Fire in the Wind (17 page)

"Are you serious?" she whispered.

"Yes, I'm serious," he said flatly. "I was nearly obsessed with you. I can't say exactly why. In one way I suppose I hoped that if I saw you a... it would be a cure, that I'd be able to forget you. I watched you dance with your husband. I wanted to kill him. It was an almost ungovernable thing. It scared me. I left then, and I never saw you again."

She couldn't look at him. "So there
was
no photograph," she stated softly.

"No," said Jake.

"Jake, why have you offered me this job? Howie says you're acting out of character."

Jake's eyes were hooded. "Howie will be lucky if he's still got a job Monday morning," he muttered. "Why did I offer you this job, is that what you want to know? Aside from expecting you to make me a profit, you mean?" He flicked a look at her, and his eyes under his hooded lids seemed almost black with an emotion she couldn't read. He said slowly, "I offered you the job because I want you, Vanessa. Because I have a ghost to exorcise just as you do. The difference is that I know how that ghost can be exorcised, and you haven't accepted it yet. I want to be around when you do." Jake's voice dropped to harshness. "Because you will, Vanessa, whether you know it or not. You will."

The car slid to a stop in front of the airport terminal building and Jake killed the engine. The drumming of the rain on the roof suddenly seemed deafening, as though it hammered inside her skull. Wordlessly Vanessa watched as Jake lifted one lean brown hand to her hair.

"We are going to be lovers, Vanessa," he said softly. "You know that, but you're fighting the knowledge. One day you'll stop fighting."

Mesmerized, she gazed into his eyes as his hand cupped her head and he drew her gently to him, and his faintly smiling mouth lowered toward hers. When he stopped smiling and his eyes narrowed she closed her own against the sight. Then his passionate lips covered hers, and she trembled under his touch like the new green leaves of the trees outside that were trembling under the lash of the rain.

Chapter 7

Work began the moment she arrived in her Manhattan apartment Saturday night. Although she would not resign from TopMarx until she had seen the signed management contract from Jake, she would have to begin making arrangements to sublet the apartment and ship her belongings immediately if she intended to be back in Vancouver by July first.

Vanessa's furniture consisted mostly of antiques lovingly obtained over the years, and when she stood in the middle of her apartment and looked around her after her arrival, she knew that she couldn't leave it behind. She would have to take it along into her new life. Suddenly the realization of all that would have to be done in three short weeks fell on her like a cloak, and she grimaced and mentally staggered under the weight of it.

Moving to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee she wondered if she should put off the move till August. If she didn't produce a spring line after all, what difference would it make? If she did, she would be rushing through the next three weeks at breakneck speed, with hardly a moment's thinking space.

When the coffee was ready she sank into a chair and lazily dialled Colin's number.

"Guess what?" she said without preamble when he answered the phone.

She needed no introduction; Colin always recognized her voice—and her mood.

"You've strangled the Philistine and are now a free agent," Colin said promptly with a laugh in his voice. But he was only half-joking; he knew the "what" was something big.

Vanessa laughed. Suddenly, at his use of the word, she
felt
free. Totally, marvellously free, as though she could suddenly fly. She gazed out of a window onto the dull brown brick of the building beside hers and thought of English Bay and Grouse Mountain and Stanley Park. Yes, she was a free agent, and soon she'd be flying to a new life, in a new city, with a new—she brought her thoughts up short. She had been going to think,
with a new man,
but for the moment she had better restrict her thoughts to the city and the job.

"It wasn't necessary to strangle Tom, however," she replied, excitement bubbling through her voice.

"My dear," said Colin, and his tone became ever so slightly guarded, "do I take it that you have burned your bridges?"

Oh, Lord, he thought she meant to go and work with
him.
In the sudden pressure and excitement of the past two days, she had forgotten Colin's offer.

"Yes," she said slowly, "but I'm not coming in with you after all, Colin. I'm going to be starting a business in Vancouver for Jake Conrad."

"
What?
" Colin screeched.

She told him all about it. He was one of the few people she could tell right now, before the contract was signed and she could feel it was definite. Colin was one friend who would keep the news quiet and wouldn't commiserate too deeply if the thing fell through next week. He understood the vagaries of fortune.

"Well, darling, what can I say?" he asked at last. "I'm shattered. I was sure you were going to throw in your lot with me."

"Well..." she began.

"But of course I'm delighted for you, Vanessa. I know it's the kind of thing you really want."

"Yes."

The irrepressible though light-hearted sarcasm that was Colin's trademark and that she had subconsciously been waiting for finally crept into his tone. "Though why you would want to bury yourself in that little backwater on the
west coast
is more than I can imagine," he said, managing to make the west coast sound like the other side of the moon. "And in
Canada,
too, darling, which—"

Vanessa laughed protestingly. "Now, Colin, Vancouver is a very modern cosmopolitan city. Just because people move more slowly—"

"Well, I can see you're unregenerate, my dear. Still, this has its potential silver lining. You can be my first client, Vanessa. I shall design some sort of signature fabric for you."

Vanessa blinked at the receiver in her hand, then put it back to her ear. It was becoming real too fast. In a very short time, decisions like that would be the order of her day. She would be choosing a trademark, a logo, a line of clothing, and her word would be law. For a moment she sat stunned as the reality sank in: from now on, she would rise or fall entirely on the strength of her own talents.

"My God, Colin," she breathed suddenly. "Am I being crazy to think I can do this?"

"What are you worried about, darling?" he responded calmly. "It's an ideal situation. If you don't make it, Conrad takes the loss, not you. You just get yourself another job. There's no risk at all on your side...."

No risk.
"I'm not the only one at risk in this situation," Jake Conrad had said. But Colin was right—financially, Jake
was
the only one at risk. And Jake certainly knew that. One failed enterprise wouldn't blight her career forever.

But he had implied that she was as much at risk as he was. And he had meant it.

What had he meant? In what way was she at risk?

* * *

The contract arrived at her apartment by courier on Thursday evening. Vanessa read it as carefully as she knew how; to her layman's ears it seemed straightforward, the terms set out exactly as she and Howard Spiegel had discussed them.

But two things nagged at her: Jake Conrad had told her he wanted to be her lover, and he had said that she was at risk. And so the sight of his black full-looped signature on the last page did little to quell the nagging disquiet she had been feeling all week long.

On Friday morning she dropped in to see Louis Standish, Larry's brother, at his legal offices. "I need an immediate opinion, Lou," she said after she had told him about it. "I want to hand in my resignation today if you think the contract looks all right."

The lawyer eyed her without saying anything for a moment. Then he shook his head and sighed. "I suppose it's no good telling you to wait and give me enough time to do an investigation so my opinion is worth something?"

"Well, Lou, I'd really like...."

"To get things settled," he finished for her dryly. With another sigh he lifted his horn-rimmed glasses, settled them on his nose and picked up the contract. Then he dropped it again and looked at her.

"Vanessa," he said, "I don't think that, for the most part, I am an interfering man. In fact, I rarely advise you about anything, even though sometimes I've wanted to shake you for your impulsiveness. But sometimes one has to offer advice even though one knows there's not much chance of being heard. Now, I want you to look at me, Vanessa, and remember while I'm talking that this is the man who told you not to marry my brother ten years ago."

"Lou—" she began.

Lou leaned back in his chair and raised a palm toward her. "Please," he said. "That is the only time I've offered you advice without being asked, and I bring it up now because I was right then and I'm probably right now. And I'm telling you—" he tapped the documents on his desk with one firm finger "—to let me give this a good solid appraisal and to wait until next week before making any final commitment."

Bring a lawyer into this,
she heard Jake's voice,
and you won't be starting before Christmas.
She admired Lou; he was a more than competent lawyer, but he was also cautious. And suddenly she did not want to wait till Christmas—or even next week!

Lou saw it in her eyes. "Vanessa," he said before she could answer. "If the man wants you to run his company for him, one extra week—an extra month—is not going to change his mind. On the other hand, if he's rushing you into the decision, you should have a long look at it."

"He isn't rushing me," Vanessa objected. "I'm the one who wants to start immediately."

"Why?"

"Well, I...." She hesitated. "Because I'm fed up with TopMarx and—and because I'd like to start out with a spring line with the new company."

Louis Standish was a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Harvard Law School and sometimes her own perfectly competent I.Q. seemed sadly puny under the piercing examination of his own. Ten years ago, when he had harshly told her not to marry Larry, his look had been just as piercing, but it had made her uncomfortable in a different way.

Lou took off his glasses and threw them down lightly on his desk. Resting his head against the high back of his black leather chair, he lowered his eyes to the desk and then looked back to her. In the transition his gaze had become hooded.

"I am not by nature altruistic," Lou said. "But ten years ago I wanted you and I didn't lift a hand to get you. I had no children then; divorce would have been easy for me. I wanted to divorce Marjorie and marry you more than I've ever wanted anything in my life."

Vanessa gasped a breath through parted lips and stared at him in astonishment.

"I didn't do anything about it, Vanessa. I was thirty-two and you were nineteen, and you were in love with my brother. So like a fool I decided I couldn't soil the bloom of young love.

"When it became obvious that you were falling in love with someone else I could cheerfully have killed you first and then myself. But too late is too late and you still had a right to young love."

She had never heard anything of this. She had never suspected the least hint of it. Vanessa couldn't say a word.

"And the next I knew there was this business with Larry, and my mother's hare-brained scheme to get you to marry him in spite of everything."

She said finally, "Why are you—"

He raised a hand. "Please listen," he said. "I told you not to marry Larry then for your sake, not for my own, but because of the way I felt about you I couldn't fight. I might have tried much harder to prevent the marriage if I hadn't been so damned aware that it would suit me royally to have you single and with a little experience behind you. I didn't try harder, and you married Larry, to the eternal shame of the Standish family."

He took a deep breath, and so, suddenly, did Vanessa, feeling as though she had forgotten to breathe while he had been speaking.

"Well, I've got the same problem with my motives today—except that now I've really only got the memory of having loved you. Love doesn't survive what I've done to it, I've discovered. In fact, it sometimes feels as though not much of anything survives.

"If you want me to look at this damn thing, I'll do it. There's not much I could refuse you. And I'll do it today if you insist. But my real advice to you is to get another lawyer, Vanessa. Because my legal advice will be clouded by the fact that I don't want you to leave town."