“I don’t care if people think I’m nice or a troll.”
“Liar. You’re a good person, and it bugs you when people assume otherwise,” she mumbled. A poignant feeling of longing went through him. Her utter confidence in him reminded him of the Harper of old. He wanted to believe her like he had when he was a kid, but his innocence was lost. He’d sacrificed it to become Jacob Latimer.
Since he couldn’t agree, he just caressed her silently for a moment. He loved to see her reaction to his touch. He always had, even when they were kids. It was fresh, immediate evidence that he meant something to her. Her reaction at the moment was for her eyelids to drift closed. Despite her obvious contentment, he found he couldn’t stop himself from setting something straight with her right then and there.
“Harper, honey?”
“Yeah?” she asked, her eyelids rising a fraction of an inch with apparent effort. The sun had really gotten to her. He was going to demand a lot of her later. That’s why he wanted to make sure she was rested.
“When we were on the diving board earlier, before we jumped?”
“Mmm-hmm”
“You called me Jake.”
Her eyelids snapped open wider.
“I . . . I did?”
He nodded, closely studying her reaction. Unlike on other occasions when he’d cautiously tested her, he thought he’d seen a flash of anxiety in her eyes.
“Why did you call me that?” he asked tensely.
“I don’t know,” she whispered warily. “Why? Is it a big deal? Jake is short for Jacob—”
“No one calls me that.”
She winced at his sharpness, and he cringed inwardly. She nodded in agreement. “Okay, I won’t anymore, then.”
“No,” he bit out. Recognizing how unreasonable he was being, he leaned down and kissed her brow, trying to smooth his uncertainty and confusion. He spoke quietly near her ear, like he was imparting a secret. “You can. If you want to, I mean.”
He stood and turned away so that she couldn’t see his irritation at his abrupt, irrational change of mind.
thirty-two
Twenty Years Ago
She awoke to the feeling of Jake’s hand in her hair and the sound of gentle rain falling. She opened her eyes and saw the cave cast in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn. Memories shot through her, horrifying recollections of the mountain lion’s screams rolling off the walls of the cave, of how the predator had stalked them all through the night like a living nightmare.
Sweet memories of the boy holding her and containing her fear also crowded her brain.
“Jake?”
“I’m right here,” he said, and again, he stroked her hair.
Her eyes clamped shut at the sound of his reassuring drawl. His voice and his embrace had become her touchstone during that terrifying, seemingly never-ending night. Several times, she’d felt her very being fraying and splintering upon hearing the shrieks of the mountain lion resounding so close to them, sensing the animal’s feral hunger and imagining its sharp, white teeth. Then Jake would speak to her in that even tone of his, prompting her to tell him more about Lord of the Rings, or reassuring her that they didn’t have long now.
“Dawn’ll be here soon. He’ll go then. You can bet on it.”
She sat up abruptly, breaking contact with his warm body. A jolt of panic went through her when she saw the dying embers of their fire. Those flames had come to mean safety to her, and life.
The fire had . . . and Jake.
“It’s gone?” she asked turning toward him, her eyes wide. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep in the middle of so much terror. It was a testament to how much she’d come to trust Jake Tharp.
She made out his outline in the semidarkness: his scraggly, longish dark blond hair and shoulders. She knew from firsthand knowledge that his hair was thick and soft and that his shoulders, though narrow, were stronger than she would ever have imagined.
Just like the rest of him was.