The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

Her dusky gaze shot sparks at him, and she snarled maliciously, the first ridiculous thing that came to mind, ‘Your lack of freckles is an affront to nature.’

  The winter king’s eyes grew very wide. Unseen and unnoticed by Yvonne, her famous and dignified mother had creased up. Serene and unscathed, Adam said to her, ‘You and I need to talk.’

  ‘Privacy,’ commented Christopher wisely, and her loving, traitorous family scattered like so many autumn blown leaves.

  Yvonne cursed them absent-mindedly, as she lounged back in her chair in an attitude of indolence; then her hooded gaze fell on to the half-eaten meal that lay in front of her, and she shoved it away in an abrupt movement that clattered the rare, delicate china into musical discord.

  ‘So, talk,’ she growled surlily, watching out of the corner of her eye as he traversed the spacious room with meticulous ease.

  ‘What nice weather we’re having, but do you think it will ever rain?’ He spoke the inanity with sardonic pointedness, as he rounded the long table and laid a package down on it.

  Her fingers sought purchase, found it on something and gripped, white-knuckled. Adam laid a gentle hand over her wrist, the warm contact shaking through her senses, and he said, ‘For God’s sake, not the Sèvres. I’m not worth it.’

  She looked down at their hands. Her own, while femininely shaped, were strong enough to hold a spirited horse in check. Adam’s hands appeared slender until laid over hers, for the comparison clearly showed the male strength in the corded sinews and the expanse of the palm. The immaculately pared fingernails were half the width of hers again, and the tracery of veins along the back of his hand was a web of fine subtlety.

  ‘No,’ she agreed hoarsely, as she loosened her death-clench on her dinner plate and pulled away from him, ‘you’re not. What do you want?’

  Even as she thrust out of her chair to prowl the open expanse of the room restlessly, she glanced back at him sidelong, and nearly checked herself. He appeared to be recovering from some impulse that had been almost overpowering; she wondered if he had longed to do her violence. Certainly she had never wished to do or dreamed of doing to another person the excessive things he drove her to. What a queer and lucid bond they had forged together!

  As if in conscious contrast to her, he had gathered his body into that frigid, motionless repose he executed so incomparably, leaning against the dining-table as his vivid gaze retreated inwards in introspection. He shut himself off from her, so completely that no human or supernatural means could recall him back to this world from that private realm unless he wished it. The winter king’s reign was a vast one; it was over himself.

  ‘I brought you a script,’ Adam replied. An idle hand flicked towards the package beside him, then returned to its frozen home against a hard thigh. ‘First reading is Monday afternoon. Your father has the details.’

  Her fast breathing was shallow and uneven. She found him insupportable. She darted forward, talons outstretched, swift as a falcon screaming out of the blue, snatched the package s and threw it into the marble fireplace.

  Adam exploded out of his stillness in one great uncontainable leap before he could stop himself. The leap was towards the hearth, which was empty and cold, where the package lay undamaged. He stopped dead and rounded on her, and she covered her luscious mouth with both hands in a parody of terror while her eyes danced in wicked joy.

  ‘Poor baby,’ he murmured then, in furious, tender solicitation, as he took a threatening step towards her. ‘For once in your life you’re not going to get your own way. What can I possibly be thinking?’

  She ground her teeth, then lowered her hands and spat at him, ‘Is suspect that thinking is not your strongest point.’

  ‘Certainly not around you.’ His agreement was grim as his chest rose and fell visibly. He rested his hands on his lean hips, a picture of disgust, His wine hair had escaped from its original sleek containment and fell intoxicatingly over his lowering brow. ‘Your destructiveness is infallible; you can level a man’s logical rationality to the ground without even thinking about it,‘ and then grind your heel into him.

  ‘Change your mind,’ she urged him softly.

  He shook his head and smiled, the swordsman blade-sharp. ‘Never.’

  She made a strangled sound; no doubt it would have been pithy and multisyllabic had it managed to find its way out of her throat. His grey eyes were luminous with laughter. She sprang for the fireplace, one claw-swipe capturing a box of matches, and she’d struck one alight when thunder fell upon her.

  This time his hands on both her wrists were not gentle at all. The thunder bellowed out from him on the lightest, silent puff, and the flare of the match between her thumb and forefinger disappeared in a tiny sulphurous curl.

  Her other hand still clutched the box. He turned her fully towards him and shook it, his handsome face taut and dark with rage. ‘Drop it,’ he growled from between beautiful hard teeth. She said nothing, did nothing, and he shook her harder. ‘Damn you, drop it!’

  She was a frozen statue. His hold tightened, powerfully, inescapably; he didn’t appear even to realise what he was doing, as the slow-building pain arced her slender body and stole away her strength.

  Her immense, dark, unblinking eyes were fixed on him in shock and wonder. She had never seen anything so feral, so beautiful before. She was sinking to the floor and he bowed over her, his own compulsive ravening gaze taking her apart and putting her together again, willy-nilly, and she didn’t recognise herself in the new puzzle he had made of her.

  Whatever he saw in her face altered his own expression. He eased to the floor, hands gentled and sliding up her forearms in a searing caress, and he said with wise and ruthless seductiveness, ‘Won’t you drop it, Yvonne? Won’t you drop it, please?’

  What-what was he doing? The tiger in her was bewildered, as he let go of her arms entirely and cupped the delicate line of her jaw with probing, splayed fingers. Her confused eyes blinked, and he brought his elegant mouth down on to hers.

  If last night he had been warm, now he was heated. Her breath came in on an intake of amazement, and her perfect lips parted, and he entered her mouth with unhurried, ineffable consummation, and she was ravished to the core.

  She knew what a man’s mouth was. She knew what it was, to be inside a man’s mouth. She thought she knew the feelings that it provoked in her, the dance of tongues, the casual repartee of pleasurable movement.

  She knew nothing. She was a new-born to the experience; his slow, unrelenting probe into her dark, moist crevice was a stunning execution of her former precepts; he snatched her whirling into blatant, terrifying, soul-shattering intensity. The insubstantial shades of those other times and kisses fell sacrificially under the executioner’s axe, and the moan she gave up to him was an offering of sweet frankincense and bitter myrrh.

  She held on to his shoulders. Well, there was nothing else to hold on to. He did not seem to be breathing, but instead was a taut victim to some terrible, devouring suspense.

  She was driven, always driven; this time it was starvation that impelled her to enter him as he did her, enter that private, male, beautiful domain of sensuality, and he shook with feverish reaction as she fitted her hand to the back of his neck and plunged as hard and as deeply into him as she possibly could.

  His response was molten. He made some sound, a deep, male, evocative growl of discovery in his chest, and realisation of what she was doing exploded in her head.

  My God, she thought, hazed with astonishment, I am a madwoman! Making love to the enemy. Yes, that was what it was: an oral representation of the deepest sexual act.

  Instantly she changed into at raging virago. She struggled, fused to his mouth and his body by the bond of his ruthless arms, and when he would not let her go she bit him. On the lip, hard.

  He reared away with a gasp, and his face was a stranger’s: tight and excited, with the grey eyes glittering hotly, and a slight crimson smear on his lower lip. His expression was so electrifying,
the sight of him rousing a powerful, atavistic reaction in the deepest corners of her soul. Then he razed over her ferocious, terrified face and bee-stung swollen mouth with blazing silvershot eyes and dived with savage, erotic accuracy to bite her back.

  He was the one to laugh, a murmurous, satisfied, intimate laugh as she fell back from him in boneless shock. This time he let her go. Her arms crossed over her chest in a classic position of defence and she sat back on her heels.

  She would have shrieked at him in wordless fury had he given her the opportunity, Instead Adam’s lit, translucent eyes fell to her hands and he scowled, and she realised why he had even kissed her to begin with: the devious motives of the man, the reason behind his softened approach and extraordinary sensual assault. She could not be any angrier; it just simply wasn’t possible. Bur she could wonder, in a tiny corner of her mind, why she felt such a deadening sense of disappointment.

  Ever one to snatch victory in the face of defeat, she raised the box of matches she had never relinquished, and rattled it under his patrician nose. It was crushed out of its shape; she had never even consciously retained her hold and could just as easily have let the box slide from her stunned fingers, but she would die before she admitted it to him.

  Adam smiled then, sunnily, and said, as if the knowledge of it was a delight, ‘You never give up, do you? You just don’t know how.’

  One corner of her ravished mouths lifted in a sneer. ‘I certainly know of no good reason why.’

  ‘Grace?’ he suggested drily, sliding one hand under her elbow. ‘Dignity? Good sportsmanship?’

  ‘I’ve tried them,’ replied Yvonne as drily as she allowed him to assist her to her feet. ‘They seem to apply to other scenes and other people. Not to you. I’ve never been blackmailed or coerced in my life, and I find it a galling and infuriating spur.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ purred the Iceman, and she threw him an impatient glance. She had no time for cryptic remarks, and he, apparently, did not see fit to explain himself to her. But then she doubted if he ever bothered to explain himself to anyone. That one characteristic, at least, they appeared to have in common. ‘I find myself relieved that you don’t behave this way with just any man you happen to meet.’

  ‘Who’s to say,’ she replied with a silken, sour smile, ‘that I don’t?’

  He studied her in amusement and just shook his auburn head, then bent to retrieve the package from the fireplace before she could further endanger it. She shrugged, and tossed the mangled box of matches on to the mantel, and he placed the script into her hands and told her, ‘Burn it, and you’ll just have to acquire another copy. Don’t waste your energy on useless statements.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ she agreed, slanting him a narrowed sidelong glance, ‘it’s time for a change of tactics anyway.’

  ‘Unforgiving, stubborn, contrary, rude, exasperating, inventive. Relentless as well; I do believe I’m looking forward to the next trick,’ he said lightly, flicking her stiff cheek with a careless finger. ‘My, how you do worry at that leash.’

  ‘Confinement,’ she enunciated, her nostrils pinched, ‘has never been a particular favourite of mine.’

  ‘But no one confines you,’ said the winter king unforgivably, his beautiful eyes wide, his empty, upturned hands in a graceful display. ‘No contract has been signed. Walk away, my dear. Turn your back and walk away.’

  He held the door open, and she stood at the threshold, but she trembled and could not take the irrevocable step. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘No, because you are loyal as well.’ He said it with such remarkable gentleness that she had to avert her face. ‘I had a special reason for coming today, you know.’

  ‘Oh?’ she replied with a show of indifference.

  ‘Yes.’ He paused, a delicate regrouping. ‘During the course of my conversation with your father last night, he explained a great many things, among them being the severe exhaustion you suffered the last year before you quit acting. Is that why you’re so resistant to returning to work?’

  She had gone completely quiet as he spoke, a tense, listening stillness. After searching swiftly through the rich, complex nuances of his voice for any kind of goad or taunt and finding nothing but a simple request for understanding, she replied cautiously, ‘In part.’

  Her face was still averted. She did not see him shift in subtle silence in order to see her expression. The striking angular bones were tight with anticipated pain, the great eloquent eyes downcast.

  He was a genius at finding just the right entry-point for the verbal rapier, and could insert it so exquisitely between the tough armour plates that his victim quite often never felt pain. He said in classic simplicity, ‘Yvonne, this needn’t be an ordeal. I will challenge you. I can’t help it. But I won’t push you beyond your limits.’

  For a rarity, the clever man before her knew failure, as her proud, unique face twisted into an agony that would return to haunt him. ‘You won’t have to,’ she said with a bitterness that was unanswerable. ‘For, you see, I’m all too capable of doing that myself.’

  She found that Adam’s judgement was infallible. The screenplay was nothing short of brilliant. She knew without doubt that the movie would be the finest thing she had ever participated in, and had the potential, under the auspices of a deft and wise directorship, to become regarded as a classic for years to come. She wondered, with final calm, if she was facing her own destruction.

  The next few days and events moved to an inexorable whirlwind machine. Contracts were signed, returned, timetables set, information was given on the preparations made for the cast and crew to be maintained on location in Arizona, both Yvonne’s and Christopher’s measurements were taken by the costume designer, publicity options were discussed.

  She did lunch, Hollywood-style, with old acquaintances who professed delight and avid curiosity at her reappearance, and exchanged witticisms over salad and Perrier while divulging nothing about herself, and she lay alone in the dark, sleepless hours before dawn in endless, compulsive speculation.

  Adam telephoned her on Sunday afternoon. She’d known other directors to be at a screaming point at the unbelievable pressure of staying on schedule and within a budget and still-achieving a quality product. Adam’s reputation had some basis, for he sounded as serene as the eye of a hurricane. Iceman, ship’s captain, god.

  Betty answered the phone, and when she took it in her bedroom he said without preamble, ‘Yvonne, the Press are going wild.’

  ‘Indeed?’ she murmured, lying back on her bed, ankles crossed. She was exhausted.

  ‘They’re screaming to get you into a conference. Movie star disappears off the face of the earth for two years and makes a triumphant return, that sort of thing. I’ve never seen anything quite like it,’ he said.

  Her smile was involuntary. He did sound surprised, in a sleepy kind of way. ‘They like me,’ Yvonne said. ‘I’ve always maintained a good relationship with the Press.’

  ‘They’re a pack of wolves that’ll fawn all over you or tear you apart at a moment’s notice,’ he said in wry, pithy reply. ‘I can see how you would understand each other.’

  She laughed out loud, wondering if he had seen any of the gossip columns recently. A prominent columnist had been present at her parents’ party, and she and the Iceman had figured over-largely—even luridly—in the recounting of it. ‘Your mistake. I never fawn.’

  ‘Well, if we don’t throw them some titbits, this time they might go for blood. Are you possibly up for a conference? We could make it a short one.’

  So he was acting as publicity agent as well? Just how much control did he have over this film?

  Her smile widened. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He sounded cautious. ‘I know it’s a damned nuisance, but PR’s shouting the sooner the better. If it’s convenient, perhaps after the reading tomorrow…’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Yvonne gently, which was always when she was at her most dangerous. ‘I can handle it.’<
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  The next day she and Christopher travelled together to the studio for the first reading, and they met the rest of the cast, which was unusually small. The focus of the script was unrelentingly simplistic and drew upon the complexities of just a few relationships. .

  Each of the other three present had achieved at note-worthy reputation. Yvonne was impressed but did not show it; she entered in a silent, sultry stalk behind her elegant father, dressed as carelessly as ever, in ragged chinos and a faded black T-shirt and scuffed Adidas tennis shoes, gleaming chestnut hair in a riotous tangle, her clear and perfect complexion not even powdered.

  One other man, dark-haired and ruggedly handsome, and two women. The two other women present were formidably arrayed, in sophisticated suits that screamed haute couture, striking and beautiful and immaculate from their painted nails to the three layers of mascara on their long lashes. Such relentless self-marketing. They both eyed Yvonne’s appearance in considerable startlement and some distaste; she just blinked at them and smiled sleepily, and claimed a comfortable, leather-padded chair at one end of the chrome and walnut boardroom.

  Five minutes to go. She hooked another chair around to face her and put her feet up. Her father lay waste to the room with his indubitable charm. The actresses were enchanted. So was Yvonne.

  The door to the room opened and settled. The winter king had arrived. .

  He was timeless, in black trousers and long-sleeved black turtleneck, the lovely clothes hugging that lean male body to devastating effect. The breadth of his muscled chest and shoulders, the accordion slimness of his waist and tight hips, the flare of long, defined thighs were shadowed and sinuously fluent. The high neck emphasised the sheer precision of his handsome face, and the brilliance of those beautiful eyes. The colour of his auburn hair gleamed with immeasurable depth; the gold tan of his skin and his elegant mouth paled to the colour of antique ivory.

  The room hushed. It was an outstanding accolade. Yvonne’s breath had caught in her throat at the stunning sight of him; she refused to acknowledge it.