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Late in the night she leaned over him. “You’re afraid,” she accused softly. “You’ve seen so much that you’re afraid to let yourself love anyone, because you know how easily a world can be wrecked.”
His voice was tired. “Jane, let it be.”
“All right. That’s my last word, except for this: if you decide to take a chance, come get me.”
She crept out of bed early the next morning and left him sleeping. She knew that he was too light a sleeper not to have awakened sometime during the shower she took, or while she was dressing, but he didn’t roll over or in any way indicate that he was awake, so she preserved the pretence between them. Without even kissing him, she slipped out the door. After all, they’d already said their goodbyes.
At the sound of the door closing Grant rolled over in the bed, his eyes bleak as he stared at the empty room.
* * *
JANE AND HER PARENTS fell into each other’s arms, laughing and crying and hugging each other exuberantly. Her return called for a family celebration that lasted hours, so it was late that night before she and her father had any time alone. Jane had few secrets from her father; he was too shrewd, too realistic. By silent, instinctive agreement, they kept from her mother the things that would upset her, but Jane was like her father in that she had an inner toughness.
She told him how the entire situation in Costa Rica had come about, and even told him about the trek through the rain forest. Because he was shrewd, he picked up on the nuances in her voice when she mentioned Grant.
“You’re in love with Sullivan, aren’t you?”
She nodded, sipping her glass of wine. “You met him. What did you think about him?” The answer was important to her, because she trusted her father’s judgment of character.
“I thought him unusual. There’s something in his eyes that’s almost scary. But I trusted him with my daughter’s life, if that tells you what you want to know, and I’d do so again.”
“Would you mind having him in the family?”
“I’d welcome him with open arms. I think he could keep you in one place,” James said grumpily.
“Well, I asked him to marry me, but he turned me down. I’m going to give him a while to stew over it; then I’m going to fight dirty.”
Her father grinned, the quick, cheerful grin that his daughter had inherited. “What are you planning?”
“I’m going to chase that man like he’s never been chased before. I think I’ll stay here for a week or two; then I’m going to Europe.”
“But he’s not in Europe!”
“I know. I’ll chase him from a distance. The idea is for him to know how much he misses me, and he’ll miss me a lot more when he finds out how far away I am.”
“But how is he going to find out?”
“I’ll arrange that somehow. And even if it doesn’t work, a trip to Europe is never a waste!”
* * *
IT WAS ODD HOW MUCH he missed her. She’d never been to the farm, but sometimes it seemed haunted by her. He’d think he heard her say something and turn to find no one there. At night…God, the nights were awful! He couldn’t sleep, missing her soft weight spra
wled on top of him.
He tried to lose himself in hard physical work. Chores piled up fast on a farm, and he’d been gone for two weeks. With the money he’d been paid for finding Jane, he was able to free the farm from debt and still have plenty left over, so he could have hired someone to do the work for him. But the work had been therapy for him when he’d first come here, still weak from his wounds, and so tightly drawn that a pine cone dropping from a tree in the night had been enough to send him diving from the bed, reaching for his knife.
So he labored in the sun, doing the backbreaking work of digging new holes for the fence posts, putting up new sections of fencing, patching and painting the barn. He reroofed the house, worked on the old tractor that had come with the farm, and thought about doing more planting the next spring. All he’d planted so far was a few vegetables for himself, but if he was going to own a farm, he might as well farm it. A man wouldn’t get rich at it, not on this scale, but he knew how to do it. Working the earth gave him a measure of peace, as if it put him in contact with the boy he’d once been, before war had changed his life.
In the distance loomed the mountains, the great, misty mountains where the ghosts of the Cherokee still walked. The vast slopes were uninhabited now, but then, only a few hardy souls other than the Cherokee had ever called the mountains home. Jane would like the mountains. They were older, wreathed in silvery veils, once the mightiest mountain range on earth, but worn down by more years than people could imagine. There were places in those mountains where time stood still.
The mountains, and the earth, had healed him, and the process had been so gradual that he hadn’t realized he was healed until now. Perhaps the final healing had come when Jane had shown him how to laugh again.
He had told her to let it be, and she had. She had left in the quiet morning, without a word, because he’d told her to go. She loved him; he knew that. He’d pretended that it was something else, the pressure of stress that had brought them together, but even then he’d known better, and so had she.
Well, hell! He missed her so badly that he hurt, and if this wasn’t love, then he hoped he never loved anyone, because he didn’t think he could stand it. He couldn’t get her out of his mind, and her absence was an empty ache that he couldn’t fill, couldn’t ease.
She’d been right; he was afraid to take the chance, afraid to leave himself open to more hurt. But he was hurting anyway. He’d be a fool if he let her get away.
