The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

  A smile of pure amusement creased Adam’s face as he caught sight of her. It was banished in the next instant by a stern, sharp frown as he took in the empty expanse of the table in front of her. Everyone else had their script with them and open at the beginning scene.

  Her massive dark eyes watched him with the bland speculation of a scientist inspecting an insect as he strode over to her and slapped his copy of the screenplay in front of her. Her blank gaze fell to it, and rose to his Icy tight-lipped stare. Menace went before the winter king like a black-cloaked herald. It touched her with chill psychic fingers, and warned. She did not move from her indolent pose.

  He turned, smiled upon the others with seductive charm, and performed introductions between the actors and a wonderfully executed, concise dissertation on his intended goals.

  Where before her father had sought to impress and succeeded, Adam’s charismatic presence reigned in effortless supremacy. Neither Christopher nor the other male actor appeared to mind the advent of such an ascendant personality in the least. They were clearly expanding in warm enjoyment under the other man’s sorcerous spell.

  The two actresses drooled. Yvonne watched them in clinical fascination. She wanted to rake her nails across their gorgeous faces, yank their moussed and hennaed hair out by the roots. Her graceful sleek eyebrows quirked in surprise at her own savage whimsy.

  ‘Yvonne,’ said Adam with terrible, threatening gentleness, ‘pay attention.’

  She jerked in startlement and said, ‘Three bags full, sir.’

  Everyone else in the room laughed. Even the actresses did, in warm surprise. Well, she had said it with such winsome, lethal charm, hadn’t she?

  Adam looked neither charmed nor reproving. ‘We’re about to start the reading,’ he said. His patience was an insult.

  She gave it back to him, a dark and satanic mirror. ‘I am aware of that.’

  His frigid, fierce eyes were pitiless. He was even more gentle. ‘You have the opening lines.’

  She was warm with gratitude. ‘An honour, in such a beautifully crafted script.’

  His elegant mouth was granite, speared with sticks of precision dynamite about to blow. ‘Don’t you think you had better open your copy?’

  Yvonne held the winter king’s hawkish gaze without moving. Her smile was creamy. She gave him her opening lines flawlessly. He sat frozen. The others were quick to contribute theirs, and the reading lasted for well over an hour and a half. The screenplay he had placed before her remained untouched the entire time.

  Finally Adam stopped the reading and told everyone in the room, and his ironic glance did not flick towards her once, ‘Thank you for a remarkable first performance.’

  He conducted a question-and-answer session, addressed them individually, and concluded the meeting. What a pinnacle of self-control he was, and how she looked forward to bringing him down from it.

  Under the general relaxation and dispersement, he prowled over to retrieve his script and paused to consider her. ‘Your memory is photographic?’

  His sardonic comment was exactly what he had asked for, and no more than she deserved, and yet it stung. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘my memory is compulsive and perfectionist.’

  He checked whatever it was he had been about to say, and looked at her sharply. ‘I thought you did it to goad me.’

  ‘I certainly goaded you with it,’ she agreed.

  ‘Why do you do it to yourself?’ he asked a quiet voice, his eyes hard.

  Her lips wanted to tremble, but she held them tight. She had baited him, and he had used intimidation tactics on her, and they had circled and sparred with each other for over two hours, but only now, at the end, was he finally, truly angry. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why.

  ‘I’m hungry and thirsty and l have a Press conference to face as soon as I walk out that door,’ she said, carefully retreating from the inexplicable. ‘Leave me alone, Adam.’

  He glared at her, his face darkened with thunder-clouds, then he pivoted to stalk out of the room. Yvonne sighed and dug the heels of her hands into her tired eyes.

  There was a tentative touch on her shoulder. She obliged it by looking over her hands enquiringly. The younger actress, Sally, smiled at her. ‘I just wanted to let you know what a pleasure it is to meet you,’ said the other woman. ‘Your work has so impressed me.’

  Good God, the other woman actually meant it. She was looking sincerity in the face. Yvonne’s soul knew a dark and self-directed violence. She searched for kindness, discovered tattered remnants, and gifted Sally with a sweetness in her returning smile that the other actress treasured. Give it away, give it all away. She didn’t know what else to do with it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said warmly. ‘I look forward to working with you. By the end of this, we should all be good friends,‘ don’t you think?’

  You and I will never be friends, Yvonne…

  She rose, stiff as an old woman from sitting so long, and went out to converse with the PR secretary waiting in the nearby office, who led her to the dozen or so waiting journalists. It was a very small, controlled conference. How cleverly titillating. She recognised Adam behind the idea.

  There was a table and chair, and hot lights. Yvonne took the chair, a ragged-clothed queen on a throne. She greeted the journalists she remembered by name, and they fell in love with her again, and cameras flashed and a babble of questions roared at her.

  She held up a narrow hand, and grinned her pleasure at them as they gave her silence. ‘We shall play a game,’ she said, her dark eyes dancing. ‘You get to ask me anything you like, but I only answer yes or no. Let’s see how inventive you can be with that.’

  The ones who knew her gave a theatrical groan. They knew her games. She would tease and tantalise them, flirt unblushingly, be generous with praise and certain information, and sit blank as a stone at viciousness or impertinence gone too far. All in all, it was good Press. They were all professional’s doing their jobs.

  The questions started. She was silent with the ones she couldn’t answer with a yes or no; and so she kept secret her private life in Montana, and they could not claim offence. They actually acquired quite a lot of information, and began to vie with each other as to the cleverness of their questions.

  She waited. Sure enough, what she waited for came.

  ‘Ms Trent, is it true that you walked up to a total stranger and slapped him at your parents’ party?’ shouted one intrepid genius.

  Thank you, she told him silently, as she beamed and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it all a misunderstanding, just as your agent said?’

  ‘No.’

  They were gobbling it up. ‘Is it true that your victim was Adam “the lceman” Ruarke, who’s now executive producer and director of your new film?’

  My new film? She smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he do when you slapped him?’ a remarkably stupid one asked, but they had to try. She laughed merrily. They were practically foaming at the mouth.

  A graceful black movement from behind the pack of journalists caught her eye. Yvonne’s eyes narrowed against the glare of the hot lights. The winter king settled against the back wall, a silent snowfall at midnight.

  ‘Are you getting along together now?’ another shouted. How incredibly blind they all were. All their attention was on her spitfire and shadows.

  Adam’s sexy mouth smiled at her.

  She dug into her ragged chinos, produced at quarter, flipped the coin and caught it in one deft fist. They were guffawing by the time she’d slapped it on to the table and peered under her hand dubiously. Then her eyebrows shot to her hairline. She said in amazement, ‘Yes?’

  The answer brought the house down.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ADAM was not at all angered by her little performance. In fact, he laughed as hard as the rest of them.

  Disgruntlement glittered briefly in her eyes and was at once banished to the nethermost corners of her mind. Thankfully the slip
of her facade had come during a time when the cameras had been quiet; she knew better than anyone how dangerous it was to be unguarded in front of people who watched, shark-like, for any slip at all.

  The conference was concluded in short, climactic order as Adam pushed away from the wall and slowly traversed the edge of the room. One by one the journalists fell silent as they became aware of his cat-like presence. Yvonne watched him with immense respect. His lean male face was serene and unclouded, that black-clad, muscular body fluid with masterful choreography, his elegant mouth inscrutable.

  He ignored the shouted questions and strolled up to Yvonne. The air was blinding with white explosions. Her head fell back to look at him. His smiling, icy grey eyes were deadly with purpose. A warning detonated, too late, inside her head.

  Adam laid an inexorable hand on her arm and said gently, ‘Time to go, darling.’

  Her sculpted lips parted. He gave her no time to say it, but braced his powerful legs and heaved. She was launched into the air and landed with appalling, breathtaking force on the rock-hard pillar of his shoulder. She whoofed as her stomach made contact, her long, magnificent mane of hair floating riotously about her head. He wrapped an arm around her long legs, fireman-style, while her astonished gaze blinked at the debilitating sight of his lean, flat buttocks and long flanks.“ The tip of her hair brushed the backs of his knees.

  The place was in an uproar. She heard the cacophony dimly through the roar in her own ears. By the time she had recovered enough to shriek, ‘What’s this?’ Adam had exited the room and was walking down the hall in long, easy strides.

  ‘Good Press?’ he murmured. The growl of his voice rumbled through her stomach and thighs and utterly destroyed any sense of composure she might have hoped to achieve.

  Her head bobbed with every step he took. She swiped her hair to one side with a wobbling hand, and craned her neck to look at the debacle Adam had left behind them.

  She was in time to catch the sight of two photographers attempting to lunge through the doorway at the same time. They stuck, and glared at each other, struggling, until one shot through with such force, he lost his balance and went down like a ton of bricks. Then the other staggered, attempted to climb over the first one, and fell on top of him. Adam had paused at the end of the hall to punch the lift button. By the time the doors opened, the two photographers down the hall had come to blows, and Yvonne was laughing like a hyena.

  The lift doors closed. Adam asked. ‘Did they catch it?’.

  ‘No,’ she said, strangled on her own mirth.

  ‘A pity,’ he grunted, then, ‘Stop struggling, damn it.’

  She struggled all the harder. ‘Put me down!’

  ‘No.’ She pinched his thigh, hard. The lift doors opened as he slapped her on the derrière. Hard. She yelped like a whipped puppy.

  He strode with her through the ground floor of the studio offices. She felt as though the pressure in her face would make her explode, and shouted at him, ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To dinner.’ Adam nodded calmly at the two suited executives and uniformed guard in the lobby who had turned to gape at them, and he paused to hitch the wriggling woman higher on to his shoulder.

  ‘How dare you‘? My father’s waiting to take me home!’ she yelled, in the hope that their witnesses would decide to take action against the crime being committed. The two executives hurried out of the lobby in opposite directions while the startled guard backed into a potted plant.

  ‘My God, you’re a noisy woman. I sent him home,’ replied the Iceman, who tightened his iron grip on her kicking legs. ‘Yvonne,’ he said then, reasonably, ‘if you don’t stop this, I shall very likely drop you on your head.’

  ‘You can’t afford to!’ she snapped, then crossed her arms and propped herself against the small of his sinuous, rippling back. ‘The lawsuit would cripple you.’

  He laughed and strode out of the doors into the glaring heat of Southern California’s autumnal sun. She said, ‘Adam?’

  There was the slightest wary hesitation in his voice. ‘Yes?’

  ‘My head’s pounding and my face hurts.’

  He stopped on the pavement. ‘If I put you down will you promise to come to dinner with me and behave like a good girl?’

  Behave like a good girl? A—good …girl? She gritted her teeth. By the time they finished the damned film, she would very likely need dentures. But he was waiting for her reply, so she said humbly, ‘Yes, Adam.’

  For every clever man there had to be the occasional moment of foolishness. He set her on her feet gently, and the relief to her escalated blood-pressure was inexpressible as she came upright, her wild hair a concealing chestnut cloud about her head and shoulders.

  Like a starving man invited to the king’s banquet he sank his hands into the glorious untamed mass and brushed it back from her burning red face. He got just one glance of her whitened lips and dark eyes snapping with furious hilarity.

  Then she was bounding away from him, a loosed and graceful falcon intoxicated with flight. Her long legs flashed in the sun in distance-preying strides, her exquisite throat exposed as she turned her face to the sky and laughed. The man she left behind could no more refuse to chase her than he could give up breathing, and he followed her along an erratic, heedless path finally to pin her between two parked limousines.

  It was her hair, again, her pride and downfall. He gained on her enough to sink a great fist into it, and she was hauled to a precipitate stop with a ungentle yank that made her squawk like a stuck bird.

  He pulled her back against his chest. She was heated and trembling with a bizarre exhilaration, and the man who had carried her not inconsiderable weight with such effortless strength throughout an entire large building was breathing heavily, his heartbeat slamming into her shoulder-blades with machine-gun speed.

  He put a long arm around her shoulders. She rested her chin on it and stared broodingly at the rear tyre of one limousine. When he buried his face into the side of her palpitating neck, she wanted to melt all over the pavement. ‘Yvonne?’ whispered Adam, moving his lips on her salted skin.

  ‘What?’ she sighed, her heavy eyelids drooping.

  ‘I’m hungry and thirsty too. Will you please have dinner with me?’ The quivering tension in her slender body eased, and she leaned against the greater length of him, the falcon come to perch at last.

  ‘All right,’ she murmured, hardly aware of what she agreed to.

  He shook against her. She thought it was laughter. ‘All it took was a please?’ he said, muffled against her flesh. ‘Then why didn’t that work last week when you nearly burnt your script?’

  She was not aware that she leaned shudderingly into the caress of his mouth. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.’

  He turned her around, anchored his arm on her shoulders and matched his longer stride to hers as they walked back through the car park. She glanced at him sidelong and found to her bewilderment that his handsome face was as untroubled and serene as ever. He caught her glance and asked her, ‘Have you always been so contrary?’

  Her frown was fierce. ‘As long as I can remember,’ she said with resignation.

  ‘I can remember the time I saw your first photograph,’ he said, his grey eyes sparkling. ‘You were an enchanting sight, elfin and tiny and snuggled against your mother’s breast, your dark eyes peering at the camera in such wide, unaffected surprise.’

  Her untidy head turned on him fully in an exact replica of that old amazement. She said incredulously, ‘You were a subscriber to Vogue magazine at—what, age thirteen, fourteen?’

  His beautiful mouth twitched. They had halted at a steel-grey BMW convertible, and he fished his keys out of a pocket to unlock the doors. ‘I was fourteen, and not exactly a subscriber,’ said Adam‘ in self-directed mockery. ‘But I did buy that one copy. I was—in the throes of my first love, you see. And if you tell Vivian that, I shall strangle you.’

  Yvonne found h
erself grinning in huge enjoyment as she slid bonelessly into her seat. Heavens, how did she come to be so relaxed with the enemy? He was a sly one, to be sure, but what would it hurt to call a truce for the space of one quick meal? What harm could one insignificant dinner possibly have?

  He slid into the driver’s seat, started the car and pulled out of his reserved space. She combed her narrow fingers through her tangled hair, struggling to bring it to some semblance of order, and as she worried at one particularly stubborn knot she told him, ‘You should know better than to give me more ammunition.’

  The winter king remarked unperturbably, ‘Young lady, you don’t need ammunition. our bare hands are sufficient weapons on their own.’

  The car slid to a stop at the security gate, he waved at the guard who nodded and raised the gate, and the BMW shot through. She glared at her lean, relaxed companion and grumbled something under her breath about sharpened ice-picks. Adam sent her a brief glance, and his expression undertook a swift transformation, and he laughed aloud.

  She scowled even harder, and snapped, ‘What?’

  ‘Look at you,’ he said deeply, his grey eyes brilliant. ‘Sitting there, scowling your bad temper, muttering evil spells and weaving them with sunshine through your hair. You’re a witch-woman, and a menace to civilised society.’

  ‘I like that!’ she breathed, highly offended. ‘An agreement to one simple dinner, and he takes it as an invitation to throw insults—stop the car, damn it. I’ve changed my mind.’ ‘Tough luck.’ He slammed the accelerator to the floor and the BMW roared powerfully as it hit the open highway. ‘You’ve already agreed, and I’m going to hold you to it. You no longer have a choice in the matter.’

  ‘I hardly had a choice to begin with,’ she snapped, her dark eyes throwing hot sparks. She was intent on working herself into a fine fury, and succeeding wonderfully.

  ‘No, I know,’ he replied coolly as he frowned at the expanse of the road in front of him. Suddenly, though their physical proximity could be measured in bare inches, he felt very far away. She was disconcerted and troubled, and hid her perplexing reactions under her speculative stare. ‘You’re forever rebelling against any authority or show of decisive strength. It’s an instinctive, knee-jerk reaction for you, isn’t it? Is that also part of the reason you finally broke away from the career your parents had guided you into?’