Fire in the Wind (23 page)

He jerked the zip once. It did not move. Then his hands moved and clenched in the curve of her back, and then they parted.

The taffeta tore with a long, high, silken shriek, like a cry of animal passion, electrifying her and sending a blinding throb of blood into her temples.

He ripped again and stood back from her, and the dress came away in his hands.

Jake looked at her nearly naked body, then down at the beautiful fabric crushed between his hands. Then he raised his dark eyes to hers.

"Damn you," he said softly, bitterly. "Damn you to hell."

She was wearing only a thin wisp of underwear, and nylon stockings that clung to her firm slim thighs with their own elastic. Jake's face was planes and angles as he took in the sight of her, the muscles drawn tight across his forehead and cheekbones. For a second they were both motionless, staring at each other, and then with a hoarsely muttered oath he threw the torn silk from him and reached for her.

The bedroom was dark, and when he laid her down on the bed the sheet was cool under her back. She heard the quiet rustle as he undressed near her and knew by the sound that he was fighting for control.

She wanted to tell him that she loved him, to let him share in that private perfect knowledge that made his anguish unnecessary. But she was afraid to. There were demons tearing at him. She had known that about Jake from the beginning; she knew it as if she saw them in the air around him.

But what demons she did not know. She only knew, with a distant foreboding, that if she told him that she loved him now she might destroy him.

Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and as he stood for a silent moment staring down at her on the bed she saw his naked body faintly brushed with moonlight. It carved out shadowy hollows along his temple, his cheek, the muscles of his chest and his flat stomach, the powerful thighs, and for one moment of stillness, it was like looking at an erotic statue.

Except for his eyes. Even in that room of shadows his eyes somehow seemed darker than the night as they gazed at her; even though she could not see them, she felt their hungry possessive touch along her trembling waiting body.

When at last he sank down beside her on the bed she could only turn to him, feeling the heat of his need in every pore, feeling the answering pulse of her own desire as first his mouth and then his arms found her.

She loved him. Her body ached for his, physically and emotionally, and she had been waiting for this moment all her life.

She kept nothing back. She gave herself freely, willingly, opening like a flower to the demands of his mouth and his body. When he sought to destroy her with pleasure she responded with an innocent delight that shook him. When he set out to make her beg she begged instantly and without shame, so that he was robbed of the triumph he had sought.

She gave him her surrender as a gift, a gift of love; he had no one to battle but himself—and his demons. He warred with the demons on the battlefield of her body for long minutes while she moaned and clung to him and cried out her small cries of gratitude, and with each one his breathing grew more ragged and desperate.

Then from the darkest well of her self came a response that drew her whole being up into the burning, blinding light of passion and offered it all to him; and she cried out with a howling intensity that tore down every defence behind his dark eyes and rushed through him like a flame. He cried out his release and his surprise in a voice that was all she had ever wanted to hear. She clung to him as tightly as if they were one being, and his shuddering protesting cry somehow made her weep for joy.

* * *

When dawn pinkened the sky and crept through the slatted blind to find their bed, they had slipped into sleep. Under the light covering of the sheet Vanessa lay curled against Jake's chest, her breath easy, a small smile on her swollen lips. But Jake's sleep was not easy. His hand clenched and unclenched in the tangled sweep of her hair, and even in the cool of morning sweat was beaded on his brow.

* * *

"Good morning," Vanessa smiled as she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a white bathrobe that she had found hanging on the door.

"Good morning," responded Jake from a deep chair by the windows, looking up from his newspaper, smiling and urbane, as though in the night just past he had not tried to destroy her with passion and been himself destroyed.

His bathrobe was navy, falling open over the dark hair crinkling on his chest. She knew the scent and feel of that hair intimately, and the memory made her smile and drop her eyes.

"Shall we order some brunch?" Jake asked, his voice politely friendly, and Vanessa knew he was back in control again. Although last night he had been hers and hers alone, this, now, was the man that Marigold and Louisa and probably many other women had known.

Vanessa looked at the calm face that said there was nothing between them except a certain physical satisfaction they had given each other, and wondered how any woman could bear to have as a lover a man so cool and unmoved. For she would always feel the need to disturb him on the deepest level, and if she could not have that, nothing less would do....

"Sounds lovely," she said with a smile, as friendly and well-bred as he.

Over brunch Jake relaxed and unwound, treating her less and less like just another pretty face he had slept with last night, and more like the woman whose talent and drive he admired and who was running his newest business. Sometimes she caught a look of faint surprise on his face, as though he wasn't used to this kind of conversation over Sunday brunch.

"My secretary tried to reach you Friday," he said over coffee. "Do you still want to discuss that market report with me?"

She said, "That market report is a nightmare. If you'd read it first you'd never have offered me this job!"

"No?" said Jake, raising his eyebrows. "Why?"

"First of all," she began, "it says that Vancouver is not a good city to be manufacturing clothing in, because there's almost no labour pool here and I'll have to pay above the market rate to steal them away from competitors. To get a good production manager Robert thinks we'll probably even have to go to Montreal or Toronto, where the majority of clothing manufacturing is done in Canada and there's a larger labour pool."

"Hmm," grunted Jake.

"The second thing," she continued, taking a sip of her coffee, "and by far the more terrifying, is the fact that my experience in New York—everything I've picked up over the years—is going to be absolutely useless to me here. The difference between the Canadian and American markets is so vast that I'm on the level of a novice. Worse than a novice."

Jake was watching her with an arrested look in his eyes. "Really?"

She wondered what kind of reports he'd been reading when he dreamed up this venture.

"Jake, I have to sell across five thousand miles of Canada to get the same market size I have in a few miles' radius of New York! I can't believe it. Do you know how many small towns there are in five thousand miles?" If she hadn't known much about Canadian geography before, the market report had been a crash course. She had been amazed to discover that there were only three cities in Canada with a population of over a million.

"And what were you expecting?"

"I was expecting to be able to restrict my operations to the area around Vancouver for the first few years, the way we did in New York," she said. "But to do that, I'd have to go for a very small, exclusive designer-model business—which is exactly what I don't want to do."

"Well, then," Jake pointed out reasonably, "you won't be doing that. So you're stuck with selling to the entire country. Other than the need for salespeople in the various regions, what problems does this raise?"

He made it sound so easy, as though a few minor adjustments would make everything right. But this was going to take more than minor adjustments.

"That's only the distribution problem, which can obviously be solved the way every other manufacturer in Canada solves it," Vanessa said. "There's also a production problem, and worse, a design problem. From a design point of view, the facts are—" she was ticking things off on her fingers now "—one: women in Canada apparently are more conservative and quality conscious in their tastes than their American counterparts. Even in the larger centres.

"Two: as far as clothing tastes go, women in the smaller centres—small towns and villages—are much more conservative than big-city women. There are lots of reasons for this, good reasons, too, but the fact remains that if I stole an exclusive Paris design and modified it for mass production and had it out in the stores in a month, no one would want it.

"Jake, it means that the one thing I dreamed of doing is the one thing I'm not going to be able to do in this country—give middle-income women quality clothing with style and flair for their money."

"I disagree," said Jake, shaking his head. "Your feeling, as you told it to me a few weeks ago, was that middle-income women aren't being given the product they really want. That's still true, but you're going to have to adjust your ideas about just what it is they want. That's all. And even that's a minor adjustment, if you choose to look at it that way—you can still give quality in line and fit and materials, but you'll have to compromise as far as fashion trends are concerned."

"Compromise!" exclaimed Vanessa with a vexed laugh. "You don't understand! I'm always going to be working on designs that are at least a year behind the fashion!"

"On the other hand," Jake pointed out, "weren't some of the designs you fought so hard to have included in TopMarx's fall showing very classical models? And you said they sold well here. It seems to me you might have a natural feeling for the Canadian market."

"Yes, but—" Vanessa sighed. "It's hard to explain. A lot of the
excitement
is knowing what's going to happen before it happens—getting a mass-market model of a hot design in the stores almost before it's on the runway. Now that competitive spur will be missing. There'll be competition for a piece of the market, of course, but that's not the kind of thing that keeps me going."

It was a bad blow. At least Tom had always produced the latest fashions, however cheaply they were made. A good part of the satisfaction of her job had been the constant jumping to keep on top of what was happening.

"I wanted a quieter life," Vanessa said ruefully, feeling a sudden sense of loss that surprised her. "I didn't expect it to be
this
quiet."

"Well, hell," said Jake. "Can't you design two lines? One for the cities and one for the smaller centres?"

"Can you afford to give me two factories?" she responded dryly. She shook her head. "It wouldn't be practical, Jake. A production line has to be set up....No, I'll just have to be satisfied with including a few of the more exciting designs in the line each season and papering my walls with the rest."

And in that moment, suddenly, she was resigned. Life was a series of changes, after all. There would be plenty of learning to do here, plenty to make her new life exciting. She had to face what came along, not try to wish it away.

"Does that mean you've decided to stay?" Jake asked, leaning over to pour another cup of coffee for her.

She laughed. "I guess I have. I guess I decided to stay yesterday when I signed the lease on the apartment. It must have been the apartment that decided me; it's so beautiful."

Jake smiled.

"Anyway," she confided, "there's a lot of satisfaction in being a technician, too. I enjoy making a really good fit. I never seemed to have time for that with Tom."

He nodded, still saying nothing, and she was briefly angry because she wanted him to be glad that she was staying, as glad as she was to be here.

She said, "I can't understand why you didn't know all this before you offered me the job."

Jake's crooked smile flashed. "What makes you think I didn't?"

"Well, I—but of course! You own Designwear, so you must have known about the labour problems here, at the very least."

"Designwear functions entirely without my supervision," said Jake.

"Well, there you are!" said Vanessa. "If you'd known the facts you'd never have decided to start this business in Vancouver, and you'd never have hired an American to run it—not against such drawbacks. In fact I can't understand why you want to start this business at all—the economy's so bad. If it weren't for Robert's telling me you always make money I'd be a lot more nervous than I am now."

"Of course, Robert doesn't know everything about me. What he should have told you is that I usually get what I want. Maybe this time I want to lose money."

He was smiling; it was a joke. He had told her before he didn't want a tax write-off.

"Well, you won't get what you want, then." Vanessa laughed. "Because I'm going to make you good money on this."

"I thought you'd feel like that," said Jake, his eyes glinting with satisfaction.

To hide her leaping response to his approval Vanessa stood with her coffee cup and moved over to stand in front of the windows. When she looked around again Jake was refilling his cup.

"I've been meaning to ask you," she said, "whether you own Fraser Valley Helicopter now. Did the reverse takeover go through?"