just have to grab my purse. Would you like something to drink before we go?”
He shook his head. “I told Luis we’d be there around two. We’d better get going.”
A few minutes later Tori was sitting beside Jake in the truck and awkwardness hung between them. Jake’s remote attitude gave her the feeling he didn’t want to make this trip with her, even though he’d suggested it. “You know, Jake, if you’d given me the directions, I could have driven up here myself.”
“Luis’s place isn’t easy to find.”
“I can follow directions and I can read a map.”
“Some women don’t like to go to strange places by themselves.”
“And some women don’t mind. I guess I’m one of them.”
At that he glanced at her. “You’re as independent as Nina.”
“Is that a compliment?”
A smile twitched the corner of his lip. “Yeah, I suppose. Independent women are just thorny to deal with sometimes.”
“As are remote men,” she returned before she could stop herself.
The hum of the truck’s engine filled the cab as the tires ate up the distance to Taos. Tori stared out the window. She never tired of the Southwest’s beauty, a beauty that seemed to change with each passing mile, with the angle of the sun, with the time of the day.
The mountains up ahead were cloaked in sunlight, and streams of it played over peaks and valleys, brush and earth. Sometimes Tori yearned to wrap herself in the scenery and just let the landscape of the yucca, sage and piñon beat through her in primitive rhythms. As old as the land, the vibrations were the same kind of primitive rhythms that thrummed through her with Jake only a couple of feet away.
Except for a glance at her every once in awhile, a flip of the switch to start the tape on the truck’s cassette player, Tori thought Jake was lost in his own world.
Finally he asked, “Was that the mother of the baby you’re going to adopt on the phone? I couldn’t help overhearing.”
It seemed funny discussing this with Jake. She hadn’t really discussed the adoption with anyone but her lawyer and her mother. “Yes, her name’s Barbara. She was accepted for the winter term of college and is looking forward to it.”
“When’s her due date?”
“September twenty-ninth.”
“And then you’ll be a mother.” The way Jake said it made her think he was reminding himself of that.
Because her worries were so very tied up with her joy, she murmured, “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once Barbara signs the papers, her decision is irrevocable. But she’s smart enough to understand that feelings aren’t something you turn on and off like a water spigot, so she asked for a sixty-day grace period. I’ll be legal guardian as soon as the baby’s born, but Barbara won’t have to make the final decision for sixty days.”
“You agreed to that?” There was concerned amazement in the question.
“I don’t know how to explain this, Jake, but I can’t imagine any woman giving up her baby and not having doubts. I don’t want to adopt a baby and then have some kind of war afterward because the mother changes her mind. I want Barbara to be absolutely sure about what she’s doing. If those sixty days will do it, then I’m prepared for life to be a little uncertain for that amount of time.”
“But what if you’ve cared for this baby and Barbara does change her mind?”
“I don’t believe that will happen. I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I thought it might. She wants to be a doctor. Her mother wants her to be a doctor. Her mom’s divorced and won’t accept care of Barbara’s baby. She won’t even help her with it, because she believes Barbara will be destroying her future if she keeps it. Barbara does, too. She chose me out of fifteen women. She cared about every aspect of the social worker’s report. The judge understood that she’s a conscientious teenager who wants the best for everybody involved.”
“I still think you’re taking quite a risk.”
“Maybe I am. But motherhood is a risk, no matter how it happens.” Now she had a question for him. “Do you want kids someday?”
He was silent for a few very long heartbeats, and then he answered firmly, “That isn’t going to happen.”
Why? was on the tip of her tongue. Yet she didn’t let it slip off. If she knew why, that meant they would be getting to know each other much better. If she knew why, she’d be delving into the part of Jake’s life he kept guarded. If she asked why, she had the feeling he wouldn’t tell her, anyway.
The sun’s brilliance made the landscape dance with golden light. It played over the cottonwoods along the Rio Grande. It flowed over the mountains, outlining a ramshackle house here, a small adobe there. And then there was nothing but land and scrub and piñon. Mountain crests seemed to envelope them, only to disclose higher crests, pink earth, more turquoise sky.
Their conversation was minimal after that, and Tori tried to ignore the movement of Jake’s strong, tanned, hair-roughened arms as he guided the steering wheel. His eyes didn’t leave the road now, and she wondered if he thought of her as a woman with more optimism than sense.
When they entered the boundaries of Taos, they passed a few fast-food restaurants. Jake took several side roads then, finally weaving between a few houses surrounded by coyote fence. He stopped at a tan adobe casita with an Open sign taped to a screen door that rattled in the wind.
“Luis told me he has plenty of tile in stock. Unless of course you want something terrifically unusual. I told him that wasn’t likely since you wanted to get the work done quickly.”
Forty-five minutes later, Jake loaded boxes of tiles into the back of his truck, thinking about the ones Tori had chosen. She’d seemed enthused about Luis’s painting. But then, that shouldn’t surprise him. One of the things Jake remembered about Tori was how she became excited over even very small pleasures—colors melting together in a rug, the turquoise-and-coral necklace her mother had given her to wear on her prom night, the Camelot-theme decorations in the hotel ballroom.
And today he’d caught her gazing at the mountains and known she was appreciating their color, their texture, their majesty.
Slamming the tailgate closed on the truck, he decided that being anywhere around her was a mistake. This trip today had been a mistake. After a year, he’d finally found a balance for his emotions, and he didn’t want that balance disrupted by desire that couldn’t be satisfied, beauty that was out of his reach, a woman who’d captivated him as a teenager and now even more so as an adult. He was in temporary mode. Tori was about to become a mother. He never intended to get married. She was the type of woman who deserved vows.
Climbing into the driver’s seat, his mood darkened as he caught another whiff of her perfume and noticed the creaminess of her skin where her sleek hair fell against her neck. He turned the key in the ignition.
He’d taken a side road toward the center
