Silk and Stone (51 page)

“Jake.” He straightened and turned wearily. Sam moved up to him cautiously, unable to read his bleary, hooded eyes. She took her coat off and put it around his shoulders. Sam could barely speak past the sorrow in her throat. Finally she said, “I’m not letting you come here alone anymore. Whatever you’re doing, I want to help. Please, please don’t shut me out.”

“You can’t help.” His voice was hollow. He shrugged her coat off and draped it around her. His hands lingered near her face. Slowly, gently, he cupped her jaw. Sam gave a helpless sob. “
Say it
. I’d rather hear you say it than go on this way. You think we caused this somehow. If you hadn’t given me a home, if we hadn’t gotten married, if you didn’t love me—”

He jerked her to him and wound his arms around her, stroking the back of her head, pulling her face deep into the crook of his neck. “I’ll love you forever,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened, or why, and I have to find out. But
we
didn’t cause it.”

Sam trembled with relief. “I keep thinking that I should have stayed here that night. That maybe, with more people in the house, one of us would have smelled the smoke in time.”

“And I keep thinking that I could have saved them if I hadn’t gone to track a stranger.”

She moaned. He had never confessed that private torture before. “No,
no
. The house burned too quick.
Everyone says so. The logs were so old, so dry. Oh, Jake, don’t blame yourself.” She raised her head and looked at him desperately. “Don’t blame anyone. I don’t believe in curses. I
won’t.
” She shook her head wildly. “If you believe in them, it means you think my aunt had something to do with this.”

He grasped her by the shoulders. His face was hard, his eyes full of pain. “I don’t know what to believe yet. I can’t even think. Because when I do, and when I fall asleep and dream, I see my parents and Ellie waking up in smoke so thick, they couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I see them trying to find each other and get out together, while the house burned up around them.”

“Don’t you think I see that too?”

“Not the way I do.”

“Oh, Jake.”

He released her and stepped back, holding her away as if it took all his willpower. “Go back home. Charlotte needs you.”

And you don’t
, she thought with despair. “What are you looking for? Tell me, and I’ll look too.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for. Or if it’s even here. But I can’t stop looking, and you can’t do it for me.”

“I can do one thing—I can get the ruby out of your sight. I can make sure you don’t lie awake, staring at it at night. You’re thinking about it. You’re thinking about all the bad blood between your family and Alexandra because of it. That’s why I hate it, and I wish you’d let me take it to the highest cliff around here and throw it away.”

His hands tightened fiercely on her shoulders, then quickly relaxed. He looked more beaten than angry. “It’s the only thing that survived.”

Sam stared at him. “
We
survived.” Crying, she pulled away from him. “Try not to forget that.”

He wanted to go home to Samantha. He wanted to kiss her and tell her that the night of the fire, when he
was driving home frantically, he’d been thinking of her more than anyone else. That when he arrived and saw her he felt he could bear anything else since she was safe.

And that no matter what he learned now, he would never believe that he had doomed his family by loving her.

He crawled in the rainy, cold darkness on his hands and knees, searching among the wilted shrubbery, digging his fingers into the flower beds of the backyard, where cars and feet had churned Mother’s careful winter mulch into sludge. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d gone over every inch of ground, maybe every inch of the Cove. He shivered; he was cold to the bone, soaked. Every muscle ached, and his fingers were numb.

He didn’t know what time it was when he finished with the yard. He found himself at the edge of the dirt lane, swaying with fatigue and battered by loneliness. He fought a desperate need to be inside Samantha’s arms, to feel the soothing warmth of her incredible hands on his skin. To forget his pain, if only for a little while.

He threw his head back. “Talk to me, Ellie. Help me. Tell me what I’m looking for. I don’t care if it hurts. I’ll listen. Because not knowing is worse.”

Emptiness. Only the sound of wind soughing through the bare branches of the forest and the patter of rain. He slumped. His twin was gone, the one person who would have understood without question. She had seen this time coming, but not well enough to avoid it. The ruby had warned her. It would not, however, help him. Because he had misused it once and caused their uncle’s death.

Defeated, his legs numb and weak, he concentrated on getting to his feet. He reached down with one hand to brace himself. His hand sank into dripping grass at the road’s edge.

His fingers closed on something small, a soggy rectangle of material that crumpled in his grip. The familiar, trancelike rush of sensation jerked him upright. Instantly his mind filled with images. An emaciated but familiar face capped with thin brown hair. A huge, stately brick building with its name marching across a dignified
marble marker on the lawn. The words
Durham First
disappeared behind an enormous magnolia tree.

The face.
The face
. It belonged to someone inside a car that had sat here on the road. It turned toward him, illuminated by the greenish lights of the car’s dashboard. A hand flung something out the window. The something Jake held in his hand now.

Jake fumbled a flashlight from his back pocket and posed it over the mysterious object. In the bright beam he saw a matchbox.

In his mind he saw the face transformed into one he recognized without doubt. He bent his head to his hands and groaned.

Malcolm Drury
.

Sam paced the living room, every nerve tuned to the light tattoo of rain on the roof and the ticking of a mantel clock that had belonged to Jake’s grandmother. The clock chimed loud and long as its hands met at midnight. She hurried, barefooted, down the hall and shut the door to Charlotte’s bedroom, peeking in briefly as she did. Charlotte, her face wan and sad even in sleep, turned fitfully in the twin bed Sam had bought for her, then settled again.

Sam sighed with weary relief and walked back to the living room. Bo rose morosely from a rug before the couch, padding to her and sticking his jowly red face into her hands. “If he’s not back by twelve-thirty, we’ll go after him,” she told the bloodhound. Sam knelt and gave him a sympathetic hug that she was certain helped her feelings more than Bo’s.

Suddenly Bo scrambled out of her embrace and galloped to the door, his tail wagging madly. Sam jumped up at the sound of footsteps on the porch. She ran to the door and pulled it open.

Jake looked the worst she’d ever seen him, his shirt and jeans filthy, matted to his body, water dripping from his dark hair, and the expression on his face … her hands rose to her throat in alarm.

Haunted. Tormented. Something dark and urgent had wiped out the young husband she knew, yet he stared at her as if he’d never needed her more. Without a word he picked her up and kicked the door shut. Nameless dread trapped Sam in her own silence. She sank her hands into his drenched, gritty shirt and felt the ragged pulse of his heart. He carried her to their bedroom, shoved that door shut too, then lay down with her on their bed in the dark.

Instantly his mouth moved over her face, kissing her fiercely, his dirty, wet cheeks leaving streaks on her skin, his hands shaking as he dragged her robe off her shoulders, then finding her breasts under her nightgown. She responded to his agonized frenzy with a soft cry of compassion.

They took each other frantically, half-undressed, wound together in a breathless tangle with her hugging his head into the crook of her neck. Afterward they continued to hold each other, his shivering body pressed deeply inside hers, his arms wound tightly around her back and waist.

Sam was afraid—for him, not herself. She tried to talk to him, but he dragged his mouth back and forth over hers, repeating
I love you
, in a raw, desperate tone until she murmured plaintively and pressed her fingertips over his lips. “I know. I love you too. Be still now. Let me take care of you.” She searched with one hand until she found an edge of the damp, jumbled quilt and pulled it over them.

A long time passed before he moved just enough to lay beside her, facing her. She burrowed into his unrelaxed grip and rubbed his back desperately, trying to impart warmth and comfort to the inflexible column of muscle and sinew. Finally she felt a slight giving. “I want to sleep,” he said. The pleading tone in his voice brought a ragged murmur of agreement from her. “I’ll get you a dry shirt,” she told him. “And fill the bathtub. You can soak, and I’ll wash your hair for you—”

“No. Please. I just want to stay here and forget about everything but the way it feels to be with you. I wish I could sleep the rest of my life.”

“Shhh. Don’t talk that way. Just … sleep, for now. I’ll hold you. I won’t let go. I never have. I never will.”

“Don’t let go.” His voice faded. Sam stroked his hair, dried it with a corner of the quilt, and hugged her bare leg over his hips. She wanted to wrap him a cocoon so safe, so dreamless, he’d wake up with the old serenity in his eyes. “Promise me you won’t go back to the house site tomorrow. Just try to stay away from it for one day. Rest.
Please.
”

“I promise.” His breathing slowed. He slept finally. Sam rose on one elbow and rested her cheek against his head. The rain stopped and faint moonlight eased through the windows. It reflected off the glass jar containing the ruby, on the dresser. Sam stared at the intruding glimmer defiantly. Aunt Alex’s bitter feud with Sarah because of the ruby, a feud that had separated Sam from Jake for most of their lives. The day Tim had assaulted Charlotte when he found her admiring his mother’s necklace. The fear and anger in Aunt Alex’s eyes when Ellie had discovered the ruby inside that necklace. Jake’s bewildering obsession with it. The sight of him searching for the stone in the shambles of his sister’s room, and his look of revulsion after he found it.

Her nerves were strained to the limit; otherwise, she would never have allowed the bitter, senseless thought she had before exhaustion overcame her.

She would never feel safe with that ruby in their house.

Sam woke with a start, alone. Sunlight streamed through the windows. She bolted out of bed, her cotton gown stiff with dried water and grime from Jake’s clothes, looking around for him wildly. The bedsheets were a dirt-stained shambles; she ran a hand over Jake’s empty place, alarmed when the cool sheets told her he’d left some time ago.

She threw her robe on and dashed to their bathroom, hoping she’d find him in the shower. When she didn’t, she ran through the house, calling his name. Bo
met her in the hall, whining. Charlotte, sluggishly contemplating a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table, stared at her anxiously. Sam gripped the table’s edge. “Have you seen Jake?”