The Invitation (7 page)

Jackie was sure the story was very amusing, but at the moment she wasn't ready to be amused. “What is going on?”

“I guess I should have asked your permission first. I mean, it is your house, or at least the bottom three floors are, but I really didn't have time to ask. I had to make arrangements as fast as possible to give us as much time as possible to get ready for the Invitational. I thought it would be much more convenient if I lived nearby instead of driving from Chandler every day, so I bought the hotel from Dad and hired people to clean the top floor. My mother found the furniture in the attic for me and—”

“Wait a minute!” she half shouted. “What do
you
have to do with the Invitational? What do
I
have to do with a race like that? Why do you keep talking about ‘we'?” The instant she said the words, she knew the answer. Standing in front of her, shading her from the sun, was not little Billy Montgomery but William, her rescuing knight, the man who had pulled her from a wrecked plane, the man who had intrigued her with his talk, had made her interested in life, and had even made her think about love once again. He was the man she had been fantasizing about, dreaming about, conjuring up a future with. The man she was beginning to fancy that she was in love with was actually a very tall little boy.

Embarrassment was Jackie's first emotion. “I think there's been a mistake. You'll have to remove your furniture and go back to Chandler.”

With her head down so he wouldn't see her reddened face, she started toward the hotel where the men were carrying a small table through the front door. But William caught her arm.

“Jackie—” he began.

“Didn't your family teach you to call your elders by their proper title? I'm Miss O'Neill to you.”

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.

A
s Jackie drove into the ghost town that had become home to her, she couldn't seem to keep her heart from leaping a bit. The light on the porch glowed warmly, and more lights shone from inside the house. Someone was waiting inside for her. It wasn't an empty house but one warm with the life of another person.

Mentally she shook herself, forcing herself to stop fantasizing. The man inside was just a boy, and he was her
business
partner and nothing more. Quietly, so as not to alert him, she closed the car door and entered the house. It was redolent of cooking, alive with warmth and light. Never had the pretty house felt more welcoming.

He was standing in the kitchen, facing the sink, his back to her. His sleeves were rolled up, his strong brown forearms damp with soapy water as he washed a sink full of dirty dishes. For a moment she stood silently in the doorway watching him. She knew that he was a banker, a student of numbers, a man who had spent most of his life with his nose pointed toward a book, but he had the body of an athlete. Having grown up in Chandler, she knew that the Montgomerys loved any form of exercise; they rowed and swam, rode horses, climbed up rock faces to the tops of mountains, walked when they could have ridden.

William's body was evidence of all that exercise. Under his thin cotton shirt, his brown back was one hillock of muscle after another, hills and valleys of a landscape of great beauty. Strong thighs strained against his trousers, tight buttocks curved against the fabric. Jackie had to put her hands to her sides, her fingers curled into a taut ball, to try to still the ache she felt at wanting to touch him. She wanted to slip her arms about his waist, press her face against his back, then feel him turn to kiss her upturned face.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked softly, his back still turned toward her. His words made her jump. How long had he known she was there? Had he been watching her face in the reflection of the dark kitchen window in front of him?

“No,” she managed to whisper as she turned to leave the room. She should, of course, have accepted his offer of coffee, then sat down with him and had a bit of conversation. She had sat with hundreds of men in the evenings, talking of planes or of people they both knew, of politics, of anything that came to her mind. Rarely had she been attracted to any of them. And certainly she'd never felt like this before. What caused attraction anyway? she wondered. What made you able to sit and talk comfortably with one man and not with another? Often she'd seen women fall hard for some guy or another, men who didn't seem in any way special to her. Now she was the one who was falling, the one whose palms got sweaty whenever a certain man was near. She was the one who was unable to talk or even to think coherently when he was close to her.

But whatever she felt for him, she reminded herself,
this
man was taboo.

Her head came up, and she gave her best adult smile to William. “Isn't it past your bedtime?”

She meant to insult him, to put him in his place, which was in the nursery, but he didn't look insulted. Instead, he gave her a slow smile that made her feel quite warm. “I wouldn't mind going to bed. How about you?”

To her consternation, Jackie felt herself blushing like an eighteen-year-old virgin. Worse than her confusion was the fact that she could think of no lighthearted put-down that would let him know that he was a boy while she was a mature, sophisticated woman.

Looking at her confusion, he gave a little laugh, then said, “Come outside. I want to show you something.”

Companionably he slipped her hand through his strong bent arm and led her outside. “I missed you tonight,” he said softly, holding on to her hand when she tried to pull away. “All right,” he said cheerfully. “I'll behave. I have been thinking about expansion.”

That got her attention. “Expansion? How can we expand something that hasn't even been born yet? When you're as young as you are, you think that everything is possible, but when you get older, you learn that there are limits to what a person can do.” There, she thought, that should do it. That should put him in his place. Her body might lust after him, but her mind was a great deal wiser than his.

William didn't even seem to notice the little bit of wisdom she was offering him. “When you're as rich as I am, a great many things are possible.”

So much for wisdom, she thought. When it came to a toss-up between wisdom and money, unfortunately money usually won. She told herself that she should be offended by his blatant reference to his wealth, but on the other hand, she rather liked it. She'd always had contempt for people who pretended that they had a difficult life in spite of the fact that they had servants lounging about, waiting for the opportunity to serve.

However, like what he said or not, she wasn't going to miss an opportunity to remind him of the age difference. “I think that as you grow older, you'll find that there are some things in this world that carry more weight than money.”

“And what are they?”

“Intelligence. Wisdom. Happiness. Ah…ah…” She thought for a moment, then looked up into his smiling eyes, the moonlight on his hair. He was firmly holding on to her hand. With a sigh of defeat, she said, “What's your idea?” She was a woman who liked to
do,
and this talk of philosophical ideals was wearing on her.

William laughed—that patronizing little laugh that was beginning to annoy her—kissed her on the forehead as though she were a child, and pointed to the empty fields that lay to the south of Eternity. “We could build another airstrip there, a place where a couple of big planes could take off. A Bellanca maybe. Is that the right name?”

“Yes,” she said softly, “that's the right name.”

“We could start a carrier service from Denver to Los Angeles.”

“This is Chandler, not Denver.”

“We open an airstrip outside Denver, but we run the business from here, carrying goods from my family to Denver, delivering there, picking up people and cargo in Denver, then flying to Los Angeles.”

He didn't seem to notice how quiet Jackie had become. “Who's going to fly these planes?”

“You can train people. I have a few cousins who'd love to learn how to fly. And if you become the first woman to win the Taggie, you'll attract many women who want to learn to fly. Maybe you could have all women pilots. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

She was sure he was trying to be nice to her, saying he'd fund a company of all women pilots, and in other circumstances she'd have been grateful, but now all she heard was the word “Taggie.” Instantly she pulled away from him. “Win the Taggie? Are you out of your mind? I have no intention of entering that race, much less trying to win it.”

“Why?” he asked simply. “You're the best pilot in the world, better than any man, certainly better than any other woman. You can fly rings around anyone. Last year the man who won the Taggie didn't have half your experience or skill. He was nothing compared to you.”

Heaven, but it felt nice to be confronted with such blatant hero worship. Especially since she knew that what he'd said was true. She'd once flown with the winner of last year's Taggie, and at the time she'd thought he shouldn't have a license to fly a child's string toy, much less his own plane. He'd won on luck, not skill.

“I'm not going to enter that race or any other,” she said, turning on her heel and starting to walk away.

He caught her arm. “But why, Jackie? You're the best pilot in America, maybe in the world, but you never enter any of the big races. You used to set records for endurance and speed, but a few years ago you stopped entering races. It was as though everyone else kept moving forward but you stopped. I used to think you'd lost your nerve, but that's not true; I've
seen
that you haven't lost your nerve. So why won't you enter the race and win it?”

“Because I'm too old,” she said quickly, wanting to say anything to make him stop talking about this. “My reflexes aren't as fast as those of these youngsters flying today. I've been in this business a long, long time and—”

William said a very vulgar word that perfectly and quite correctly described what she was trying to make him believe. “You are lying to me. Why?”

She hated it when people didn't believe what they were told. Why couldn't people just accept what others told them? Why couldn't William accept that she was too old to fly in that blasted race and leave it at that? “I don't like races,” she said. “They are a useless waste of gasoline in a time of need in our country. While other people are hungry, pilots are engaging in senseless waste. When you're older, you'll realize that money can be better spent in more intelligent ways than on races and other folderol.”

At that little speech, William snorted in derision. “What's wrong with the American economy right now is the absence of money in circulation. People are hoarding what funds they have, too terrified to spend. What this country needs is more spending, not less. And races like the Taggie give depressed people pleasure.”

He stopped talking and looked at her hard, as though he wanted to see inside her soul. When she turned her head away so he couldn't see into her eyes, he put his fingertips under her chin and raised her face to meet his eyes. “There's more to this than you're saying. Why won't you tell me the truth?”

Angrily she jerked away from him, moving into the darkness of the night, into the black shade of the old dress shop so he couldn't see into her eyes. Stupid, she thought, it was really stupid of her to feel so bad because she was disappointing him. Many, many people had thought she should enter races and competitions, and she'd laughed their suggestions off. But she had an irrational desire to please William.

In spite of what she meant to say, the words that came out of her mouth startled her. “Why? What does it matter whether I win some race or not?” There was an almost plaintive tone to her voice, she thought in disgust. Why don't you like me as I
am?
she seemed to be saying.

“I want you to be remembered,” he answered simply, and it didn't take a genius to know what he meant. The history books always remembered the people who did the most, the best, who flew the highest, the fastest, the longest, whatever. If Jackie stopped setting records, winning races, the things that she had done would die with her. Never in her life would she say so aloud, but she had thought of this many times. Sometimes she felt anger and quite a bit of envy to read that some whippersnapper of a pilot who didn't have as much knowledge in his head as Jackie had in her little finger, had won a place in the history books by setting some aviation record.

“You've thought of it,” he said, as much to himself as to her. When she turned away from him again, he took a deep breath. “All right, I'll stop. For tonight, anyway, but not forever. You're going to tell me the truth if I have to…”

“To what?” she asked, meaning to challenge him in a tough sort of way, but her voice came out instead in a tone of teasing.

“I'll have to challenge you to a duel.” Even in the dark she could see that his eyes were sparkling.

“Do I get to choose the weapons?”

“Sure,” he answered in the same tone. “Anything you want. Swords, pistols.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “A wrestling match.”

“Airplanes,” she said. “We will duel with planes.” She started laughing when William groaned as though in great agony.

As they laughed, their eyes locked. What was more dangerous than shared laughter? Laughter was more powerful than all the kisses in the world. You could keep from falling in love with a man whose only attraction was a feeling of sexual interest, but how could you not fall in love with a man who made you laugh? Laughing with a man made you dream of a life with a man who could see the bright side of life, a man who would smile when the going got worse.

“Don't,” she said softly and turned away from him, starting back to the house.

He didn't move from where he was but instead watched her walk away from him.