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What she saw was unsettling and disturbing, but she didn’t turn away as she’d been doing for so many years. Instead she stared at her reflection and tried to take in her features with her heart instead of her brain.
Her face was part of her. It might be too big to fit her personal definition of beauty, but she saw intelligence in her reflection, sensitivity in her eyes, humor in her wide mouth. It was a good face. Well-balanced. It belonged to her, and that made it good. “Jake?”
“Hmmm?”
“I really am pretty, aren’t I?”
He looked at her and grinned, a wisecrack ready to slip from his mouth. But then he saw her expression, and his grin disappeared. “I think you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.
She sighed and settled back into her seat, a satisfied smile on her face.
The motorcycle rider waited until the Jag disappeared around the bend before he came out from behind the scrub. He lifted his helmet, took in the road. Then he headed up the rutted drive to the cantilevered house.
Chapter 27
They returned an hour later, shivering with cold from their rambling, kiss-filled walk along the ocean. Jake lit a fire and laid a comforter in front of it. They undressed each other and made love—slow and tender. He mounted her. She, him. Her hair drifted around them both.
Afterward, they ceremoniously burned his manuscript, and as one page after another went up in flames, Jake seemed to grow younger. “I think I can forget it now.”
She rested her head against his bare shoulder. “Don’t forget. Your past will always be part of you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
He picked up the poker and pushed a loose page back into the flames, but he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t push him. He needed time. It was enough for now that he could talk to her about what had happened.
She called the office and told David she needed a few days off. “It’s about time you took a vacation,” he said.
She and Jake shut out the world. Their happiness felt iridescent, and their tender, passionate lovemaking filled them both with a sense of wonder.
On their third morning, she was lying in bed wearing only a T-shirt when he came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. She inched up against the suede headboard. “Let’s go horseback riding.”
“There’s no good place to ride around here.”
“What do you mean? There’s a stable not three miles away. We passed it yesterday when we out for a drive. I haven’t been on a horse in months.”
He picked up a pair of jeans and seemed to be inspecting it for wrinkles, something she’d never known him to care one thing about. “Why don’t you go by yourself? I need to catch up on some work. Besides, I have to ride all the time. It’d be a busman’s holiday.”
“It won’t be fun without you.”
“You’re the one who pointed out that we have to get used to separations.” He stumbled over her sneakers.
She looked at him more closely. He was fidgety, and an outrageous suspicion struck her. “How many Westerns have you made?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
“Five…six. I don’t know.” He seemed to have developed a sudden reluctance to drop his towel in front of her. Snatching up his jeans, he carried them back into the bathroom.
“How about…seven?” she called out brightly.
“Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” She heard him turn on the faucet and then the sounds of a noisy toothbrushing. He finally reappeared—bare chest, jeans still unzipped, a dab of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth.
She offered her most polite smile. “Seven Westerns, did you say?”
He fumbled with his zipper. “Uh-huh.”
“A lot of time in the saddle.”
“Damned zipper’s stuck.”
