Silk and Stone (57 page)

T
en years. And all he wanted from her was the ruby.

Sam cried with the kind of helpless defeat she’d never allowed herself to show anyone while he was in prison. She hated losing control. This was not the best she could do. She would not stand there, sobbing, in a beautiful hotel suite she’d selected so carefully, paid for with such pride, and filled with letters and photo albums and her weavings to show him she’d had no life besides her work and waiting for him.

Sam drew on the gritty determination that had saved her from falling apart so many times during the past decade. She wiped her face brusquely and turned around.

Ten years. A small, tormented lifetime had left its mark on her and Jake. She saw it when she looked at her face in a mirror, and when she looked at him now.
She was twenty-nine and he thirty-three. Still young, but withered and untended deep down where it counted, and that showed in their eyes. She grieved for him as well as herself, but sympathy wouldn’t get the job done.

If her tears had had any effect on him, she couldn’t tell. He watched her with a harsh, haunted expression, as if remembering how loving her had tangled him and his family in a prophecy of destruction. She forced herself to speak calmly to that memory. “I can’t change what happened to you because you tried to protect me from Malcolm Drury, but I
will
spend the rest of my life proving that you have something worth coming home to.”

Jake stood there, aching inside, wishing he could tell her his worst fear had been that she’d come back while he was still in prison, that Alexandra would find her and take her away from him forever.

I’ll always love you
, he promised her silently. But if he made one wrong step, if he drew her close to him, he’d lose sight of everything but loving her and wanting to be with her. That blindness would let the old evil slip back into their lives and finish its work.

He never wanted her to know the truth. He could live with it for both of them, but he had to take care of the past first.

The need to hold her, to lose himself inside this sleek, beautiful woman who’d waited for him the way no other woman on earth would have, was so painful, he could barely breathe.

But he’d learned how to ignore pain. He disguised it under layers of quiet rage. Even the hardest bastards in prison had left him alone because he’d given the impression he was too goddamned
calm
not to be dangerous. “This is what you wanted,” he said slowly. “I’m here.”

That empty vow, delivered between gritted teeth, sank into her like a slap. Sam searched his face, praying she’d find some hint of the husband she still loved, the man she had to believe still loved her. But all he let her see were the changes—the lines deepening around his eyes and mouth, the heavier mantle of muscle on his
shoulders, a body that had filled out without an ounce of fat, the unsparing shield of solitude around him.

She held out her hands, inviting him to look at her from head to toe. “You sent me away. You tried to keep me away from you for ten years. But I was always there, paying the bills, working with Ben to get you out, taking care of the Cove—taking care of the ruby. I made a lot of money in California. I paid Charlotte’s way through college and sent her to one of the best chef’s schools in the country. She’s got a great job with a restaurant group in L.A. Alexandra never found us—as far as I know, she doesn’t even know I’ve come back.” Sam spread her arms wider. “
Look at me
. You don’t have to take care of me anymore. You don’t have to fight my battles for me. I’m
not
bad luck.” Her voice rose bitterly. “
There is no curse on us.
”

“I have things to do,” he said. His voice was low and tight. “All I want is for you to stay out of my way.”

If she’d been on shaky ground before, now she had no balance at all. She found herself reaching for the table beneath the room’s wall mirror—anything to hold on to. The unbreakable thread of faith stretched back as far as she could remember, and she could be cruel in its defense. “I’m still your wife,” she said. “And I have the ruby. When you come back to your senses, I’ll give it to you. Not before.”

The invisible vibration between them, the war of thready self-control, reached its limit. From the look on his face, she had the horrible feeling he might rip the suite apart, drag her to the bedroom without a shred of affection, or simply turn and walk out. Nothing, at the moment, would surprise her.

“I owe you,” he said. “You took care of everything that’s important to me. So let’s go home. You can pretend the last ten years didn’t happen.”

A homecoming with a stranger. She loved him so much, she’d hang on no matter what he did or said to her.

“Is he here? Where is he? Where’s Sammie?” Charlotte called in a furtive stage whisper, glancing around grimly. She left her rental car sitting under one of the Coves ancient gnarled oaks and strode to the house, where Ben lounged on the wide plank porch, a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. The sight of him made her angry and confused about
why
she was always angry at him. She had seen him only a few times in the past ten years, when he’d fly out to L.A. to meet with Sam. But without fail he managed to get further under her skin. Thank God, he didn’t treat her like a kid anymore, but now it was worse. He seemed to find everything about her worth commenting on, and not in a good way.

“Calm down,” he answered. “The last thing we need around here is a perky little Julia Child bellowing questions.” His voice was one of those elegant lowland drawls, the province of old Carolina gentry, as smooth as bourbon. “I thought you swore you’d stay in California. Didn’t want to taint Jake and Sam’s reunion with your cynical muttering.”

He peered at her under the cap, looking like a dapper deadbeat, his legs stretched out, rumpled khaki trousers outlining stocky, muscular legs with bare ankles and polished loafers. He lay with his back against a porch post, his hands folded lazily over a white golf shirt with the collar splayed widely. Dark chest hair peppered with gray peeked between it, making a bed for a tiny gold Star of David on a slim chain.

Only her worry about Jake’s arrival kept Charlotte from strangling him. She stopped at the porch steps, hands on hips, armored in a low-cut pink sundress that dared him to stare at her cleavage. “Their reunion?” she echoed with disgust. “What kind of reunion is it when all he can do after ten years is heap more misery and blame on my sister? I called Sammie at the hotel this morning. She sounded like
shit
. When I found out he wouldn’t even let her drive him home—that he’d walked out on her, I caught the next plane to Asheville.” Charlotte jabbed a finger at Ben. “
You
drove him here, and my
sister had to follow—alone—in her own car. Mr. Matchmaker. Mr. Confident. Hell, why don’t you just collect the balance of your fee and get out of our lives?”

Ben flicked the brim of his baseball cap up and stared at her with angry gray eyes. His offbeat, ugly/handsome face had never looked more serious. Tremors scattered down her spine. “Get this through your stewbone skull, Chef Ryder. I’m
a friend
, all right? I’m trying to help two people I admire and care about. Two people who have a helluva lot of empty years to overcome. Nobody said it was going to be easy. At least I’m in there pitching for them to be happy. That’s more than you’ve ever done.”

“I watched my sister live like a
nun
for ten years,” Charlotte replied, her voice simmering with tension. “I watched her write letters to Jake and put them away because he wouldn’t even
read
them. I watched her organize her life into a narrow little framework so she’d have no room for close friendships, or temptations from other men, or vacations, or anything else that might have made her life easier—all because she didn’t want to have a comfortable life of her own as long as Jake was in prison. She put herself in her own prison.” Charlotte’s voice rose. “But he didn’t
care
. He wouldn’t have anything to do with her. He let her suffer.”

“You didn’t talk to him. You didn’t see the look in his eyes every time I mentioned her name. He doesn’t blame her for anything. But no man survives prison for as long as Jake did without shutting out a part of himself he loves. And he can’t just turn it back on like a water faucet.”

Charlotte flung a hand out dismissively. “He could at least manage a drop or two of appreciation.”

“Face it, kid. You’ve got a big emotional investment in this because of your own fears. You don’t want to come back here, and you don’t want Sam here either. I know why. It has a lot to do with your aunt.”

Oh, he knew how to hit home. Charlotte felt every miserable knot twisting inside her. “Our aunt,” she said slowly, “has tried to get her clutches into us as long as I
can remember. And if you think she’s finished, you don’t know her the way we do.”

“So what is she going to do—creep out of the governor’s mansion and descend on her errant nieces like a vampire?” He shook his head, and his eyes narrowed as if he were considering the scene. “The wife of a governor who’s being talked up as a candidate for vice president two years from now. The mother of a state senator. Oh, yes, she’s going to swoop out of her cave, ready to sink her fangs into a nasty little personal feud that brings up questions about her and the governor’s relatives. Trailed by a herd of newspaper and television reporters eager to dig up gossip. Countess Dracula and her untrustworthy tribe of Renfrews. No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t have the vaguest idea what I went through with her. You don’t know everything. Don’t lecture me about my feelings. You’re pushing forty, and you’ve never even managed to find a wife. You’re no model of emotional maturity.”

“Perhaps my role in life is solely to torment you. You seem to think so. Well, fine. I intend to make it very difficult for you to screw up Sam and Jake’s chance for happiness with your sincere but misguided bleats about the past.”

“I hate you.”

“There’s a fine line between hate and love.”

“
Where are Sam and Jake
? That’s all I want to know.”

“He headed into the wilderness as soon as he set foot from my wicked chariot,” Ben answered dryly. “Sam gave him a ten-minute head start, then followed him like the diligent trooper she is. I hope they’re on a mountaintop making mad, passionate love.”

Charlotte whirled around and stared at the forbidding forest, her hands clenched. “She’ll get lost, and this time he’ll let her
stay
lost.”

“Sit down and corral your sinister imagination. I’ve never known two people less likely to lose each other.” He waited a beat, then added, “Except for us. A fact which gives me heartburn.”

Charlotte sank onto a porch step and decided, shakily, not to speak another word to him.

Sam was no tracker, not like Jake, but she had poignant memories that were better, she hoped, than her tracking skills.

She followed a deer path through dense, old-growth forest just beginning to fill in with spring greenery. Nothing was too absurd for her tortured mind today, not the hope that he was headed for a place that had been special to them, not even the idea that he’d be secretly pleased if he discovered her following him.

Not even if she looked foolish in her yellow, crisply tailored jacket and skirt with sweat soaking her silk blouse, her hose shredded by briars, and her hands covered in heavy leather work gloves.
Oh, yes, I have to protect my hands. They’re worth a fortune
.

She congratulated herself for having traded her pumps for jogging shoes. Small evidence of sanity, but she’d take it.

Sam halted suddenly, halfway up a crest where the mountain’s stony backbone protruded in great hummocks of granite streaked with white quartz. Her foggy concentration had almost let her clamber right up to Sign Rock. She skirted the crest and climbed through a gnarled rhododendron thicket on its sister ridge. From that vantage point she could look down on the jutting ledge of Sign Rock.
And spy on him
, a weary inner voice rebuked.
I have to know if he went there
, she answered.