He didn’t release her arm. “I think we should talk about this.”
“I don’t think we should talk at all. Hey!” she yelled to a man leaving the hotel to go back to the truck. “Don’t take anything else inside. Little Billy won’t be staying.”
The men chuckled as they looked from Jackie to William, hovering over her. He was several inches taller than she, a good deal heavier, and he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of “little Billy.”
William gave the men a curt nod. “Take a break,” he ordered. Then, still holding Jackie’s arm firmly, he pulled her down the street, a tumbleweed blowing across their path. He didn’t say a word as he pulled her into a building that had once been one of Eternity’s saloons. Inside were half a dozen broken chairs and a few dirty tables. Firmly he ushered her to the only chair that had all four legs and sat her on it. “Now, Jackie—”
Like a jack-in-the-box, she came out of the seat immediately. “Don’t try explaining anything to me. This has been one huge mistake, that’s all. Now I want you to get your things out of my house—” She hesitated. “Or, if the place now belongs to you, I shall be the one to move.” At that statement her heart wrenched. She had taken a ninety-nine-year lease on the first two floors of the hotel, planning to lease a floor a year until it was all hers. When she’d first approached Jace Montgomery about renting the hotel, he’d asked for more than she had to spend, so she asked him how much per floor. Trying to keep from smiling, he had divided the rent into five equal parts. Then Jackie had asked for a discount for renting two floors. With a ten percent discount, she was able to afford both floors, and after six months she’d added the third floor, at a twelve and one-half percent reduction. The ninety-nine-year lease made her feel secure enough to spend all the money she had in decorating it, and now she was going to have to leave her pretty house.
“I’ll start moving now.”
“What is wrong with you?” William asked, putting himself between her and the door. “You’d think I’d jilted you in a love affair. I thought we agreed that we were going to run a business together. Was there any more between us? Something I didn’t know about?”
Jackie sat back down, praying that she would be able to live through this day. Of course he was right. She was acting like an idiot. There had been nothing between them except what was in her head. He had known all along that night who she was, had known that she was old enough to be his…well, his older sister. He had known that she was his former baby-sitter.
So that meant that everything, absolutely everything that she had imagined herself feeling, was all on her side. He had kissed her, but she had to be honest with herself: it wasn’t a kiss to set the world on fire. Well, maybe at the time she’d thought it was a great kiss, but in hindsight it was more of a friendship kiss. And what about all their talk? That had been normal too. If he wanted her awake he couldn’t very well have asked her boring questions about her second grade teacher.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
She was looking at him and thinking that this could not possibly work with both of them living under the same roof in the isolated ghost town. She would have liked to think that the town gossips would be up in arms, but the truth was that they would no doubt think of her and William as teacher and pupil, with no possibility of scandal. Jackie was sure this was the way William saw it, too. Jackie was his mentor, his hero, his teacher, the one who had shown him how to catch bugs, how to swing on ropes, how to hold his breath for a full minute. No, she was sure she would have no problem with William.
The problem would be with Jackie herself. For the life of her she could not look at this gorgeous young man and remember that he was just a boy and that she was, by comparison, an old woman. When you feel that you are eighteen, it’s difficult to remember that you aren’t. Sometimes it’s a shock to look in the mirror and see the aging face looking back. Never again was a man going to say to her, “When you wake up, you look like a kid.” Now she didn’t look like a kid even after an hour spent putting on makeup. Oh, she looked good, and she well knew it, but she no longer looked eighteen and she never would again.
“I think it would be better if you lived in Chandler,” she said in her best adult voice. “It would be better for…It would just be better, that’s all.” She did her best to keep her voice neutral. If you lusted after a man ten years younger than you, a man you used to baby-sit, was that incest?
“In order to start a business we must spend a great deal of time together, and I think it would be ridiculous to have to drive the forty miles back and forth to Chandler every day. What if we wanted to discuss something at night?”
“Telephone.”
“What if you needed help with the planes?”
“I’ve gotten along rather well without you until now. I think I can continue to manage.”
“What if I suddenly had a question?”
“Wait until morning. You know, like you have to wait until morning to open your Christmas presents.”
He walked away from her, put his foot on the rail of the bar, his elbow on the counter, and his head on his hand. Now all he needed was a shot of red-eye and a six-gun at his hip and he’d look like a gunslinger, Jackie thought. Out, she thought. She definitely had to get him out of Eternity and as far away from her as possible.
After a while he turned back to her, his face serious, and she remembered the solemn little boy he had been. “No,” he said, then held out his hand to her as though to help her up.
Jackie didn’t feel quite old enough yet to need help getting out of a chair. “What does that mean? No?”
“It means that I will live in Eternity for as long as it takes. I have decided.”
“You have—” she said, nearly sputtering. For a moment she felt as though she were again his baby-sitter and he were disobeying her, but when she stood in front of him, she had to look up, and she was looking into the eyes of a man, not the eyes of a child. Turning on her heel, she left the saloon, her anger evident with every step she took.
She walked for some time, walked far out into the desert that surrounded Eternity and tried to think about what she was doing. It embarrassed her greatly that she had felt such…such strong feelings for this young man that first night. Why hadn’t some sixth sense told her that she knew more about life than he did? Why hadn’t she picked up on the clues that she was dealing not with a grown-up but with a large child? And of course there must have been clues. There was…And, well, there was…Think as hard as she might, she couldn’t remember anything that would have been a clue that he was a great deal younger than she was.
Except maybe that he was a lot of fun that night. Why was it that the older people got, the less they wanted
to laugh? It would seem that the opposite would be true. Age needed laughter to help it along. Where once you bounced out of bed in the morning, as a person got older there wasn’t much bouncing. Laughter might help a person through all the aches and pains, the muscles that no longer stretched but seemed to catch in place. But the older people got, the less they laughed. Maybe that was a way to guess their age. If they laugh fifty times a day, they’re kids. Twenty times a day means they’re in their twenties. Ten times a day and they’re mid-thirties. By the time they reach their forties nothing seems to make them laugh.
About a year ago Jackie had gone out with a very nice man to dinner where they had met three other couples. Throughout the dinner there had not been one scrap of laughter. It had been all talk of money and mortgages and where the best steak bargains could be had. Later, her date had asked Jackie if she’d had a good time, and she had replied that the people seemed…well, a little old. To this the man had stiffly replied that his friends were younger than she was. “In years only,” she had snapped, and that was the last time she’d heard from him.
So now her problem was one young man, one very young man by the name of William Montgomery. She needed to get rid of him, needed to get him away from her. She didn’t trust herself around him. She had felt a pull toward him the night he had taken her from the plane, and she’d felt it again this morning. Maybe it was just the absence of male company for so many months, especially when she had spent so many years almost exclusively with men, but she didn’t think so. There was something about Billy’s solemnity, something about the way he did what he said he was going to do, that appealed to her. Hell, she thought, after years of Charley, she might fall in love with a blue-faced monkey if the creature followed through on his ideas, if he did what he said he was going to do.
Chapter Four