by Jacobs, Ann
I imagine I’ll find out soon enough, he thought wryly as he grabbed some clothes and padded into the bathroom to shave and dress.
A few minutes later, a mug of freshly brewed coffee in hand, he went out on the porch. Sunlight filtered through the tall trees, casting dappled shadows across the broad floor planks. Tired yet too wired to sleep, he leaned back in a rocking chair and listened to water tumble over the boulders in the stream beneath his feet.
“Jared?” Althea’s soft call jarred him from his idle thoughts.
“I’m out here, sweetheart.”
She set her coffee on the table next to him, then sat down on the bench next to the porch rail. “I guess you saw I finished your quilt.”
“I did. It looks good, especially with you lying underneath it.” A chill slithered into his gut. It sounded as though she was getting ready to say goodbye.
The look on her face confirmed his fear. “I love you, but I don’t believe we’re going to make it together.”
He tried to smile, hoping she’d think he wasn’t taking her seriously. “Why?”
“We’re too different. We’re worlds apart, and we’ve got very different ideas about what’s important. I guess the simplest way to explain it is that I feel out of place in your world.”
“My world is yours, sweetheart. It’s you.” He realized that was the absolute truth. His life wouldn’t be worth living without her.
Like a skittish animal, she got up and sidestepped away from him. “Please, Jared. Listen to me. You make me uncomfortable.”
He reached out and laid a hand on her arm, desperate to keep her from bolting. “Tell me what it is I do that makes you feel that way.”
“It’s not any one thing.” She paused, as though trying to put together the words to explain. “Your wealth…your… You want an example, here. The way you buy whatever it is you get a notion you want intimidates me.”
Oh no. He thought about the jewelry upstairs on the night stand. “You’re talking about the jewelry. Well, the aquamarines reminded me of your eyes—“
“Not just the jewelry, but that’s part of it. Think about it. The land for the co-op. The brand-new building that’s going up on that land as we speak.”
When he started to protest, she held up a hand. “That’s not all. Even small things, like the quilt frame you bought. The quilt itself. If you want something, you buy it without batting an eye. No thought. No deliberation. I can’t live with that.”
Damn it, Jared had worked hard to get to where he could spend money as he saw fit without worrying about it. “You want me to become a miser?”
She shook her head. “Oh, Jared, you just don’t understand.”
“No I don’t. I’ve known women who pretend love they don’t feel, just to get themselves a rich man. You’re the first one I’ve come across who wants to throw away real love because the guy she fell for happens to have a lot of money.”
Althea jerked her arm away and stalked over to the porch rail, making a show of watching water flow over the boulders in the stream bed before speaking through clenched teeth. “It’s not the money, Jared, it’s the way you think. The way I think. How we live and what’s important to us. We’re just too different.”
Coming up behind her and taking her hand, he squeezed it. She couldn’t walk away. He wouldn’t let her. After what seemed like forever, she laced her fingers with his and brought his hand to her lips.
Her breath tickled his knuckles. “What’s important to me, sweetheart, is you. Us. The kind of life we can have together. Damn it, I’m not going to apologize for helping you realize your vision for the co-op, or for giving you whatever I can afford that I want you to have. I’m not about to say I’m sorry for having worked hard and made my dream for Cain Software a reality.”
“I don’t want an apology. I just want you to understand that I’m not comfortable in a world where you can open your wallet and make things happen the way most men can’t. You’ve made yourself that kind of world.” She paused, and when she spoke again he had to strain his ears to hear what came out as barely a whisper. “I’m a simple country woman. I don’t belong in the world you’ve made for yourself.”
What could he say? “My roots are here, same as yours.”
She faced him, and when she met his gaze he saw tears glistening in her eyes. “I’ve tried to believe that. I’ve told myself over and over that you’ve come back to the mountains and made them your home. I’ve wanted so much to believe you’ve come home to me. But you haven’t. You’ve moved what might was well be a million miles from Big Bear Mountain, in every way that counts.”
The resignation in her tone, the sadness in her eyes, even the resolute set of her shoulders told him she’d made up her mind to walk away. He had to say something, anything to make her change her mind. “That’s not true—”
“You know it is. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
“Come with me.” He took her hand and practically dragged her down the steps behind him.
“Where are we going?”
“Just come. There’s something I want to show you.”
Holding her hand, he headed up the steep pathway that led to the summit of the mountain. As they went higher, the path narrowed. A blood vessel began to throb in his temple. He had to make her understand. If he couldn’t, he’d lose the first real love he’d had since he was twelve years old and his dad’s death turned his world upside down.
He’d lose Althea.
▪ ▪ ▪
When they finally stopped at the end of the path, Althea tried to catch her breath. Jared was still clutching her hand as if he thought she’d bolt, given half a chance.
“Look,” he ground out. “These are my roots. This is where I spent the first twelve years of my life.” He inclined his head toward what looked like an odd-shaped, overgrown clearing practically gone back to the forest.
She caught her breath then looked around. The stone and cement foundation of a small cabin stood stubbornly against the elements, while its rotting walls had caved in on themselves, leaving an eerie skeleton. What remained of a thick tree trunk took up most of the rest of the clearing, and she noticed the carcass of a rotted truck tire a few yards away, underneath the unkempt growth of a couple of mountain laurels in full bloom.
Jared strode over to the tree trunk, dragging her behind him. “I used to play for hours under this tree. When Dad hung up that tire so I could swing out over the gully, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
Once he must have dreamed simple dreams, found pleasure in amusements less complicated than the elaborate electronic games that had made him his fortune. Althea watched a wealth of emotions flash in his dark, expressive eyes. Nostalgia. Pain. Love. It was as though he’d raised the curtain on his soul and set his feelings free.
She glanced at the cabin ruins that seemed almost obscene against the background of a brilliant sky and majestic evergreens, and suddenly she knew. “You found that quilt square among those ruins.”
“Yes.” He touched her cheek, so softly she might have mistaken his fingers for the breeze if she hadn’t been looking his way. “There was nothing else. Just that square, and one old, rotten tire to show for all the years the Cains lived on Big Bear Mountain.”
Althea lifted his hand and brushed it across her lips. “There’s you, Jared.”
“Yeah. I may be crazy but I always thought of this miserable place as home. I kept picturing Mom working on her quilts inside, and remembering Dad taking me to pan for gold in the streams.” He paused and gestured toward the jumble of rocks and rotted timbers. “Smiling. Both of them seemed so happy all the time. Mom never smiled much after we went away.”
“I’m sorry. I understand how you must have felt.”
His expression turned fierce. “You don’t have the faintest idea about how I felt. You couldn’t. I was twelve years old, damn it. A twelve year old kid with no time to cry because I’d just lost my dad, no chance to remember the fun we
’d had. I was too fucking busy, trying to step into the shoes he hadn’t filled even when he was alive, shoes I’d been too dumb to realize needed filling. I couldn’t fill those shoes because I was nothing but a worthless little kid, somebody my mom had to find a way of taking care of.”
“Jared—“
“No. Don’t say it. If you had any idea how useless I felt when I helped Mom haul the pitifully few things we owned down this mountain where we’d been squatting, you’d understand why I vowed I’d never end up dirt poor. I’d never be a worthless dreamer like my old man.”
Althea wished she’d known Jared then, before he’d lost his childhood and learned how some folks measure pleasure in terms of its price. “You must have missed this place something fierce.” She looked away from him, at the cabin’s ruins, because it hurt too much to see him suffering.
He knelt on the ground and rubbed his hand across the carcass of the tire. “I missed what I’d made of it in my mind.”
Even before time and the elements had reduced it to a pile of rubble, the home Jared had kept in his heart all these years couldn’t have been much more than a couple of tiny rooms. Still, he’d apparently made it a symbol of all he’d had. All he’d lost and missed in the ensuing years. A symbol of his childhood and his sense of belonging.
“I bought this mountain and came back searching for something. I thought this would be it—the home I remembered from when I was a boy. It wasn’t, though. It wouldn’t have been, even if nature had preserved the place the way I recalled it in my mind.”
He stood and strode toward the ruined cabin. When he stopped outside what Althea imagined must have once been the front door, he turned and looked at her. “Know what I finally figured out? Home wasn’t a place, it was family. Love. Mom, Dad and me. We’d have been home in an Atlanta mansion or a condo on a beach, as much as we were here. Money doesn’t matter when you’ve got love, sweetheart.”
His words had Althea choking up, but she forced herself not to cry. She wanted so much to believe him, to take a chance that their love could bridge the gap between his world and hers. A small voice inside her warned her, though, their worlds were still light years apart.
He walked over to the edge of the clearing and plucked a cluster of pink flowers from an overgrown mountain laurel. His gaze steady on her, he came back, smiling as he handed her the simple wildflower. “Here. This is my heart. It belongs to you. I warn you, it breaks easily, so please take care of it.”
The velvety petals fluttered in the breeze, as though to remind her how fragile they were, how easily they could be destroyed. How easily she could lose the love he brought her—the heady emotions she’d once promised herself never to risk feeling again. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said softly, holding his sober gaze as she hugged the flower to her breast.
He smiled. “Then believe in us. Give us a chance. Take the same kind of pleasure when I give you diamonds as you’re taking in that little flower I just picked off a wild shrub. They’re both beautiful. More important, the message I’m sending with either gift is exactly the same.”
The kernel of insecurity inside Althea burst into bloom, choked the breath out of her. She wanted to conquer it but she couldn’t. “I want to believe we can make it work. Honestly. I want to with all my heart. But I’m afraid. Afraid you’ll get tired of me, want somebody—“
He put a hand gently over her mouth. “Be quiet.”
She loved the way his eyes reflected the colors of the forest around them. Now they seemed more amber than green against the backdrop of blue sky and russet earth. Warm. Full of love and hope.
“Listen to me, Althea. I’ve never wanted anybody the way I want you. You satisfy me in every way. You make me feel whole. It’s the God’s honest truth that losing you would be like losing the better half of me.”
She sighed, realizing she couldn’t keep fighting him when that meant fighting herself just as hard. “I can’t help loving you.”
“Enough to risk marrying me?”
She nodded. Risk was the operative word, but she couldn’t deny her heart. “I even love you enough to put up with you taking over and deciding what I need, before I even know myself. I’d appreciate, though, if you’d ask me before you do something else on such a grand scale as your co-op project.”
Looking happier than she’d seen him since the night she’d accepted his proposal, she watched him lay his right hand over his heart while reaching into his jeans pocket with the other hand. “I want to put this back where it belongs,” he said as he slid her engagement ring back on her finger.
“About those gifts you sent me…”
“Those trinkets? I wanted you to have them, but if it makes you feel better, pretend they came out of boxes of Cracker Jack and just say thanks.”
Althea’s first instinct was to make a sarcastic reply, but she held it back. She could life with Jared buying her extravagant gifts if that gave him pleasure, but she wouldn’t stand for him to barge in and take over projects she needed to do for herself.
“All right. Thank you. They’re beautiful.”
“There. That wasn’t too difficult now, was it?”
“No.” It wasn’t hard at all to accept him the way he was, not when she loved him so much. “But Jared, I won’t thank you for going behind my back the way you did, arranging to build the co-op facility.”
“I’m sorry. Not for anything I did, but for not talking over my plans with you before going ahead with them. I’ll try to remember you don’t like surprises like that.” His smile looked almost angelic, but she noticed a wicked twinkle in his eyes.
She figured, if she believed he wouldn’t barge in the next time he wanted to do something he could do better or faster than she could do for herself, she’d be an excellent prospect for any con artist trying to sell oceanfront property in Arizona or something equally ridiculous. But she wouldn’t worry about that now.
Shooting Jared a smile, she figured she’d enjoy watching him every inch of the way. She’d given him her love, but she’d be careful to hold on to a piece of herself.
“Let’s go home,” she said, putting her hand in his just as she’d placed her heart in his care.
“Let’s.”
Epilogue
Three weeks later, after a quiet wedding on Big Bear Mountain
The wedding had been exactly as Althea wanted, just him and her and a handful of good friends and family on the porch where sounds of woods creatures and rushing water in the rocky stream bed took the place of organ music and voices raised in song. Jared watched his bride disappear into the bathroom, apparently shy with him now that their vows had been said.
He stripped off the suit he’d put on for the wedding and hung it up then crawled into the big oak bed, under the quilt Althea had finished when their future had been less than certain. Idly, as he listened to the water pound against the shower wall, he traced around a square of the quilt. His mother’s words from long ago echoed in the room.
The geese fly away from the mountains every fall, the way we’re going to do. Someday, though, they’ll come back.
With his fingertips, he traced each small stitch, reminded of the long hours and the love Althea had invested to fulfill the dream his mom had put in his head years ago.
God how he loved Althea—and how he wished she’d hurry. How long could it possibly take for her to do whatever she was doing in the bathroom and come to him?
She was his wife now. His wife. Saying the vows earlier today hadn’t brought terror to his throat the way he’d always thought it would. A gentle peace had come over him this afternoon when she came to him. Now lazy anticipation was giving way to impatience for her to join him. He was eager to seal the promises they’d made.
It wasn’t as though they hadn’t made love a hundred times or more, or that they didn’t know each other’s bodies as well as their own. They could have made love a thousand times over decades instead of months, and still tonight would be special.
J
ared rubbed his palm along his jaw. He’d shaved before the wedding. No matter. Folding the quilt back, he got up and hurried to one of the guest bathrooms. Tonight of all nights, he didn’t want to chance chafing Althea’s tender skin. For good measure he showered again before hurrying back to bed and crawling in.
She still was locked up in the bathroom. What was taking her so long?
As she slid an old-fashioned muslin nightgown embroidered with mountain laurel flowers over her head, Althea breathed in the scent of woods violets from the body wash she’d used. The platinum band Jared had slipped on her finger earlier caught the fluorescent light, catching her attention as much as the big diamond solitaire she still hadn’t quite gotten used to wearing.
She smiled, gratified that he was trying. He’d even let her go with him to select their wedding bands, and he’d kept his complaints to himself when she’d insisted on the simple, narrow band.
Until she’d looked at Jared while Jim had escorted her to him, and seen the unconditional love etched on his handsome features, she’d been afraid. Now, though, she was ready for whatever the future might bring. Smiling at her blurry image in the steamed-up mirror, she fastened the bracelet that held a ruby heart dangling from her sleeve.
Recalling nights she’d come to Jared as naked as a baby, she looked down at the modest nightgown her friend Trina had sewn for her trousseau from a century-old pattern she’d found. When Althea opened the door and stepped in the bedroom, she shivered, and not just from the cool air in the room. The sight of her husband propped up on a pile of pillows in the big, oak bed, under the quilt that had brought them together, took her breath away.
His eyes reflected the tones of green in the quilt. The intensity of his gaze when he looked her over head to toe made her feel as if he were seeing every inch of her through the soft, fine muslin.
“Come here, wife.”
She took a step closer. The muscles in his arms and chest rippled as he sat up all the way and let the quilt settle on his lap. Tanned and fit, Jared in bed was a sight meant to turn a woman to jelly. She didn’t have to ask if he was naked beneath the quilt.