Authors: Lindsay Longford
"Appropriate. That's how I feel every time I'm around you. Like the whole damn world has tilted and I'm sliding off the edge." His words sounded torn from him as he grabbed her arm and the WD-40 cartwheeled to the floor. "C'mere."
Curled on his lap in the swing with her arms around Jake's neck, Sarah tried to think of a way to continue a discussion begun two nights earlier and stonewalled by Jake. "We have to pick up Nicholas and head over to the Chalo Nitka pavilion. You don't mind that he went off with Buck,
do you?" She finger-walked under Jake's shirt over to the spot on his ribs that he found so fascinating on hers.
"No. Of course not."
She heard the reserve. "Do you miss not having any family?"
"You don't miss what you don't know." He pushed against the ground, and his thighs moved under hers.
"You never found out why your mom left you?"
"It's not important. I made out okay." He dug his heels in the sand and slowed them. Bitterness echoed in his voice.
"How old were you?"
"Hell, I don't know. Nicholas's age, maybe seven."
"I see." That explained a lot.
He frowned at her. "There's nothing to see. I said it wasn't important."
"Of course not." Sarah could work out for herself how a six-year-old boy must have felt. "And later you lived with—?"
"Relatives." Off-limits signs sprang up around his clipped words.
Sarah wouldn't give up. "Until—?"
His muscles tensed under his shirt. "Look, in a nutshell, here it is. I ran away, joined the army, and I've been working as a consulting engineer for most of my life. The army's been my home. Okay?"
"Where did you work?"
"Here, there. Who cares? I work hard, I earn good money, I pay my taxes. Okay?"
Jake didn't go in for details.
"Poor Jake," she crooned, tiptoeing her fingers up his spine. His rough hand was sliding up and over her bare knee.
"Poor Jake, nothing. It's not your pity I crave at night when I'm lying there looking at the ceiling." He traced a circle on the underside of her knee.
Sarah stroked his back with the lightest of touches and changed the subject. "Do you think Nicholas is going to enjoy the small-fry fishing contest? He didn't have to fish."
Jake pumped the swing high. "He wants to do everything. Nonstop. All day."
"Buck's a wild man. Nicholas will be crazy about him. Actually," she mused, "he reminds me of Buck in some ways, same energy, I guess."
Jake moved suddenly, leaving her breathless. "I don't want to talk about your cousin," he breathed into her mouth, his tongue outlining her lips. "I've got better things to do with your mouth."
He curled his tongue around hers and chased all thoughts from her head.
She strained against him, wanting more than he was giving her, wanting something she sensed just over the horizon. Gripping Jake's face, she rained kisses all over his face, straining past the barriers she sensed in him, needing to comfort the child he'd been. "Jake," she whispered against his skin, "Oh, Jake."
The swing swooped up and out and her legs entwined with his and she felt him beneath her.
"Sarah, sweetheart, stop. This isn't working." Jake slowed the swing.
She moved against him. "Oh, I don't know. Seems to be working," she kidded.
He groaned. "Yeah, that's the problem."
"Or your solution?" The words popped out.
He stood up, supporting her until her feet touched the ground. "It's not like that."
"No?" Embarrassed but determined to have her say, Sarah ploughed on. "It seems to me that you use the attraction between us to avoid discussing issues. I'm not trying to pin you down, Jake, but I need to know what's happening with us because it's not like anything I've ever known." Miserable, she creased the front of her shorts.
He turned away from her and folded his arms. "I told you my intentions. You know what they are." When he looked at her again, the walls were up.
This was the Jake that kept her off balance.
" A courtship."
"A courtship," he concurred, glancing away.
'To what end?" The mockingbird in the xoria bush whistled its echo.
He shrugged. "I don't know." His cheekbones were a knife edge in the grooves of his face.
4 'But what do you want me to doV
"Nothing."
Sarah held her hands out to him in supplication. She needed words from him, words she could build on, she realized in surprise.
She wanted to build on the feelings Jake had freed in her. Unnamed and unidentified, as they were, she wanted them to grow and flower into—whatever. Something. But a plant couldn't grow without nourishment, and chemistry wasn't nourishment enough.
"Sarah, don't look at me like that." Jake groaned and folded her in his arms. Against her, his heart beat steadily and surely.
There, held close to his heart, warmed by him, she was answered by his body in an old and wordless language until a cloud passing over the sun chilled her.
"We'd better go get Nicholas," she murmured, rubbing the goose bumps on her arm.
Jake's finger trailed down her arm, but he released her. "Yes." He looked up at the sky for a long time. "Let's go get Nicholas."
Bumping out of the driveway, they headed towards Moore Haven in silence.
Jake drummed a rhythm on the dashboard of his truck.
Sarah, what are you doing to me?
Sarah tucked her knees under her and looked at the hyacinths in the ditches.
/ like you, Jake Donnelly, but I don't trust the way you make me feel.
Jake twitched on the radio. A melancholy song filled the truck.
Oh, Sarah, if you were only what you seem to be.
Sarah glanced at Jake's hand on the dial as the words of the song plucked at her. "No, leave it on," she said as Jake started to turn off the radio. His eyes were hooded and she looked away.
Where's it all going to end, Jake?
When the song's notes died away, Sarah swallowed the lump in her throat.
"Where to?" Jake's words cut the silence.
"Highway 27, past the park and down to the river. The kids will be fishing south of the city docks. That's where the trophy tables are set up." Sarah fiddled with the door handle. "I wonder how Nicholas did."
"If he fished."
Jake slowed when they passed the new Chalo Nitka Park. People in bright plaid shirts and jeans, in Seminole traditional dress and in comfortable gear migrated in a kaleidoscope of color. "Those booths look like the Seminole 'chickees.'"
"They're modeled after the traditional homes. The floats and cars in the parade will have palm branches tied around them. Even the food will reflect Indian life. Want to try some swamp cabbage?" She relaxed as they resumed the more or less comfortable relationship that they'd fallen into before today.
Jake signaled a turn with his arm out the window. "I've eaten worse."
"It's like a potato with crunch." She laughed, glad he was picking up the mood.
"How're you going to cook it?"
''How do you feel about nouvelle cuisine?"
"Come again?" He switched off the engine.
"Thinly sliced swamp cabbage with a sprinkling of sea salt served over lightly grilled Okeechobee cat?"
"You're kidding, right? No?"
"Relax, Donnelly. I'll spare you the nouvelle, but you'll enjoy the rest of it, fried cat, raw or boiled swamp cabbage." Sarah grinned at him and stuck her feet up on the rusty dash. "Speaking of nouvelle, this truck could use some saucing up."
"It runs."
"Barely."
"Never, ever, insult a man's wheels, sweetheart," Jake growled, reaching his hand over and pulling her closer to him.
"That's about all this is. Wheels, antenna, brakes—it has brakes?" Sarah asked, alarmed.
"I don't know. I just let it run till it's out of gas and then I stop where it does."
"You said you'd made money consulting, so why this— uh, this—very interesting vehicle?" Sarah surveyed the interior of the cab with a wrinkled nose.
Springs coiled out of slits in the vinyl seats. Corroded bolts and hinges merrily flaked rust with each bouncing jolt. Wires draped in a decorative festoon under the dash.
"It's hard to explain."
"I'll just bet." She loved teasing him. She thought he'd probably seen little of the lighthearted side of life. "Kidding aside, Jake, how did you wind up with this antique? Not that it doesn't have character."
"I'd just gotten back from a job, I was in a hurry, it was late at night, and nothing much was open. I didn't have much cash in my pocket, so that's why this rolling wreck." He patted the steering wheel affectionately. "I'm starting to like the old girl. She grows on you."
"That I believe," Sarah said mournfully as she un-snagged her shorts from a roaming spring coil. "I wish this classic rust bucket had seat belts, though."
"Beggars can't be choosers. The three of us would never have fit in your windup toy."
"You mean j>ow wouldn't have fit."
Jake wrapped his fingers around her knee and laughed. "Yeah, I thought I was going to be shifting my toes when I drove it. How far do I go?"
Sarah's knee was liquefying where his palm cupped it. How could she be so susceptible to his every touch? "Past the post office at First Street, until you start seeing crowds." She lifted his hand up and thumped it on his own knee.
He slanted a look. "Like that, huh?"
"You need both hands to drive this gem," Sarah declared and folded her hands primly in her lap. It would do him good to suffer a little. Of course, she thought gloomily, missing his warm grip, she was suffering, too.
"Damnation," Jake burst out as they pulled off the road. "Is every kid in Florida here?"
All up and down the banks of the Caloosahatchie, kids stretched in a long line. Sarah watched Jake's face as he searched for Nicholas. Jake didn't know it, maybe couldn't admit it, but he loved the child. Every anxious turn of his head betrayed him. Finally, he rubbed his neck and turned to her.
"How are we going to find him?"
"Easy," she said in a superior tone. "We'll find Buck."
"That's going to be easy?" Jake surveyed the elbow-to-elbow mass and throngs of children screaming around tables set up with rows of trophies.
"If you know what you're doing," she said smugly, taking his arm. "Remember, I'm the guide in these parts."
"I'm not proud. Lead on." He tucked his arm under hers.
Sarah wondered if he'd intentionally made sure his forearm was snagged in close to her, grazing her breasts.
i
"Here," she said, sliding his wrist down, "this will be more comfortable."
"Think so?" His eyes narrowed.
She only shook her head as he worked his hand back up her arm. His constant need to touch her was enormously seductive.
Holding her close to him, his thigh muscles brushing the skin of her bare thigh, he said, "Okay?"
She surrendered and let his arm remain, a humming electrical cord binding them.
As they sauntered over muddy ground down to the river-banks, Sarah spotted Buck. "Hey, there, Yucky Bucky!"
A reed-thin, red-haired man with a straw cowboy hat pushed up on his head looked over. "Hey yourself, Scarey Sairy." He bent down to Nicholas, who was huddled between his legs dangling a fishpole in the murky Caloosa-hatchie. When Sarah called out, Nicholas gazed at them and grinned around the tag end of an ice cream cone sticking out of his mouth.
Sarah wanted to run to him and give him a rib-cracking hug, but it wasn't her right. She trailed behind Jake, who lifted Nicholas up by the seat of his britches.
"Catch anything, kid?"
"Sure, Jake, the best. Look in the bucket."
"Hi, Nicholas." Sarah allowed herself a kiss on his cheek which, bless his little-boy heart, he refrained from scrubbing off.
"Go see, Sarah. I got the best catch of the day. Buck said so."
"He did?" Sarah cocked her finger at Buck. "What have you been pulling now?"
Buck ambled over, his thumbs hooked into the skintight, faded Levi's painted on his frame. A silver buckle fastened a belt that rode low on lean hips. He nodded to Jake whom he'd met earlier when he picked up Nicholas.
"Pest," Buck said to Sarah as he leaned down and planted a smacking kiss on the top of her head. "Y'all showed up too soon. Nicholas and I had great plans for his catch." He draped an arm around her shoulders and scrutinized her. "For a skinny runt, you don't look too bad. Legs are still decent," he faked a leer. "Sorry I missed you this morning."
"I was in the shower. You should have stayed. I'd have cooked." Sarah prodded him in the ribs. "You could use some food on these bones. Haven't talked your current honey into cooking for you yet?"
"Like Atlanta, sugar, she's gone with the wind." Turning to Jake who'd joined them, Buck confided, "She ever tell you why I call her 'Scarey Sairy'?"
"No." Suddenly a stranger behind the mirrored sunglasses he'd put on, Jake glanced at her.
"Come on, Buck, don't do this," Sarah laughed and tried to pull away.
"Nope," he chivvied her, "you're not going to escape. Jake's got to hear the story."
"Can't wait." Jake's voice went so flat it was below sea level.
Sarah leaned toward him, knowing Buck's arm around her and the shared reminiscences were leaving Jake on the edge of the camp fire again. She didn't like the image of a lonely Jake prowling at the fringes of warmth and comfort, so she slipped her hand into his. "Don't believe a word Buck tells you. He wouldn't know the truth if it came wearing a name tag."
Buck pulled at the braid of hair hanging down her back. "See this hair? Well, Sarah was the littlest of the cousins, the only girl, so when she had a fever and lost all her hair, we ganged up on her. Nothing serious, but you know how mean kids can be. For months after she sprouted new hair, she was Hairy Sairy, Scarey Sairy, until one day she lit into us with a bunch of mud pies. You were something, Sarah,
flinging mud pies left and right.'' Buck chortled. "You have a temper once you cut loose."
Sarah laughed. "I was tired of it. Anyway, you were all bigger! Gosh, our folks were furious. At least," she rejoined, "my ears didn't stick out like yours!"