The Winter King

by Amanda Carpenter

‘I don’t know what you mean. Nothing’s going on,’ she told him, her chin tilted at a haughty angle, and only afterwards did she realise that she’d played the scene all wrong again, for she’d given herself away with the quick denial. She would have done far better simply, to stare at him in incomprehension.

  His slow, searing smile told her so. She closed her eyes at the failure, then turned to walk up the trailer steps.

  ‘Yvonne,’ said Adam, halting her escape into privacy. She looked over her shoulder at him enquiringly, one hand on the latch of the door. ‘If I were you I would rinse off very well before I—soaped my body.’

  Her bewildered lips parted at the words, so innocuous in meaning, so sultry in delivery. His hawkish eyes captured hers, and she caught fire. ‘Because of the splinters,’ he explained, in a murmurous verbal caress. ‘Your skin is so much more delicate than mine.’

  What was he saying to her? What was he communicating really? She promised, a shaken, fragile thread of sound, ‘I’ll—be careful.’

  ‘Good,’ he said very softly, intently, in full force and delicate focus. ‘You see, I don’t want you to cut yourself. I don’t like you to be hurt, either mentally or physically.’

  It was nothing, what he said. It was, a product of reaction from the accident, a spoken acknowledgement of the fear that had propelled him, the inevitable lecture after the fact. She told herself so, but for some reason she couldn’t make herself believe it, and she had to cover her face with one narrow, trembling hand, for he overwhelmed her.

  And then, without ever having physically laid a hand on her, she felt the unbearable tension ease as he offered her release. ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes.’

  Words were his multidimensional province; she was beyond them. She ran inside, stripped off her jeans and T-shirt in graceless haste, and flung herself into the tiny shower cubicle. ‘

  ‘Trust me,’ he’d said, and she had, increasingly, over the weeks.

  She had dive-bombed into his life, a falcon screaming for battle, and he had obliged her. He gave her every struggle she demanded, every opportunity to bristle, every reason to hurl her temper at him, and yet somehow he managed to become the victor. Somehow he managed to transmute their antagonistic relationship into at dynamic evolution.

  Every ultimatum she had laid down for herself, every definitive stance, had been demolished. She would not act again—and now she did so. She would not be governed by another human being—but now she adapted her actions voluntarily at another’s request. She would not be budged from her Montana ranch—and then she found herself, within a matter of weeks and much to her own surprise, in southern Arizona. She discovered gentleness, and patience, and they were as easy to incorporate as if they had always been there inside, waiting like flowering bulbs that slept in the ground during the winter only to unfurl at the first delicate sign of spring.

  Hadn’t she said that he would change her? Hadn’t she warned herself that it would happen? Couldn’t she gloat, morbidly, and flay herself with ‘I told you so’s?

  But consider this: none of it felt alien. She hadn’t lost herself in the changing; she had found that she was more than she’d ever imagined she could be. She was on an immense and wonderment-imbued quest of self-discovery, and what shook her to the core was that one single man, just one, as anchored and adamant as she and without domination, had impelled her to this.

  Oh, she could cry from the terror. She lifted her face to the sharp sting of the shower spray and let it rain down on her.

  They inhabited a transient world of falsity and illusion. The intensity of working on a movie produced deep creative bonds between people that felt transcendent at the time, but then, inevitably, it ended. The successful teams fractured; individuals shot off to other bondings and other horizons, and on the occasion when they met one another again it was often with remembered affection and delight. How good to see you again, what have you been doing with yourself —a new spouse, my God, kids?

  So few bonds remained throughout the many separations and the lifestyles that spanned the globe; so few could be sustained under such a hectic pace. So many changes, so little to hold on to. Yvonne had learned not to hold on to anything but watch it all filter through her open fingers with wide, unflinching eyes. That was why she had been so resistant to self-change, for she was the only thing she’d allowed herself to rely upon, only she had remembered that fact far too late.

  She shocked herself by sobbing aloud, a deep, physical, involuntary sound, her face contorted with anguish. She knew how to occupy the role of a graceful traveller through everyone’s life but her own; her own, she didn’t know what to do with.

  ‘Trust me,’ he’d said, and she did. But she didn’t know the man she trusted. The evidence of him was everywhere around her, except for who he was, and she didn’t know how to brace herself against the invisible umbilical cord that was strengthening between them, or how to prepare for the awful sense of loss when it ended.

  The water in the shower ran cold. Yvonne shivered, and stood under it for as long as she could, for reasons she did not comprehend or wish to explore. When at last she could not stand it any longer, she turned it off and groped blindly for a clean towel to dry off with, her body shaking as if with palsy as she struggled, into a thin cotton robe which she belted at her slim waist.

  Movement sounded through the thin prefab walls of the trailer, and she exited the minuscule bathroom to find Adam in the kitchenette.

  He had never been in her trailer before. He looked completely at ease and at home. He had showered as well, and was clad in a clean pair of jeans and a pale blue shirt that was carelessly untucked at the waist and unbuttoned. The smooth, wide, muscled chest that rippled with his every movement was a shocking exposure, and his sleek auburn hair was still wet.

  She stopped dead at the first sight of him, the rigidity of her body a silent scream of protest, one hand clutching the neck of her robe together so tightly she almost strangled herself.

  He glanced at her unsmilingly. He must have seen everything there was to see in that one comprehensive sweep of his eyes; he always did, and he never failed to comment on it.

  ‘Go get your hairbrush,’ he ordered softly. She went to her darkened bedroom and retrieved the brush from the bedside table, and got lost along the way. Oh, God, she couldn’t face him. She clutched the brush to her chest and bowed her head over it, for the person she didn’t trust was herself.

  Adam said, from the doorway behind her, ‘Lie down on the bed.’

  The bow of her mouth was open, her eyes squeezed tight. She felt her extreme vulnerability, from her bare feet, to her state of undress, to her state of mind. She felt his imminent, watchful presence. Please, someone help her.

  She went to the bed and lay on it. She heard him move then, in a subtle friction of cloth, and the light in the room came on, and she shut her eyes tighter and averted her face.

  The man by the doorway stood and looked at the woman lying before him for long moments. He stared at the long reclining body, the lush, graceful swell of hips and breasts outlined against the lines of a robe that revealed more than it concealed, the half-exposed, slender, tanned legs, the intricate delicacy of her wrists and narrow hands, the hollows of her collarbones and throat, the angled line of her cheekbone and jaw.

  For Yvonne the silent time felt like an eternity. She lay trembling and heated and completely devastated, knowing that he looked at her and saw what he saw, and she would have screamed had it been a release and had she had the strength for it.

  Then he walked over, put his hands upon her, and guided her head to the side of the bed. He unwrapped the towel that had covered her hair, and coaxed the chestnut mane to flow over the edge, then laid the towel underneath the dusky strands that touched the floor. He tugged the brush from her stiffened grasp, knelt and began to use it on her hair.

  He worked through the tangles patiently, with an unbroken rhythmic gentleness, stroking the dust and the tiny shards of glass out of the
silken mass. The act of brushing her hair became an incredible intimacy. He burnished her hair to a lustrous shine, Aladdin polishing his magic lamp.

  She endured the sensuous ordeal, feeling the pervading languorous delight as a penance, and when at last she could no longer stand his silence her dark eyes flew open. She looked at his upside-down, intent face and said starkly, ‘You are a stranger to me.’

  He stopped brushing, an instant freeze, his eyes undertaking a severe dilation. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Who are you? I don’t know who you are.’ It was a very quiet, almost timid whisper.

  Adam put aside the brush, for he had rid her hair of the glass splinters long ago. He rolled the towel away, rose up on his knees and cupped her face with both hands, the tips of his forefingers meeting at the point of her chin. He bent over her, his grey eyes ruthlessly probing, and he said in a wise and guttural growl, ‘You know me better than you believe. You just won’t let yourself see it.’

  Her mouth trembled. She felt poised on the edge of a precipice encompassing a huge discovery.

  ‘Think,’ he told her. He sounded almost as if he was eager for her to know. Her eyes clung to his and she thought.

  Back to the first night they had met, when the Iceman had cracked. ‘Yvonne, I’m sorry,’ he had said. ‘We went too far. I didn’t mean to hurt you like that; I didn’t know———’

  To the second time. ‘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.’’

  The third time, his question asked in pain. ‘Why do you do it. to yourself?’

  ‘Your technique is flawless…I hate it…you’re not giving anything…’

  ‘I will not suck your soul dry.’

  ‘If you would trust me that far, I would bring you back to yourself. Every time, Yvonne.’

  And what she had been fighting and denying from the moment she had met him exploded inside her. Her eyes went wide. She gasped harshly, and would have surged from her supine position on the bed had he not tightened his hard hands around her head and held her prisoner.

  His expression had sharpened in predatory triumph at the intense reactive change in hers. He leaned over her unsteady mouth and held his lips just over hers, and did not kiss her. His clean male scent was invasive, inescapable.

  ‘Now do you see?’ he said against her lips, in offering and demand.

  ‘No,’ she moaned, her legs writhing on the bed as she stared at the hammering pulse underneath the strong bone of his jaw.

  ‘I want you,’ he breathed into her mouth. ‘I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you. I ache at night from thinking about you. I’m hard and dry and nothing and no one else brings me relief. I’m obsessed with the thought of taking you.’

  ‘Stop it!’ she cried her panic.

  ‘No.’ He said the quiet, inexorable word—a promise, a curse. His hands were shaking now against the curve of her skull, each stiffened digit biting into her over-burdened brain. ‘You asked for it. You had to ask. It’s time you heard the entire truth.’ .

  ‘I won’t listen to you!’ She didn’t know what she said. She would have recalled the words ‘had she known.

  “He closed his eyes, his breath a tiny expellation; it was another hurt she had caused him. ‘You’ll listen,’ he said, then grimly, ‘By God you will. You deserve to hear it and take responsibility at last for what you’ve done to yourself. I never wanted you for this film. I hadn’t even considered you as a possibility—everybody knew that you had retired. Your father concocted the whole crazy scheme. He always knew he had his part; I’d promised it to him from the very beginning.’

  ‘What?’ she shrieked, cried, screamed.

  He. was blowing her to pieces with methodical precision.

  ‘Then you showed up at your parents’ party,’ he purred in his primeval growl. ‘And you were like nothing I had ever seen before. What you did to me—I was reeling from it. Yes, I grabbed at you, and used every clue you gave away to keep you in Los Angeles. I couldn’t believe you were vegetating your life away; I couldn’t stand the thought of you disappearing again. You had hidden yourself away in a cave and covered the entrance with a bramble bush, and you weren’t ever going to come out. What a wasteland you were.’

  Tears sprang into her anguished eyes and spilled over on to his wrists. She sobbed, ‘None of it was true?’

  ‘Oh, Yvonne,’ he sighed, evocatively, impatiently, and he laid his auburn head on her shaking shoulder. ‘All of it was true. Every bit. It just wasn’t the understanding you thought it to be. Can you grasp that?’

  She was crying, her body labouring with it, her face turned into his warm neck. ‘Why did my father do it?’

  ‘He did it because he loves you,’ said Adam raggedly.

  ‘He explained it to me at the party after you and I had our argument. And I had already seen your strength, and recognised in you the possibility of a better; Hannah than I had ever before conceived. In one fell swoop I was given the unique actress I was looking for, and a means with which to keep her, and I used it ruthlessly.’

  ‘You’re telling me now, after everything that’s happened, after everything we’ve done to each other? I don’t understand anything any more!’

  ‘You asked me who I am,’ he whispered. He let her go suddenly and surged to his feet, and she sprang into a crouching position on the dishevelled bed and wrapped her tight-clasped arms around her middle and wanted nothing more than for him to hold her prisoner still. He shouted, ‘Who am I, Yvonne?’

  She whirled, grabbed a pillow and flung it at his rigid figure as hard as she could, crying, ‘Don’t you shout at me!’

  He put his splayed hands on the edge of the bed and leaned on them, his loose shirt gaping open, those broad shoulder muscles bunching massively, and thrust his angry face into hers. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do,’ he growled dangerously. ‘Who am I, Yvonne?’

  She wiped the back of one hand across her streaked face and breathed hard, her puzzled, devastated eyes searching his rapidly. She was trying desperately to quiet the emotional upheaval inside her, to regain a measure of control, to stop her own wild reaction to what he was doing to her. What was he trying to say to her now?

  She’ gave him what she thought he was looking for, in the form of a question. ‘You’re not the person I thought you were?’

  He closed his eyes slowly and bowed his head, and said with extreme gritty patience, ‘Well, I don’t know that, do I? I don’t know how you saw me—all I can do is guess.’

  Sudden comprehension. She was frozen with it, and then she twisted with an abruptness that made the bed rock, and reached with both hands to cup his down-bent face and tilt it up to her.

  She said with amazement into his grey eyes, ‘I thought you were a cold manipulator. I thought you were distant, and superior, and I wondered if you could possibly have any human warmth of feeling at all.’

  His gaze darkened into smoky pewter. He said bitterly, ‘Iceman Ruarke?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she sighed, and stroked his face. And she had wondered if he could feel pain. ‘Of course you’d know about the nickname. You said you read everything.’

  He raised a rueful eyebrow. ‘I did manipulate you.’

  ‘Well,’ she said drily, ‘I think I have my own fair share of that personality trait. That’s how I got rid of my three nannies, after all.’

  Laughter exploded convulsively out from him then, and he turned his face into one of her hands. His skin was so warm, the curve of his mouth such an exquisite pleasure. ‘That ,doesn’t mean I forgive you,’ she said slowly, as she watched him. ‘It just means that I understand you.’

  ‘Better than you thought.’ His mouth moved in her sensitive palm and raised the tiny, feathery hairs at the nape of her neck.

  Her agreement was shaky. ‘Better than It thought. Adam, why did you tell me?’

  He reared back from her upraised arms with a violence that made her heart leap in her chest, and
he turned away, tilted back his head, rubbed the back of his neck with long fingers.

  ‘Because I got tired,’ he told her flatly. ‘I got tired of working long hours, and fighting with you every available moment. I got tired of watching you react in all your misunderstandings, tired of maintaining. everything and still trying to keep my cool. This has never happened to me before. My concentration is shot to hell.’

  Would she ever cease to be amazed by him? The frailties and flaws she had once hoped in desperation to uncover in the winter king he now gave to her with open hands; and contempt had absolutely no part in her reaction to it; and she wasn’t about to walk away.

  She said gently, ‘You’ve hidden it beautifully. I’m sure no one else knows.’ .

  ‘You must be joking,’ he said with a short bark of a laugh. ‘The whole damned lot of them know.’

  ‘No,’ she insisted, crawling off the bed and straightening her dishevelled robe into more decency. She walked up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder, his body heat burning through the thin barrier of his shirt. ‘They see us fighting. They see attraction and conflict. But you’ve still maintained the quality of your work. I’ve never respected another director the way I respect you. You make me want to work again after two years of drifting in a self-imposed vacuum. You make me want to act better than I ever have before. I’m scared to death of some of the scenes coming up, but I’m also exhilarated.’

  He turned his head to one side to listen to her. She never even realised what she had given away in that little speech. She was too busy noticing other things. She saw the hard edge of his cheekbone, the way his auburn hair curled over his shirt collar, could sense the inward curve of his ribs from those wide shoulders to the slim, angled hips, the tight, lean power of his buttocks, the long legs planted well apart.

  ‘I believe I’ve had an easy time of it for too long,’ he remarked in an absent, musing tone, as he rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. ‘Maybe I’ve become complacent.’

  She snorted in derision and looked at her hand flattened against the strong, large bone of his shoulderblade. ‘You don’t know how to become complacent.’