly poking out from behind a weed whacker, a sack of lawn seed and several boxes. It seemed to her that her idea of sliding the furniture out of the living room was better than his, but she said nothing.
She reached to take the first dusty box from him. Their hands touched. His closed around hers and squeezed. She realized Jefferson was offering her his strength until her own returned.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANGIE WAS FEELING STRONGER, already, as she set down the first box, and Jefferson passed her another. Finally, he unearthed the dolly and managed to wrestle it out of the shed.
He brushed himself off while she looked at the dolly. “It’s covered in spiderwebs. We just need to—”
She caught Jefferson taking a giant step back out of the corner of her eye.
“What?”
“I don’t like spiders,” he said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He made a face. She was aware he was not kidding, not entirely.
“For someone who does not want to be mistaken as a knight in shining armor, it was a very brave thing to go inside that shed if you’re afraid of spiders.”
“I don’t recall using the word afraid.”
“Maybe we’re all afraid of something,” she said gently.
He rejected her gentleness. “I’m not afraid of them. I just don’t like them.”
“Look! There’s one crawling up the handle. It’s huge.”
“Don’t touch that!”
She ignored him and let the spider crawl onto her hand.
“Put that down.”
“He’s cute. Look.” She held out her hand.
Jefferson stepped back. She stepped forward. He scowled. She giggled. She took another step forward. He retreated, then turned on his heel and darted through the trees.
She shrieked with laughter and went in hot pursuit of him. He plunged through the trees and leaped over fallen logs, shouting his protests.
She followed on his heels, shouting with laughter.
Finally, when they were both gasping for breath from running and laughing and leaping logs and dodging trees, Jefferson put the huge trunk of a live tree between them. He looked out from behind it. She lunged one way. He went the other.
Then his hand snaked out from behind the tree and grabbed her wrist.
“You made me drop him,” she protested. In actual fact, she was pretty sure she had dropped the spider a long time ago.
“Thank God,” he said. He threw himself down on the forest floor and lay on his back, his hands folded over his chest as if he was monitoring the hard beating of his heart. “It’s already hot,” he said.
It felt like the most natural thing in the world to lie down on the forest floor beside him. It smelled of new things and ancient things, blended together perfectly. She looked up through the tangle of branches at a bright blue sky. And then she turned her head to look at him, drinking in his strong and now so familiar profile.
New things. The way she felt about him.
Ancient things. The way men and women had come together for all time and against all odds.
“Are you really afraid of spiders?” She suspected he wasn’t. He wouldn’t be lying here in all this forest duff if he was afraid of creepy-crawly things, would he? “Or were you just distracting me from my own fear?”
“Maybe you were right. Everybody’s afraid of something.”
“What are you afraid of? Really?”
He was silent for a long time. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked quietly.
She thought of that. She thought of him being an orphan and first losing his grandparents and then his wife. She thought of his extreme isolation. Of the fact that he didn’t even want a housekeeper who was chatty.
He was afraid to let anyone in. He was afraid to lose anything else.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s obvious.”
“It’s too hot to move furniture today,” Jefferson announced, obviously not prepared to probe his fears any further, obviously fearing he had already said way too much. And so there it was. Full retreat.
Except it wasn’t. She recognized a miracle when it was presented.
“You want to go out on the boat?” he asked softly.
Angie thought of the boat and how safe she had felt there through the storm, and how much it must have taken for him to offer her this. She thought of the boat as the place where pure magic had unfolded between them.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to go out on the boat. And suddenly, I’m starving. I knew cookies were not a good breakfast! Should I pack a lunch?”
“Sure. And don’t forget your bathing suit.”
“How do you know I have one?”
“It was on the bill.”
She thought of that bathing suit. She was pretty sure she did not have the guts to wear it in front of him. On the other hand, he was testing his courage. Maybe all of it, all of life, was a call to courage.
He got up and held out his hand to her. She took it and he never let it go as they walked to the house together.
* * *
“What is that?” Jefferson asked, when Angie met him at the boat a half hour later.
“What?”
“What you are wearing.”
“It’s a bathing suit cover.”
“It looks like a cross between a monk’s frock and Mexican serape. Where did you unearth it?”
“I made it,” she said, as if she was quite pleased with herself. “I mean I didn’t sew it. I didn’t have time. I just found some fabric and cut it. I’ve always been good at making things.”
“Hmm, good might be a bit of a stretch,” he said, and realized he felt comfortable teasing her. It was a terrible thing, but he felt glad about that phone call this morning. It had broken the impasse he had created between them.
He wanted to give her—a woman who had suffered just a little too much—carefree days of summer. He wanted to do that, even if it cost him.
He took the boat out onto the lake, and they did a tour of some of its hundreds of miles of coves and inlets and arms. And then he brought them back to a place that was not that far—and yet a world away—from where his house was located.
“Let’s go ashore here for lunch,” Jefferson suggested.
“What is this place?” Angie asked, handing him the picnic basket and then taking his hand and letting him help her out of the boat.
“Watch the pier. It’s a bit rotten. This is where my grandparents’ house used to be. You can still see the foundation.”
She wandered over and looked at the crumbling stone foundation. “What happened to the house?”
“What a beautiful spot.” She reached for the basket and pulled a blanket from it. She set it out and they both settled on it. “I’m surprised you didn’t build your new house here.”
“It wasn’t practical. This spot is nearly inaccessible by land. My great-grandfather ran a trading post here for lake traffic. When I came here, my grandparents were still almost exclusively using a boat for transport.”
“How did you go to school?”
“Until high school, by correspondence. Then, my grandparents bought a place for us in Anslow. They said it was because they were getting older, but I know it was so I could have a normal high school experience, make some friends.” He grinned at the memory. “Meet a girl. My grandfather was always concerned about me meeting a girl.”
It occurred to him his grandfather would be very pleased, indeed, to see this girl eating a picnic lunch by the old homestead.
“What kind of normal did you have here?” she asked.
He thought he should probably stop talking, but on the other hand, it was good to distract her and to see her growing more relaxed by the minute.
“The best kind,” he said. “I grew up using a boat, and chopping wood and hunting and fishing. I knew every inch of these woods. It helped me. It healed me.”
He was shocked to hear himself say that. He was not sure he had ever said it before. If he had been able to say it to Hailey, would she have understood?
“I could never sell it,” Jefferson heard himself say.
“Sell it?” Angie looked at him, astonished. “I think it would be criminal to sell it.”
As they ate lunch, she seemed to know all the right questions. And so he found himself talking of things he had not spoken of for years. He told her of the basset hound named Sam who had followed him through the days of his boyhood, and of a baby squirrel he had bottle-fed. He told her of the winter the snow had piled up past the roof, and of being on the lake in twenty-foot swells. He told her of bear encounters and afternoons in the hills picking gallons of huckleberries that his grandmother turned into pies and preserves.
“People see this place as magical in the summer, but my favorite time of year here was Christmas,” Jefferson said.
“Really? Why?”
“My grandmother used to have a Christmas gathering every year, right on Christmas Day. She sent out a blanket invitation. Everyone was invited, and everyone came. My grandfather and I were put to work a month in advance. We had to find the perfect Christmas tree, and make sure there was enough wood to have a bonfire down by the lake. The main body of this lake never freezes, but sometimes the arms do, and I can remember my grandfather going out there with a saw, every day in December, to check the depth of the ice. We were allowed to skate if the ice was over four inches thick. The day he pronounced it safe was better than Christmas for me. I can remember skating on it when the ice was so clear it was like skating on a sheet of glass over the water.
“It could be hard to get here in the winter, but they came for the Stone Christmas, anyway. There were no gifts allowed at her gathering—my grandmother said the gift was each other. And so people came from miles around, and the women got around her gift rule by bringing pies and homemade bread and buns and jars of preserves.
“Families prepared skits, and we sang songs, and we ate food until we could barely move. We kept a bonfire going, and there was sledding and snow fights and snowman building competitions. Lots of times people came prepared to stay, and there were sleeping bags on the floors, and the gathering lasted for days.”
It seemed, as he spoke, he was being restored to some part of himself that he had forgotten.
“It sounds wonderful,” she said wistfully. “What happened to it?”
“We had a smaller version of it once we moved into town. My grandparents got older, families grew up and people moved. It just kind of faded away.”
They sat there in silence for a long time.
“Are you up for a bit of a hike?” he asked. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
He contemplated that invitation, even as he took her hand. He’d never taken anyone to his secret place before. Hailey would not have wanted to go. She would have complained incessantly about bugs and branches snagging her clothes. She would have worried about bears and cougars and wolves.
He guided Angie to a trail that was sadly overgrown, though the animals still used it, so it was passable. Even though her footwear was entirely inappropriate—a flimsy pair of flip-flops, she was uncomplaining as they wound their way steadily upward through the forest growth and the steadily increasing afternoon heat.
The trail ended an hour later at a waterfall. It cascaded out of a rock outcropping fifty feet above them and ended in a gorgeous green pool.
He watched, not the waterfall, which he had seen a thousand times, but her.
Her face was a study in wonder.
“This,” she declared softly, “is the most beautiful place in the world.”
They were both hot and sticky after the hike, so he stripped off his shirt.
“Ready to swim?” he asked her.
She hesitated and then tugged the hem of that serape/frock invention over her head.
He was aware his mouth fell open. He snapped it shut. He ordered himself to look away. He didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s all they had at the Emporium.”
Sorry? She was a goddess. She was a vision. He had to turn from her and dive into the water to break away from the spell she was casting on him in that tiny polka-dot bikini.
He surfaced. She was standing at the edge of the pool. Her arms were wrapped around herself. She was a self-conscious goddess.
“Come in,” he called.
She stuck her toe in and emitted a very un-goddess-like shriek. He swam over to her, took the flat of his hand and splashed her.
“Hey! I’m getting in my way. It’s very cold.”
“It’s mountain fed. Of course it’s cold. Get in.”
“Quit being bossy.”
“I’ll be bossy if I want. I’m the boss.”
She giggled at that. “I’ll have to look at my contract,” she said, putting a finger to her chin and tapping. “I’m not sure if you’re the boss here, or just in the house.”
He exploded from the water, wrapped his arms around her, and fell backward into the pond, taking her with him.
She broke from his embrace and the water, sputtering wildly and shaking water droplets from her curls. She glared at him. She stomped toward him. He moved away. She moved after him.
“Come back here,” she demanded.
“That seems as if it would be foolish,” he said, moving a bit farther from her.
What he knew, and she didn’t was that the floor of the pond dropped away suddenly. He took one more step and was treading water.
She took one more step and was in over her head. When she came up for air, paddling to keep her head above water, the laughter rumbled up from someplace deep inside of him. It felt so pure and so good.
“I’m going to get you,” she said.
“If you can catch me. You couldn’t this morning. I don’t see what has changed.”
“You are infuriating.”
“Yes, I know.” He splashed her.
“Oh!” She plunged after him.
Now that the bathing suit—or lack thereof—was hidden by the cool, pure water, the same playfulness that had been between them with the spider erupted again.
He wanted to keep her from thinking of that phone call. And he wanted to make her laugh again.
Soon they were chasing each other around, splashing and shrieking. Their
laughter rang off the walls of the mountains surrounding them and echoed in the rocky cavern behind the waterfall.
Finally, he allowed himself to be caught, and good-naturedly suffered a decent splashing. He guided her under the water of the falls. They could stand up here, and he helped her find her feet. He put his arms around her naked midriff to steady her against the pummeling of the water. She lifted her face to it. And he lifted his.
He stood there, in awe of it, of being baptized by mother earth, cleansed, purified, as if he was being prepared for a new beginning.
Finally, cooled, drenched, pleasantly exhausted, they dragged themselves out onto a huge sun-warmed rock beside the pond. They lay there side by side, until their breathing had returned to normal.
She reached out and laid her hand on his naked back as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“I never want to leave here,” she said.
And he heard himself saying, “I don’t, either.”
He closed his eyes. He let the energy ooze from her hand like heated oil, thick and healing, onto his back. And then through the skin of his back and inside of him, bringing light to a place that had been in darkness.
And days later, he knew the place had not been about the waterfall, because they had left the waterfall and yet that feeling of a warm energy, of something deeply comfortable and playful, remained between them.
Jefferson told himself he was allowing this to happen only because he was being a better man. He was distracting Angie from the pure terror of discovering her predecessor in Winston’s affections had gone missing.
But somehow it wasn’t a job he was doing. There was a kind of joyous discovery of the world they were sharing. His world was boats and water and woods and waterfalls. They took the boat out; they swam, they picnicked, and one memorable afternoon he taught her how to catch a fish. In the perfect marriage of their worlds, she taught him how to cook it.
After the success of that, she invited him into her world even further. He could see what an amazing teacher she must be as she taught him how to make cookies and the correct way to do his laundry and how to sew on a button.