“Laura.”
She came out of the depths of sleep to the soft sound of Jake’s voice calling her name, the gentle nudge of his hand on her shoulder, and the delicious aroma of coffee tantalizing her senses.
“Is it first light?” she asked, blinking the cobwebs of forgotten dreams from her eyes.
“Long past. It’s after ten.” He removed his hand in a slow, almost caressing glide down her arm.
“After ten! I must have died!” Stifling a yawn, and a sensuous shiver in response to his touch, she sat up and stretched. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
He turned abruptly and headed for the door. “You needed the rest,” he said tersely. “But you’d better roll out now. Breakfast is ready.”
Wondering what she had done to annoy him—or was he always grumpy in the morning?— she tossed back the covers and crawled out of bed. She ached all over from her tumble into that hole.
Pushing her fingers into her tangled hair, she turned to gaze out the small window above the bed. The unrelenting glare of the midmorning sun hurt her eyes and brought an old saying to mind: Things always look better in the light of day.
Wrong.
She shook her head, wincing as her fingers caught in her snarled hair. Things didn’t look better at all; in fact, the view through the window looked pretty darned depressing.
Alternating sunlight and shadow played over the rock-strewn, craggy hills in the near distance. The terrain closer to the ranch house was somewhat level, with only an occasional series of rough-looking bumps. The landscape seemed dry, barren, and devoid of life, both animal and plant.
But Laura knew better, having tramped over that arid earth, those craggy humpbacked hills. The evidence of tracks and animal droppings, and the variety of plant life, had not surprised her. She had read books and watched several TV documentaries on the Western deserts and had expected it to appear barren, lifeless, and desolate.
No wonder Jake behaved a trifle off center, she mused. Living alone in such a remote place would have had her climbing the walls.
“Rustle your rump, woman!” Jake shouted from the kitchen, ending her reverie. “Grub’s on the table!”
Insufferable, arrogant. . . Breaking off the thought, she smiled and sauntered into the kitchen.
Raising his gaze from the cup he was filling with coffee, Jake started, then stared at her in stark amazement. The coffee ran over the sides of the cup and onto the table.
“Mr. Wilder, watch it!” Laura exclaimed, rushing forward.
“Dammit! Your fault,” he growled. “What in hell do you think you’re doing, woman, coming to the table dressed like that?” He indicated her appearance with a sweep of his hand.
She glanced down at herself, then back up at him. “It’s your shirt. What’s the problem?”
“It’s indecent.”
Laura’s back went up. “I do beg to differ, Mr. Wilder, but I consider myself adequately and decently covered.”
“I can see most of your legs.”
“No kidding. So what?” She gave him a haughty look. “I’ve been told I have very attractive legs.”
Her statement seemed to throw him into confusion. “Well, you do,” he admitted grudgingly. “But dammit, woman, it’s unladylike to show your legs to a man. The only women who do are the kind you claim you’re not.”
“Soiled doves?” She arched her brows.
“Yes.”
“Oh, brother,” she moaned, shaking her head in despair.
He slammed the coffeepot onto the table. “Since the food’s ready, you might as well just sit down and eat. But as soon as you’re done, you get yourself decently dressed.”
“All right, I’ll eat.” She seated herself opposite him. “But before I’ll even think about getting dressed, I need a shower.”
“A shower,” he repeated, his face blank. “We don’t get much rain out here.”
This was just too much. “I don’t mean a rain shower, you nit!” she yelled. “I’m talking about a bath.”
He shook his head like a punchy prizefighter. “Well, hell, why didn’t you say so?”
“You have a bathtub?” she asked eagerly.
“No.” He shrugged. “But I have my ma’s old washtub. I can fill that for you.”
‘Wonderful,” she muttered, picking up her fork and spearing a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I’ll take it.”
“Thought you might.” Jake scraped his chair back and got to his feet. “I’ll have to put the water on the stove to heat.”
“Figures,” she said, heaving a sigh.
* * * *
Laura caught herself sighing often throughout the following days.
She sighed in exasperation every time she prepared a simple meal for Jake on that impossible excuse for a stove. She sighed in frustration every time she had to drag the washtub into the kitchen and heat water for her bath.
She sighed with confusion at the excitement she felt every time she made physical contact, no matter how slight and impersonal, with the solid masculine warmth of Jake’s body.
And she sighed because he didn’t trust her, believing she was there to get information from him.
For Laura, it was a long and harrowing week, fraught with moments of dizzying delight... and unmitigated torture.
One evening as they dawdled over their after-supper coffee, Laura decided to try a little mining of her own, digging for personal information about her host.
“Where were you born?” she asked, not even trying to hide her curiosity.
‘Here,” he murmured, jerking his head at the doorway. “Right there in the bedroom.”
Laura was appalled at the very idea of a woman giving birth under such primitive conditions. “In there?” she exclaimed in disbelief. “The same room I’m sleeping in?”
“In the same corner.” A smile twitched the edges of his lips. “Of course, there was a double bed then.”
“How utterly primitive.”
“Hey,” Jake objected. “The bed was handmade, and maybe a little crude, but it wasn’t primitive.”
She shot him an impatient look. “I meant the overall conditions, not the bed.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “I’m sure... I think my pa did wash his hands before helping to deliver me.”
“Oh... well then...” Realizing it was useless to pursue the subject, Laura asked another question. “Then you’ve lived on this ranch all your life?”
“Yes.” He nodded, then turned the tables on her.
“How about you? You live in Pennsylvania all your life?”
“Yes. I was born in Philadelphia... in a hospital.”
“That’s nice.” Jake shrugged off her verbal jab. “I’ve heard of hospitals, but I’ve never been in one. Don’t want to, either. Heard they’re nasty places.”
Never been in one! Nasty places! Laura thought in astonishment, feeling a feathering of unease along her spine. Could Jake honestly believe he was living in the nineteenth century?
Naw. She rejected the idea as too farfetched. Ignoring the unsettling sensation, she again changed the subject. “What was it like growing up out here? I mean, well, in comparison to Philadelphia, or almost any city this place is pretty deserted and remote.”
“Remote ... maybe.” Jake smiled and turned his head to gaze through the one small kitchen window to the dusk-softened landscape beyond. “Deserted?” He turned back to her, his expression patient, tolerant. “No, ma’am. Ifs not at all deserted. It’s teeming with life, maybe not human life, but real, breathin’ life, sure enough.”
“And you weren’t lonely growing up?” Laura asked, recalling his telling her he never got lonely.
“No. I had my ma and pa, and the horses we ran.” He frowned. “That is, until Pa got sick, and we had to sell some of the horses to keep going. Ma and I did the best we could to hang onto all the horses until Pa got better, but...” He shrugged. “I was only ten, and Pa didn’t get better.” Painful memories darkened his eyes. “Then he died and, over the years, some of the horses had to go. Most of them were gone by the time I was grown enough to take over running the ranch.”
Jake fell silent, except for the soft sigh that whispered through his lips; then he gave a shrug, as if shaking himself free from introspection.
“You’ve had a hard life,” Laura murmured, silently deriding herself for all the times she had thought she’d had it tough. Though she had worked hard to achieve her degree and her associate professorship, she had had the support of a loving and encouraging upper-middle-class family.
“No harder than most out here,” he said. “But, then, God never did promise that life would be easy.” He shrugged again. “Anyway, then I built the herd up again to what it had been when Pa got sick.” A cynical smile flickered across his face. “I even got betrothed to the daughter of our nearest neighbor, a good half-day’s ride east. Then Ma got sick and my girl didn’t want to be saddled with a sick mother-in-law. She wasn’t getting any younger, she said, and she broke the engagement. Two weeks later she married a dry-goods clerk she’d met during one of her family’s trips into Virginia City for supplies.”
“Oh, Jake,” she murmured, impulsively reaching across the table to give his hand a sympathetic squeeze. A shock of awareness jolted through her, awareness of Jake as a man, of herself as a woman... alone together.
A fine tremor rippled Jake’s flesh beneath her palm, giving evidence that he was also experiencing a heightened sensual awareness. He sliced a glance to her hand resting against his, then as quickly shifted a piercing stare to her, probing the depths of her eyes.
“Don’t waste your pity on me,” he said, his rough-edged voice betraying his reaction to their physical contact. ‘Turned out I got off lucky. Less than a year after she married the dry-goods clerk, she ran off to California with a gambler headed for the gold fields.”
“And you never married?” For a reason Laura refused to explore, she held her breath waiting for his answer.
“No.” He gave a brief, decisive shake of his head. “There aren’t many marriageable females out here and, what with taking care of Ma, and running the ranch, I didn’t have time to waste looking for a bride in Virginia City.” He heaved a sigh. “Ma died just two years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and would have continued with more questions, but he beat her to it.
“Thanks, but it was for the best,” he said, accepting and dismissing her sympathy at the same time. “What about you? You married or anything?”
“No.” Laura managed a weak smile as she carefully lifted her tingling hand from his. “I was too busy with my college and postgraduate studies even to consider marriage.”
“But there must have been men in your life,” he insisted.
“Well...” She hesitated, then, because he had been so forthright with her, went on. “I did have a brief, very brief, affair with an associate, a professor of literature.”
“You went to bed with him?” Jake demanded, sounding positively Victorian in his shock.
“Once.” Laura, who considered herself a self-confident, independent woman, had to swallow to moisten her suddenly dry throat. “Just once,” she repeated. “He was a very nice man, a genuine gentleman, but there simply were no sparks, no sparks at all,” she explained, annoyed at defending herself. “Going to bed with a man before marriage is common practice in 2014, you know.”
“I told you before that I don’t know,” he growled. “I don’t like it a damn sight, either.”
Laura was well grounded in the precepts of equality, and could have retaliated with a crushing argument. But she didn’t, wanting to maintain the fragile truce between them. She tried another topic, opting to dazzle him with her expertise in the field of botany.
Fortunately, Jake allowed himself to be distracted from the thorny topic of male-female relationships in the early years of a new century.
Had Laura believed herself less than a sensuous woman? After almost a week of experiencing the tingles evoked by the mere sound of Jake’s rough velvet voice, and enduring the flames of desire set ablaze inside her by the lightest of Jake’s touches, she was forced to revise her self-evaluation.
By the end of that week, Laura concluded that she was either intensely sensuous, completely bananas, or falling in love.
Seeking distraction from her disturbing thoughts, she came up with a positively brilliant idea, one that would serve her in several ways. Besides appealing to her interest in the Old West, it could prove especially useful when she returned home. That is, if she could get Jake to agree to it.