Firestorm (21 page)

Because she sounded forlorn, Jake wrapped his arms around her to give her comfort. “You could teach anywhere,” he pointed out gently. “And marry. Groveland isn’t the only place in the world where you can raise a family. There must be hundreds of places where you’d feel more at home than there.”

“That’s my home. Except for when I was in college and the year I spent teaching in Jackson, I’ve lived there all my life. I have my friends. Becky and Stan. And Gilda. They all live in Laurel, but we get together nearly every week. Until I leased my place to you, my neighbors had been good to me. Did you know Ms. Cahill came and helped me get things ready for the funeral after Pop died? And that everybody from miles around brought food and sent flowers to the cemetery? They’re angry now about me leasing Ann Jacobs

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my land, but they’d be there for me if I needed them.” She looked up at him, tears in her eyes.

Kate has never known real acceptance. Or tolerance. She excuses her neighbors’

meanness because they bring her a truckload of fucking cakes and pies when their social consciences require it.

Jake recalled the barbed words he’d heard Gladys Cahill spew out at Kate, and his blood began to boil. “Honey, you’re a lot more charitable than I am,” he finally said.

“Not everybody’s as tough as you.”

Her soft drawl flowed around him like sweet honey, and the way she tangled her fingers in his chest hair and stroked his nipples was driving him insane.

He tried to ignore her sensual assault, but his cock wasn’t listening to his brain.

“I’m just realistic. I can’t see anybody wanting to stay someplace just because their family lived there for a hundred years or more.”

“You've lived here all your life,” Kate pointed out gently.

Jake chose to interpret Kate's comment literally. “No I haven’t. I bought this place about a year ago, for when I’m in town and don't want to commute back and forth from the ranch.” I doubt if I've spent a total of a month in this place.”

“You know what I mean. Houston has always been your home, your family's home.”

“Wrong again. Dad brought Mom here from Dallas after they got married. And he came from a hell of a long way away from here. He was born in a little town in southern Germany. After Gramps brought him to Texas, they lived in Midland until after World War II was over and Gramps decided his company ought to be based here, where he’d be in the thick of things with other Texas oil men.”

Her eyes widened. “I didn’t know. I thought your family was Texan from way, way back.”

“Yeah. I guess you would think that. We are, on Mom's side. And the Old Man’s done a pretty good job, melting into good old American ways. Of course he’s had more than sixty years to do it.” Jake caught her hands.

“He must have been very young when he first came here.”

“He was seven when Gramps moved them here in 1936.” Jake stood, cradling Kate in his arms for a minute before setting her on her feet.

“Let’s go out to the kitchen and see what we can find to snack on. We’ve hardly eaten anything all day,” he said, figuring he might forget about sex for at least as long as it took to stuff his stomach with food. “Later, if you’re really interested, I'll tell you about Gramps and how he came to be an American oil man.” He stalked off toward the kitchen, leaving her to follow.

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Chapter Ten

“Here. Hold this while I climb down.” Jake handed Kate a heavy album bound in burgundy leather before backing down the library ladder in the den. He took back the album and put it on a glass-topped cocktail table, then sat in the center of a beige leather sofa and patted the place beside him.

When she’d settled in, he set the album on her lap. She ran her fingers over his name, embossed deeply and engraved in gold on the cover. “What’s in here?” she asked when he reached over and flipped it open to the first page.

“Mementos and pictures. You wanted to know what makes my family tick. Mama Anna had a different one made for me and each of my sisters after Gramps died. Might as well let the album tell the story. I haven’t looked at it for years.”

He flipped open the cover to reveal a portrait Kate thought could be of Jake, if not for the man’s old-fashioned attire and the faded sepia tone of the photo.

“That’s Gramps in 1937. He’d just found oil on a desolate piece of West Texas land when he had this picture taken. Here’s one of Dad that was taken around the same time.” He turned the brittle page.

“That’s your father?” The pale, thin boy with the sad eyes looked nothing like the dynamic man she’d met at the hospital.

“Yeah. He’d gone through a lot the year Gramps took that picture. Shows, doesn't it?”

“Yes. What does this letter say?” Careful not to damage it, Kate touched a wrinkled, dog-eared letter written in a language she didn’t immediately recognize.

“Dad’s mother wrote it to Gramps just before she died. I can’t read it either, but Gramps used to say that letter made him hurry back from Capetown to get Dad and move him out of Germany.”

“Before the Holocaust. How did he know?”

“He didn’t. I remember him saying he must have been the luckiest man alive.

Gramps came back, got Dad, and brought him here.”

“How?” Kate looked at the letter, trying to make out some of the words.

“By getting passports and tourist visas, and buying passage on a ship. I guess that must have been before Hitler started restricting travel. When they got here, Gramps applied for their permanent visas. Because he was a well-known geologist, he had no trouble getting them.”

Jake turned the page and pointed out his grandfather in a group picture of men posed at the base of a wooden derrick.

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“There’s the first GreenTex well,” Jake told her proudly. “Between 1937 and the end of World War II, Gramps brought in over a hundred wells in that field. They didn’t have pipelines then. They used trucks like the one you see in the background to haul crude to the refineries in Midland.”

Kate looked at the picture, touched by the starkness of the rig against sandy, arid flatlands. “Drilling for oil back then must have been hard, dirty work.”

“It’s still hard, dirty work, honey. But it gets in your blood, and you don’t want to do anything else.”

She thought she saw pain in his expression as he flipped the page.

“These are pictures of Gramps and Mama Anna's wedding.”

The black-and-white photos had faded over the years, giving her a blurred image of Jake’s tall, rugged grandfather and a petite, blond lady who bore a vague resemblance to the elderly woman she met earlier. Her gaze settled on young Jacob’s smiling face.

“Your father looks happier there.”

“Yeah. Mama Anna was good for him. The Old Man’s always telling us how he owes her for loving him, helping him forget being scared and alone after his mother died. Turn the page,” he urged.

Kate found herself looking at an eight by ten studio portrait of a young man in the uniform of the U. S. Army Air Corps. She stared at the earnest face, the sergeant's stripes on his shoulders.

“Dad joined up in forty-six, as soon as he turned seventeen. He worked for U.S.

intelligence in London. Because he was fluent in German, they assigned him to piecing together information of all kinds—particularly to ferreting out the truth about what had happened in the concentration camps.”

“Oh, Jake. That must have been terrible.”

“I imagine his duty of going in to inspect the camps after Germany surrendered was a lot worse,” he commented as he flipped over several pages in the album. “He doesn’t talk about it—at least he never has, to me.”

“I’d think experiencing horrors firsthand like that would have made your father bitter.” Kate shuddered as she recalled TV documentaries about the Holocaust and its aftermath.

“It could have. But what it showed Dad was the absolute extremes to which bigotry could go. He talked about that a lot. The worst damn caning I ever got at school was for calling an Oriental kid in my class a chink. And that punishment was nothing compared to the talking to the Old Man put on me when I got home. I must have been about seven years old at the time. I learned young that I’d better not judge folks by the color of their skin or the way they worship.”

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That had been one of many lessons Jake had taken to heart. Thinking of his father now, with his fragile heart and tired-out body, he was sorry he couldn’t be the man who’d take over the far-flung business Gramps had started and his father had nurtured.

Needing distraction from those troubling thoughts, he reached for Kate's hand and rubbed his thumb across her small, soft palm.

“That's the well Gramps drilled in Saudi Arabia,” he said when he showed her a faded color photo of a derrick rising proudly out of desert sand. “And there he is.” He pointed to a man standing beside the rig, apparently deep in conversation with a robed Bedouin worker. A broad-brimmed hat obscured his grandfather’s face.

“He drilled just one well over there?”

“Just that one. That photo was taken in 1976, the year before he died. It was one of the first free-flowing wells over there. It’s kind of ironic. Gramps brought that well in over twenty-five years ago. When I was over there last month, I shut it down for the last time.”

“So you don’t have a well there anymore?”

“Not that one. But we had twenty-three producing wells in the western Saudi Arabian desert as of this morning.” He frowned. “Dad negotiated with the Saudis to get drilling rights over there. Those wells have kept us going, while our domestic fields have been going dry over the years.”

“You go there often, don't you?”

“For the past three years I've put in more time in Riyadh than Shana and Bear have spent in Kuwait City. Now, with Dad needing to retire, I’ll probably stick closer to home, concentrate my efforts on getting maximum production out of the Groveland field.”

“Out of my land.” She trembled, and when he tried to cradle her against his chest she pulled away.

“Your land’s only a small part of the Groveland field. As soon as we catch whoever is trying to sabotage our drilling sites, the Oil and Gas Board will cut loose with permits for us to put wells in on the other properties we’ve leased. For God’s sake, honey, you act like having oil wells on your land’s the worst thing that could happen.”

“Can't you understand? That place is my home. It’s all I have left of Pop, all he was able to leave me. I’m the last of my family. I was born there, and I expected to die there.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks, and Jake saw she was trying valiantly to hold back the ones that were welling in her eyes.

“You said you used to be engaged. Did you expect your fiancé to come to Groveland and live with you on your ancestral land after you got married?”

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She didn’t answer right away. The pensive look in her eyes gave Jake a guilty twinge.

“No,” she finally said. “We were going to live in Jackson. David told me we could keep the place and go there for weekends and vacations and such. I’d wanted him to set up his medical practice in Laurel, but he wouldn’t. He told me there wasn’t enough call for a urologist there, and that when country people who could afford a specialist needed one, they’d drive to Jackson instead of relying on the local talent.”

“He was probably right. Anyhow, you were willing to leave your home for him.

What was he going to give you in return? What in hell did he do to make you want his kind of life?”

This David character had given Jake no reason to be jealous, at least as far as his physical relationship with Kate went. And since he didn’t love her he had no reason to care that she’d once loved somebody else enough to plan a life with him. Still it burned Jake to think she’d been willing to leave her precious home for the doctor—but that she was furious now because his company’s drilling was driving her away from it.

“David would have given me everything I always wanted,” she snapped.

“Now why do I doubt you were ever starry-eyed, head-over-heels in love with the guy when you never even let him in your bed?”

She scowled. “David was gentle and thoughtful. Since I was a little girl, I wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother, to make a home for my own family. He’d have been a good husband, a wonderful father. A good provider.”

“Do you still love him?” he asked.

If Kate did, that shouldn’t bother Jake. Unless he was starting to feel more for her than was safe. And he wasn’t. He only felt possessive—no, more like territorial—

because he was the only man who’d ever fucked her.

And if he kept reminding himself of that, maybe he’d keep on believing it was true.

“No. I don’t know now if I ever really loved him. You’ve made your point. I would have left home if I had married David. And I probably would have slept with him if I’d been head over heels in love, as you put it.”

“Then for God’s sake, quit agonizing over what our drilling is doing to that piece of ground. It’s only a place. Not some sacred legacy you’ve got to sacrifice your life to protect.”

He paused, searching for words to comfort her as he rubbed his thumb gently over her palm.

“Hey, I know it hurts to let go of a place that meant everything to you when you were a kid. I nearly lost it when I had to go to Midland ten years ago and shut down the last of the wells in that field Gramps opened long before I was born. That was where the Old Man sent me to learn the oil business from the bottom up. It hurt to shut that well Ann Jacobs

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down, but I realized that nothing stays the same forever. We all have to face that fact, sooner or later.”

“I know. It’s so damn hard, though.” When she spoke, she looked up at him, a tremulous smile on her soft, inviting lips.

For a moment, Jake wished he could love his gentle Kate. Then Alice stepped between them in his mind, reminding him that with love came pain so fierce that he couldn’t bear to risk suffering that way again. Forcibly he closed the door to his heart.