Higher Than Eagles (Donovans of the Delta) Read Online Free PDF Page A

hers in the briefest, tenderest kisses she’d ever known. “I would hold you” —he pulled her into his arms and buried his face in her hair— “and cherish you.”
    For one glorious moment, their heartbeats joined. Then Jacob moved away. His arms dropped to his side, and he stepped back. The tide came in and washed between them.
    “If I loved you, Rachel, you wouldn’t have to ask. You would know.”
    Jacob turned and walked down the lonely beach.

 
     
    CHAPTER THREE
    It was early when Jacob walked through Rachel’s gate.
    She wouldn’t be up yet. He knew, because he’d sat through both her shows the night before. She hadn’t finished the late show until two. And she’d looked tired. He hoped his presence in Biloxi had something to do with that. He selfishly wanted her to be losing as much sleep over him as he was over her.
    He wanted her to be yearning, too.
    The gate swung shut behind him, and he walked to her nearly naked flower bed. There were great bare patches where she had uprooted her petunias. Setting his box on the ground, he grinned sheepishly.
    He could understand his sleeplessness and his motive for revenge. What he couldn’t figure out was why he’d conned the owner of a landscape nursery to open his gates at seven and sell him a big box of petunias.
    Still grinning like a penitent schoolboy, he knelt beside the flower bed and dug a hole for the first petunia.
    “What in the world are you doing?”
    He looked up, and what he saw took his breath away. Rachel was standing on the front porch, her honey and butterscotch hair tumbled over her shoulders, her green eyes still dreamy from sleep. The filmy pink concoction she was wearing couldn’t be called a nightgown and robe by any stretch of the imagination. To Jacob, it looked more like a bit of cotton candy or a pink cloud or even a chunk of heaven that had fallen from the sky.
    He swallowed his grin and pinched the head off the petunia he was holding.
    “I’m gardening.”
    She threw back her head and hooted with laughter.
    “Unless things have changed, you know as much about gardening as my son.”
    He tore his gaze away from the enticing vision on the veranda and patted the earth carefully around the broken petunia. Then he started digging another hole.
    “Madam, how dare you insult me? I grew up on a farm.”
    She laughed even harder.
    “You’re a pretender, Jacob. Your mother once told me that if you had spent as much time with your books as you did thinking up excuses to get out of gardening, you’d have been a genius.”
    He remembered the time he’d painted himself red, using a leftover bucket of paint he’d found in the barn, and had told his mother he had a rare disease. It took Anna three days to get all the paint off him, and when she did, part of his skin came with it. He’d paid the price with two weeks of irritating pain. It had been the high point of his career in deception.
    As he looked up at Rachel, he realized he hadn’t come to her house merely to plant petunias. He’d come to see her. He wondered what the consequences of his deception would be.
    “That just goes to show you, Rachel. I’m a man of many talents. Pretending is only one of them.” He grinned at her. “Want to see my others?”
    “No.”
    For the first time since she’d heard him in her flower bed and had impulsively run out of the house, she became aware of her attire. It was not exactly the costume she’d have chosen to face Jacob Donovan in, but it was too late now. She’d just have to make the best of it. She drew herself up and tried to pretend her legs weren’t weak from longing.
    “Are you planning to put a flower in that hole?”
    He kept on digging. “Yes. Gardening is simple. Just dig a hole and drop the plant in.”
    “Unless you’re digging all the way to China, I’d say the hole is deep enough.”
    Chagrined, Jacob looked down. Sure enough, he had dug a hole big enough to bury a good sized cat. Rachel descended the steps