Fire in the Wind Read online

  "I don't need that," she said, struggling to sit up. "I'm all right."

  Jake Conrad helped her to sit up. "Are you?" he asked.

  She had a splitting headache, that was all. She watched as Jake set the glass down on a table beside her and sank into a chair nearby. She looked around. They were in some kind of private lounge, and she remembered that Gary had told her this was Jake's hotel.

  "I'm fine," she repeated, putting her hand to the back of her head. "My head aches. What happened?"

  "You fainted," Jake Conrad said briefly. "When did you eat last?"

  "Oh," she said, remembering. She looked at him. "You're Jace's cousin. You told me that he's dead." She wondered why she had fainted; it had all been so long ago. She hadn't been in love with Jace for years.

  "And you fainted," Jake Conrad repeated. "I'm curious: did you faint when your husband died, Vanessa?"

  That was a brutal thing to ask, but she was too shaken to be angry. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. Her head ached abominably. She wondered if she had struck it when she fell. "My husband was terminally ill for some time before he died," she said. "I knew it was coming."

  "You knew Jace well," he said. He was watching her closely, one ankle across the other knee, the heavy crystal glass in his hand warm with the glow of amber liquid.

  "Yes," she said softly. "Pretty well." Well enough to have loved him, but now he was dead. She touched her forehead. "Did I hit my head when I fell?" She had never had a headache like this—except once, she remembered, on her wedding day.

  "You didn't fall," said Jake Conrad. "You collapsed against me and I caught you before you went down." He glanced towards the other end of the sofa she was sitting on and she looked to see the jacket of his suit lying there, a dark damp patch on the front where she must have spilled her drink.

  "Thank you," she said mechanically. The pain in her head was all Jace, then. Well, she had tried. She had tried to forget him.

  "What was it?" Jake asked suddenly, as though he couldn't help himself. "A summer romance?"

  She thought of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza, of snow falling thickly on dark nights, of the laughter of ice skaters floating in the afternoon air....

  "No," she said dully. "Not exactly."

  There was silence between them for a long moment, and then Vanessa found the courage to ask, "How did he die?"

  He paused. "Of complications following an accident," he said.

  Vanessa sat up and said breathlessly, feeling as though her heart had been clenched in a fist, "When? It wasn't—it couldn't have been the accident he had back then, could it? "

  Jake blinked. "Yes, that's right," he said briefly.

  "Complications? But he was all right; he was perfectly all right!" she protested. "What went wrong?"

  "I honestly don't remember at this distance in time," said Jake. "It was nearly ten years ago."

  And she hadn't known. All these years she had imagined him alive somewhere, marrying, raising children, settling into a life that took him farther and farther away from her—and all the time he had been dead. Vital, laughing Jace had been dead practically since the night of their last goodbye, the night whose memory had never left her, for all her attempts to banish it....

  She had been doing volunteer work at the hospital a few hours a week while attending a design course at college. Jace Conrad had been brought in late one afternoon after a traffic accident, with several broken bones and a face cut to ribbons. He was a Canadian, he was in New York alone, there was no one to visit him. His eyes were swollen shut; he was bored and lonely and very irritable.

  "I don't need sympathetic visits from little do-gooders!" he had stormed at Vanessa the first time she had tentatively suggested that he might like her to visit with him or read to him. Vanessa was young and vulnerable, and she had retired into hurt silence. After that she spoke to him as little as possible, quietly and unobtrusively bringing him the coffee he asked for.

  "Dammit," he said suddenly one day, "can't a man have one show of temper without wounding you forever? You used to laugh and chatter, and now when you come in here I feel as though I'm on death row."

  "How do you know it's me?" she asked in astonishment, gazing at the bandaged face with its swollen, unseeing eyes.

  "Well, of course I know!" he exclaimed impatiently, as though that were explanation enough. She felt a little flutter in her stomach, as though he had said something very significant.

  She was as good as engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Larry, but she wasn't wearing a ring. In a very short time she was coming to the hospital every day to visit Jace, and by the time the stitches had been removed from his face they were in love.

  He was released from hospital just as she began her college Christmas break, and then they spent all day, every day together. Sight-seeing, window-shopping, walking through an early thick snowfall, warming themselves over coffee, singing carols—everything they did was magical, bathed in the glow of their love. He loved New York City, and he showed Vanessa her own city in a way she had never seen it, the tourists' New York. She copied his accent, not so very different from her own, saying "oot" and "aboot" instead of "out" and "about." He told her she sounded like a demented Scotswoman, not a Canadian, but, laughing, she insisted that she sounded just like him. One day a waitress paused to talk to them about Canada and told Vanessa how much she admired her country and wanted to visit. With a straight face Vanessa urged her to do so, telling her in her atrocious mock accent that Vancouver was the most beautiful city in the world.

  "I told you so!" she crowed when the waitress had gone. Jace shook his head, smiling.

  "After this I believe anything," he said.

  He had to return home. His face needed surgery, and his work wouldn't wait forever, even though he was in his father's business. She promised to go and visit him at her Easter break, and it was unspoken between them that he would ask her to marry him then and she would say yes.

  Jace was scheduled to leave on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. On their last night together he took her to a very special restaurant, and then they walked through cold streets white with a fresh snow that hadn't yet turned to grey slush, and then, unable to part, they had gone back to his hotel room.

  His body was battered, bandaged and sore, but he wanted her; like a soldier going to war he wanted the memory of her to take with him, like a promise.

  She wanted to give him that promise; he was her first lover, and she loved him more than anything in the world. "But you'll start bleeding again!" she protested, half-laughing.

  "I bleed every time I look at you," Jace said hoarsely, reaching for her, and her smile died on her lips when she saw the look in his eyes.

  She was nervous, being undressed by a man for the first time. Jake was clumsily one-handed, his other wrist in plaster, his arm in a sling, but the intensity of his gaze as he looked at her breasts and her body for the first time stilled her fears, made her want to weep for joy. This was why her breasts were full and rounded, she learned, so that Jace's eyes would close helplessly when he saw them; this was the reason her waist narrowed in just that way above her hips, so that his hand would tremble as it followed the curve to her thigh.

  He told her it was so. "I've never loved a woman in the world but you, Vanessa," he said, clenching his jaw as though the love he felt was almost a torment. "Do you believe that? I've never loved anyone the way I love you. And I love you enough for a thousand lifetimes. I must have been saving all my love for you; I must have known."

  His hoarse voice started a fire in her, and he saw the look in her eyes and smiled in triumphant intensity. "Help me take off my clothes," he commanded then. "I want to feel your skin touching mine."

  He was bandaged at ribs, shoulder, arm, knee, shin and ankle, and they had laughed as she undressed him, because it seemed as though she hardly undressed him at all.

  But she was shaken to the core when she saw what power she had over him, and her laughter died
in her throat. She was suddenly desperate for his touch, desperate for him to take what he needed from her body.

  Jace knew it, and he lay back against the pillows, his eyes burning into hers. "Come here, Vanessa," he whispered, and she lay beside him and rested her head on his bandaged shoulder while his one good hand stroked her with a gentle magical passion.

  "Give yourself to me," he said softly. "I need to feel your pleasure, Vanessa. I need it."

  Because of his need, of the heat of his love, because in that moment she trusted him completely, she let go, allowing him to give her the shuddering pleasure he wanted to give her. She understood that her need to have him take what he wanted from her body had enclosed the seeds of another need: to be given the pleasure she suddenly needed from his. And she learned that there was no greater joy in the world than this sweet wild commingling of giving and receiving.

  When, unable to stop herself, she cried out her surprised joy to him, Jace looked down into her eyes with a triumphant possessiveness.

  "You're mine," he said hoarsely. "There'll never be another woman in the world for me, Vanessa, and there'll never be another man for you! Tell me!" he commanded. "Say it!"

  "There'll never be another man for me," she promised wildly, and beside the blinding truth of it, everything else was shadow.

  He kissed her until she was breathless, and the next day he caught his plane for Vancouver, promising to wire her a ticket in time for her Easter break....

  Vanessa, not sure how many of her memories she had communicated to Jake Conrad, lapsed into silence, letting her thoughts wander.

  "Are you telling me," Jake's voice broke in on her, "that you were waiting for him to send for you, and you simply never heard from him again?"

  "What?" Vanessa asked, breaking out of her reverie. "Oh—no. No, I sent him a Dear John letter and married Larry a few weeks later."

  Chapter 2

  TopMarx, the manufacturing house Vanessa worked for, was third on the list at the afternoon showing of ladies' suits, but when her first model appeared Vanessa's thoughts were far from gauging how the trade in Canada would like her simple lightweight wool suit with the softly pleated skirt. Designing a women's medium-priced ready-to-wear line need not have been the constant unhappy grind that the past three years had been, but Tom Marx was committed to giving as little value for the money as he could, and that meant constant battles between them on the subject of quality. Battles that Vanessa, in a process that she felt was finally eating away her soul, invariably lost.

  The suit as she had conceived it had a jaunty English school-miss flavour, as though the school miss had grown up and become office manager. But the perkiness of line had disappeared with the few inches of fabric that Tom had insisted could be saved on the skirt. Vanessa kept the needs of middle-income, self-supporting women at the forefront of her mind when she designed. But she knew that once a design had been through Tom's "process," a woman looking at it in Eaton's or Simpsons, the big Canadian department stores, would first think, yes, and then, trying it on, well, maybe if I can't find what I really want. But thinking of it was futile, and Vanessa's mind was wandering....

  It wasn't that she had expected anything to come of a meeting with Jace even if she had found him after ten years. She had not imagined him single and waiting for her. He would have been thirty-three, after all. No, she had thought of him as being happily settled, competently running his father's business—what had it been, a trucking firm—but devoting most of his time and attention to his family. She had imagined going to visit him in a pretty townhouse, or perhaps a house in the suburbs with all the neighbourhood children shrieking happily around the pool, a house that her designer's eye would have found pleasing and tastefully done....

  She would have worn one of her own designs—not one of the ready-made, skimped-on models, of course; for her own wear, Vanessa always made her designs up individually—and his wife would have admired it and Jace would have congratulated her on making a career for herself. And then, in a quiet moment, when his wife had left them alone, she would have told him why she'd married Larry, why she'd written him that letter without explaining anything... and then Jace would have understood and forgiven her, would have told her how happy he was without her, and she could have gone on with her life without the guilt and perhaps with a little less bitterness for her ten lost years.

  Her worst nightmare had been that she would find him unhappy, cheating on his wife and yelling at his kids. She would have hated that. She wondered now if the fear of it would have kept her, in the end, from dialling the phone....

  But her fears and imaginings had been for nothing. Jace was dead. If she had looked up Jason Conrad in the Vancouver directory she would have reached the cynical Jake.

  Jake. When she had told him about the Dear John letter and marrying Larry, he stood up to refill his glass with an awkward abruptness that made her pause. The story wasn't unfamiliar to him, she was convinced of that. He had known.

  "Were you close to your cousin, Jake?" she asked tentatively.

  "Pretty close," he said shortly, his back to her, taking a drink of Scotch.

  "Did... did he get my letter?" Vanessa swallowed over the lump that was in her throat. Perhaps he had died without knowing.

  "Oh, yes, he got it," Jake said in a firm voice, turning around to face her. "He got it when he was lying in hospital awaiting surgery. He didn't wake up from the anaesthetic. I've always thought it was your letter that killed him."

  She felt as though she'd been shot in the stomach at close range. She actually made a small animal grunt, wrapping her arms across her stomach, hugging the pain to her. "No," she whispered hoarsely, begging. "No."

  "I found the letter on his bedside table when I was clearing out his things," the voice that was suddenly so like Jace's went on inexorably. "I kept it. I think I've still got it somewhere. I give it a prize for the most concentrated cruelty in the most innocent schoolgirlish handwriting I ever expect to see."

  Vanessa remembered her misery as she had written the letter, the torment of her mind. "Cruel..." she repeated. "Was it cruel?"

  "It was, if I remember, a very bald statement of the fact of your preference for another man, written almost on the eve of your wedding. By the time he got the letter you were already married."

  "Oh, God," she whispered. She was incapable of saying anything else. She hadn't meant to be abrupt or cold in the letter. She had wanted to beg, but she hadn't known how....Suddenly, remembering, she sat up with a small helpless laugh.

  Jake Conrad's eyes narrowed and the muscles of his face tightened till he looked like a carved wooden mask. The muscles pulled on one side of his face, so that the straight harsh line of his mouth was drawn up on one side, giving him an even crueller look.

  "Enjoying your victory?" he asked grimly.

  Vanessa sat up straight. "No," she said, "no, please don't think... I was just thinking about fate. I just remembered that all the time, I was half expecting Jace to turn up and stop the wedding. Even right at the last minute I was hoping he might be there and stand up—you know, when they say, 'Speak now or forever hold your peace.' And when he didn't come, I thought...." Vanessa set down the brandy glass and stood up. "And now you tell me the damn letter never even got to him till the wedding was over." She laughed once, harshly, feeling light-headed with pain.

  The most incredible animal look passed over Jake Conrad's features, and he moved to her in a couple of quick steps and grasped her shoulders. "You were hoping?" he demanded. "You were standing in church marrying another man hoping that... that my cousin would come and stop the wedding? Why were you marrying him, for God's sake, if you wanted Jace?"

  He was looking at her with fierce anger and she realized that he hadn't said what he'd said just to shock her. He must truly believe that her letter had caused his cousin's death, and he must hate her for it. But there was no point in making explanations. No amount of explanation would change the facts.

  "I loved L
arry, too," she said simply.

  His hands on her shoulders shook her a little. "But you didn't want to marry him?"

  Vanessa sighed. It was all so long ago, and none of it was important any more. Jace was dead, she was alive, and life had to go on.

  "I'm tired," she said, pulling against the harsh grip of his powerful hands. "I'm going to go to my room and get some sleep."

  He didn't let her go. His grip tightened and his eyes glinted down at her. He said, "You came looking for Jace Conrad for a reason, little widow. Were you maybe hoping for a brief nostalgic affair, just for old time's sake? Was that it?"

  Vanessa moved her shoulders uncomfortably under his hands. "No, of course not," she said.

  "Sure now?" he asked. "Because you're very beautiful—just as beautiful as Jace described you. In fact, even more beautiful now; women like you improve with age." His deep voice had taken on a seductive tone and, incredibly, started a spiral of fire deep in her stomach. She gasped in astonished protest at her own feelings.

  "If that was what you were looking for, I'd be happy to stand in for Jace," he went on. "I like beautiful women." He bent and kissed her lips, and the spiral spread its sensuous burning languor through her body. It was a response she hadn't felt for a long time, perhaps not since Jace had last kissed her. Larry's lovemaking had been sometimes gentle, sometimes passionate, and she had enjoyed his touch, but for him she had never felt a passion that threatened to engulf her, as she had felt with Jace, as she was halfway to feeling now, for Jace's cousin....

  She pushed him away and stared at him, her heart pounding in her chest and temples. "No, thank you," she said coolly.

  Jake threw back his head and looked down at her out of slitted glittering eyes. "No?" he queried. "But you're hungry, little widow," he half whispered in a seductive voice so like Jace's she could have screamed. "I tasted hunger on your lips." He ran a hand lightly down her bare arm. "Why so hungry?" he asked.