The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

  ‘What?’ she, burst out, considerably startled, and then she smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh, heavens, you do have the wrong end of the stick, don’t you? No, my parents were everything wise and loving and supportive. I admire them tremendously. Even as a six-year-old child I was a headstrong horror, and I’d enjoyed the photo sessions with my mother so much that I demanded to be allowed to do it again.’

  ‘And they obliged?’ he asked, a careless prompt. He hardly appeared to be paying attention, so remote did he seem, a lounging figure in the archetypical colours of crimson, and white and black; he looked as though he belonged in some ancient fable, and talking to him was as easy as talking to herself.

  ‘They were delighted,’ she replied. ‘School wasn’t enough to keep me challenged, and I had gone through three nannies already. So they contracted an agent, and proceeded to let me have my head. Within reason, that is. They did keep a stern check on the number of bookings I was allowed to do. I was given everything I could possibly want.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Adam asked, spearing her with lucid grey.

  Yvonne’s expression was a self-inflicted irony.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ she said drily ‘I happened. Everything that has occurred in my life, anything that has gone wrong, has come from me. It’s funny, but your parents can give you everything in the world, but they can’t teach you what to do with it. That, you have to learn for yourself.’

  He shook. his rich auburn head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Her eyebrows rose in startlement. ‘About my parents?’

  ‘About everything that went wrong in your life happening because you caused it,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’ve heard some horror stories about the last year you worked, from other professionals who’d been involved in the productions. From the sound of it you could neither assume responsibility for what happened nor control it.’

  Yvonne went into a shut-down sequence. She felt as if he had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart, and it hurt, dreadfully. Just his quiet words could evoke the memory of the trap that last year had been for her, of contractual obligations, commitments made, demands, so many demands; she’d been drowning in the sea of demands while everything around her went to hell. Her angular face was dead white, dark eyes like stone.

  ‘No?’ She said the word as a challenge. ‘Maybe not, but it was up to me to deal with it.’

  He parked the car and sat frozen. Impelled into the memory of that awful, anguished year, she stared into space and never noticed her surroundings. ‘And you feel somehow that you didn’t,’ remarked Adam, a quiet prompting as he looked at his hands clenched on the steering-wheel. ‘But I’ve seen those films, Yvonne. The quality of your work was completely consistent. Where’s the failure in that?’

  ‘Well. There’s a question,’ she replied in an absent tone, compulsively twisting her fingers around a long strand of hair she’d just unknotted, over and over and over. ‘I suppose it started in little ways. I’d forget what I was talking. about in the middle of a cast party. I’d drive down the street on automatic pilot, and when I would “wake up” I wouldn’t remember where I was supposed to go or what I was doing. I’d be in the middle of shooting a scene and feel this hot panic wash over me because I’d blank out, or I’d be afraid that the lines I remembered belonged to another movie. The last time—the worst time—was when I woke up and couldn’t remember what country I was in, or what my name was.’

  The man beside her remembered to breathe, and it was a scraping, pleasureless experience. ‘I think I can guess the rest,’ he said harshly. ‘It ended; you would have had to end it, in order to save yourself. Somehow you lost sight of Yvonne in the face of all those other personalities everyone expected from you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with ungovernable viciousness. ‘Yes, and yes, and yes. Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, I’ve had more than enough of this topic of conversation. I don’t want to talk about it again!’

  ‘Then we won’t,’ said Adam gently, and his gentleness was the final, terrible straw.

  She unbuckled her seatbelt, scrambled out of the car, and ran heedlessly down a long flight of steps, then paused in la surprise that was great enough to shake her out of her dark mood.

  She looked around her. They were at the beach? What?

  She was standing in the middle of a wooden stairway that led down to the Pacific, and the sparkling ocean and wide expanse of the bowl blue sky were panoramic. She took great breaths of the salt-fresh air, and the floating gulls overhead screamed their raucous cry, and a fierce, eager smile lightened her intense expression. Freedom, freedom; it was all around and within her, and she flew down the rest of the stairs, giddy and drunken with the immensity of it.

  She barely halted in her headlong dash to tear off her shoes, and roll her trousers to her knees. Then she didn’t stop until she stood at the edge of forever and watched it curl foaming at her narrow feet.

  She was alone for a while. She retreated at last above the tidemark and sat on the dry sand, dreamily watching the incandescent reflection of the westward sun on the water. On her face was the first real peace she had known since returning to LA, when Adam came to sit, beside her.

  She murmured accusingly without looking at him, ‘You promised me dinner.’

  ‘You changed your mind,’ he told her drily, to which she shot him a self-deprecating grin, and her eyes fell on what he held in both hands, and she laughed out loud.

  He must carry spare clothing in the back of the BMW, for he had changed his black turtleneck for a crisp white T-shirt. He handed her one of the hot dogs and a soft drink he’d purchased from a waterfront vendor up on the promenade where he’d parked.

  For a moment she couldn’t decide which she wanted more, as she looked from the food to the drink. Then she took a huge bite of the hot dog, and balanced it on one thigh as she wiped the dirty top of the aluminium can with the edge of her shirt and opened it.

  ‘You surprise me,’ she said to him with her mouth full. ‘I don’t know why, but you do. I had expected something a little more along the lines of—’

  ‘Haute cuisine?’ he supplied with a wry smile, as words failed her and she waved an inadequate hand. ‘I do like a good restaurant, but, taking my cue from your state of dress, I suspected you wouldn’t be in the mood to appreciate a three-course meal with a wine list, an exclusive clientele and a supercilious maître d ’. Of course, I could have been wrong.’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly, her dark eyes narrowed on his imperturbable face, ‘you’re rarely that. Clever man that you are. Why did you give up acting?’

  ‘Because I didn’t have time for both acting and directing,’ he said easily, squinting against the angle of sunlight as he glanced up at the sky. It brought into relief tiny lines a fanning from the corners of his dark-lashed, light-coloured eyes, laughter-lines embedded in gold. He shot her a quick glance and a twisted smile. ‘I was a good actor. I’m a better director, though, and I enjoy my work.’

  ‘You’re a stunning director, and you know it,’ she said deliberately as she watched him.

  ‘Oh, but I’m modest as well,’ he said, with such adroit demureness that she laughed again.

  ‘Parents?’ she queried.

  ‘A matched pair, still intact.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘No, but an army of cousins within a stone’s throw of home just outside Edinburgh.’ He finished his hot dog and settled back on the sand, propped on his elbows, his eyes mild. He didn’t appear to mind her grilling.

  ‘Why ’America?’ she asked abruptly, sifting sand through her fingers and twirling idle circles.

  He smiled. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You said Edinburgh is home,’ she prodded.

  He laughed at that. ‘I regret my unintentional slip if you’re going to behave like that. Edinburgh is where I grew up. It’s where my parents live. I have a London flat, and own a condominium here in LA, but they’re both just roofs over the head. Nice enough, I su
ppose, but I have no abiding allegiance to either place. I haven’t set foot in the London flat in six months now. Where is home for you, Yvonne?’

  Startled by his turn-around of the conversation, she looked at him and remained silent. His face darkened as the silence stretched into something eloquent, and then he laughed, angrily, and said in a harsh voice, ‘No man’s land? All right, I apologise for my intrusiveness.’

  She glanced at him through her lashes, and couldn’t explain the slow impulse that made her say, almost indifferently, ‘No one knows. No one else beside my parents, and my brother David, and my agent. No one at all from LA or from the life I used to live here.’

  Another silence, drawn into the air around them, which nearly resembled the peacefulness, they had achieved at the beginning on the beach. Then he said quietly, ‘If you should ever choose to share that with me, I wouldn’t tell a soul. I promise you that.’

  She looked at the approaching sunset and knew that he would keep that promise. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Any—er—involvements back wherever it is that you call home?’ asked Adam then, lightly. He was laughing at her, with a deft and gentle wickedness that reached inside and tugged seductively at her heartstrings.

  Her lips pulled into a twisted grin of their own volition. ‘Some important people,’ she replied, her eyes amused. ‘But no—er—involvements. And you?’

  ‘And I?’ he mocked indolently. She didn’t rise to it, and he admitted, ‘There’ve been a few.’

  ‘One in particular in London, I seem to recall,’ she mused, her eyes heavy-lidded. ‘According to the gossip columns. The whatsit was rather stunning too.’

  ‘The “whatsit” happens to be a highly successful model, with a name and a identity of her own,’ he said drily.

  She shrugged in lofty indifference. ‘I wouldn’t remember.’

  He made a sound, as if smothering something. ‘No, you wouldn’t, would you? At any rate, the whatsit is past history.’

  ‘So?’ She dusted off her hands with great efficiency, and stated, ‘I want to go home now.’

  ‘In a minute.’ She had made no move to rise to her feet, but his hand came out to shackle her wrist. She stared at it and tried to prod herself into taking offence, but she had committed too many acts of provocation against the man, and found to her weary surprise that his actions were only reasonable after all.

  He continued to lounge on the sand, apparently enjoying the peace and the lingering warmth of the day, but the mood had been destroyed for her. She sat tensely, facing forward, her jaw knotted and her eyes unseeing and hard.

  She would not look at him again. He should always be seen this way, bathed in the rose and gold and royal purple of sunset, a monarch reclining. at ease against a tawny, seashell-embroidered carpet. No battles to fight, no armies left to conquer, a man so indelibly sure of himself and his domain that he invariably roused in everyone else an utter faith in his own capabilities. Yvonne, who fought everything, could hardly comprehend it.

  He was one of the golden people, those rare and sparkling few individuals who redefined any part of the world they chose to inhabit, and if she was with him too long he would redefine her as well. He wouldn’t be able to help it. He wouldn’t have to do a thing. It would happen simply because he existed, and he was who he was; and, being who she was, she could not allow it.

  She worried at the possible various angles of approach, then stumbled upon a possible weak link.

  ‘Adam?’ she said quietly, her eyes massive and blind.

  He stirred and languidly murmured, ‘Hmm?’

  ‘If I ask you to,’ she whispered, ‘if I—ask—very seriously, will you cancel my contract and let me go?’

  Time stretched in a measurable, uninterrupted stream that flowed between and around and through them, and became a minute, and then two.

  ‘No,’ said the winter king at last, his voice a musical chain that he hung around her lovely neck as he rose from his rest and pulled her upright along with him. She looked at him in mute grief, for he was beautiful, and hard, and inaccessible once again, and yet he could reach across that gulf and touch her; still, he could touch her.

  His. grey eyes held, her in ruthless tenderness, and he said, ‘I will not confine you. I will not try to change you. I will not check your headstrong spirit, or attempt to pour you into another mould. But I will keep you, Yvonne. I will keep you.’

  ‘Only for now,’ she warned fiercely, in a voice that shook.

  He agreed with her. ‘For now.’

  It was such a strange observation to make, but there was a quality in that rich velvet voice that sounded like mercy: mercy, given to her, in a verbal acknowledgement of the brevity of their contract and the transience of their relationship, and it was inconceivable, unimaginable how he had managed to inflict on her the greatest hurt to date. He did it by being kind. He did it, and she could not see how or why or what he did it with.

  The insignificant dinner was over with, and the harm done was incalculable.

  Impetuously she threw down the terms of the truce, and took up battle once again. She goaded him, and, looking considerably surprised, he snapped back at her.

  By the time he had driven her back to Beverly Hills, his elegant mouth was tight and his dark brows lowering, and she was morbidly. gleeful at the destruction of their fleeting camaraderie.

  He climbed out of the car when she did. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the twisting slide of his long, powerful body coming to its full height, and she whirled to snap at him, ‘Don’t bother seeing me to the door! You’re not invited!’

  His auburn head turned towards her in awesome, deliberate menace, and he snarled very quietly, ‘Shut up, Yvonne. Just—shut—up.’

  How far was too far with him? she wondered. Was it too far to push him too far? Was that what she wanted? Was too far just far enough? .

  She had hesitated, and she should have known better. He’d stalked around the end of the car and grabbed her, and she jerked away and cried out, ‘You know nothing better than how to manhandle, do you?’

  ‘You’re the only woman in the world I’ve ever met who’s asked for it!’ he roared. Dear God, he was a fine one in a fury. They stalked, pace for pace and glare for glare, and a good three feet apart, to the door.

  It opened before they reached it; their raised voices must have been better than a doorbell. Betty stood in the doorway, her expression determinedly bright to the man who had scared the wits out of her the week before. ‘Mr Ruarke,’ squeaked the maid. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Oh, just bloody fine,’ he snarled, his whole appearance an expression of danger.

  The exchange was so excruciating, Yvonne’s patience snapped. Before she had pretended, but now it truly did snap. ‘Dear God, not pleasantries!’ she cried.

  ‘Woman, what else would you have me do?’ he shouted.

  ‘Oh, just go home!’ Yvonne leaped inside the house, pushing the maid out of the way, and slamming the door so that the entire front of the mansion seemed to shake.

  Vivian drifted out, noted the thunderous look on her daughter’s face and how she pressed back against the door, her chest heaving, with her arms spread wide as if to turn aside a marauding horde, and said cheerfully, ‘Yvonne’s home.’

  Yvonne jumped at the violent roar of the BMW, and the subsequent squeal of tyres on the driveway. ‘Oh, Ms Trent,’ said the trembling maid beside her. ‘That one’s temper is awful when he gets riled—why do you goad him so much?’

  ‘He bothers me,’ she said dreamily, and leaned her head against the door.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE first month of work on the film blew past to the dictates of a whirlwind machine.

  The machine was a powerhouse of inexhaustible energy, and had a name and a face, both of which were guaranteed to interrupt a peaceful night’s sleep. Adam’s involvement in the film was intimate and manifold, and his personality permeated everything Yvonne witnessed.

  She didn�
�t have to see him to feel his presence in the next few weeks that followed their dinner on the beach. She could sense the brilliant, incisive mind behind the decisions that informed, directed and guided them all; in the memos that arrived for her, slashed with his hard, spiky signature; in the choice of location and the excellent planning in each updated schedule; in the anticipation of the individual’s needs while maintaining a harmonious whole.

  Yvonne was no businesswoman, but she was experienced. She had been involved in a few projects that had been in a scramble, and one in particular that had been a nightmare of bad planning and luck. T he utter smoothness of this operation was a revelation of expertise.

  She had wondered, when she’d found out that Adam was not only director but also executive producer of the film, and now she knew with instinctive depth that he would not delegate anything he could do himself, and certainly, if the did delegate, he would not simply trust that a thing would be done but would watch, quietly hawkish, for any imminent failure so that he could intervene at the earliest opportunity.

  Such compulsive attention to detail on a huge project might have broken another man. It must be a punishing schedule he set for himself, an unrelenting seven—day week, but Adam appeared to thrive on the pressure. He was an awesome example of immense vitality held in effortless check for the marathon ahead of him, a racing car on cruise control, the powerful engine well oiled and purring.

  She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why it made her crazy to see him do everything so superbly, so effortlessly. She admired it, she really did. She was in awe of his irrefutable serenity, his indomitable patience, his incredible efficiency.

  And while she was undeniably impatient and ungentle by nature, while her own powerful emotions sometimes amazed and confused her, she was not by nature destructive towards anything or anyone other than herself. Her own unrelentingly high standards were her major strength and weakness, for his assessment of her that evening by the beach was shrewdly accurate: she might make allowances and be capable of compassion for anyone else, but she did not know how to forgive herself.