Precious Moments

by Suzanne Roberts

  Perhaps David had been right when he called her a romantic.

  She looked at the phone, sitting out there in the bedroom, placid, silent. And up on the mountain, the lights from Thorne’s chalet blazed like beacons; he might even be having a party. Whatever had very nearly happened between them the night before evidently meant nothing at all to him.

  Of course she would go to Jamaica. Why on earth not? There was, after all, nothing to keep her here in Aspen—

  Someone came heavily up the stairs. Then, a tap on Jamie’s door and the always-cross-sounding voice of David’s fat housekeeper: “You’ve a phone call; he’s dialed Mr. Saunders’ number instead of the unlisted one he had put in for you.”

  “Thank you,” Jamie said, and she tried very hard not to skip down the stairs to the black, waiting telephone in David’s study.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello,” Thorne said smoothly, as if he hadn’t kept her waiting all day for a call. “I hope you’re in the mood for dinner.”

  “Thank you, no.” Was she turning him down? Jamie realized that, once again, all sorts of mixed feelings were churning around in her. “I just had a snack with David,” she told him. “I’m not at all hungry.”

  “Well, then, how about a drink? Two, maybe.”

  “People who ski ought not to—”

  “Kindly don’t lecture me.”

  “Sorry.” Why was it going badly when she had been waiting to hear from him again?

  “Do you want to see me again, Jamie?”

  She was silent for a heartbeat. “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes. Oh, incidentally, tell your boss the reason I called his number was to talk to him. I’m going to punch his face when I see him. Tell him that, will you please?”

  He hung up before she could say anything.

  Something, something was wrong. Yes, she was totally attracted to Thorne; she had never before experienced such an attraction to a man. And he felt that way, too—at least he seemed to.

  Then what was it that made her feel uneasy talking to him? She frowned. When would she begin to feel easy with him, the way it ought to be with people—the way it was with David and her?

  She was dressing when she heard David’s car pull away, out of the old brick garage in back that had once been a carriage house. At least, she thought with relief, David wouldn’t be around when Thorne came to pick her up. It was hard to believe Thorne was really looking for a fight, but it was entirely possible.

  David was a gentleman; he wouldn’t refuse to fight, and would very likely get his nice-looking face smashed in by Thorne.

  She put on warm, nicely fitting black wool slacks and a pretty, hand-knit ski sweater her mother had sent her from Wisconsin as a gift. Her cheeks glowed a warm, soft color and her eyes looked more gold than brown or green in the soft light of her room. Outside, it continued to snow.

  Thorne was twenty minutes later than she thought he would be, than he said he would be, but if he noticed, he didn’t apologize.

  “I know a great place where we can sit and hold hands and lose our hearing,” he told her. “We might even be able to dance if you like having people stand so close it’s like cattle in the pen.”

  He was talking about Friday’s, a disco place nestled at the end of one of the downtown side streets. The activity took place mostly in the basement of the huge old Victorian house; upstairs, expensive, intimate suppers were prepared and served. It was said that an internationally famous skier from Germany had given a party there, the night before he skied to his bloody death trying to make it down the Silverlode Run of the great Ajax.

  That had been forty years before.

  It was a private club; Jamie realized that when a tall, good-looking young man wearing a casually expensive suit glanced suspiciously at Thorne, then, seeing who it was, grinned and stuck out his hand.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Gundersen.”

  “I’ve been on the slopes, man, on the slopes. Now, I’m giving my-self a brief rest due to a case of sun blindness.” He put his arm around Jamie. “This is my best girl.”

  “Very nice.”

  Jamie smiled, feeling vastly uncomfortable. From beyond them, in a darkish room that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke, came the wild beat of disco dance music. People moved about, dancing very close; some of them were in each other’s arms, eyes closed, seemingly oblivious to anyone but each other.

  Inside the room, Thorne bent close to her, his eyes dark blue in the dim light.

  “Stay with me. If anybody asks you to dance, tell them your boyfriend will sail them right down the mountain if they put a hand on you.”

  He found a table for them, far in the back; Jamie suspected it had been saved for him. They were by a window; outside the snow lay clean and serenely quiet, a contrast to the wild music and the restless dancers.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” He put his hand over hers; it was warm and very strong. “Terrible place to bring one’s girl.”

  She tried to smile at that, but suddenly she saw that his eyes were serious and her heart seemed to stop for an instant.

  “I’m not anybody’s girl,” she said lightly.

  “Yes, you are,” he said, and he put his hand on her face. Jamie closed her eyes; even the loud music didn’t change the rising feeling in her when he touched her this way.

  “Well,” a girl’s voice said, “if it isn’t Thorne G. with a brand-new item!”

  “Lydia, aren’t you out of your neighborhood? I thought you only hung around writers on the Left Bank. Jamie, this is Lydia Markin; she’s a gossip writer. Makes her living by telling nasty, untrue stories about people.”

  The girl with the long, sleek black hair, beautifully streaked with bleached silver, gave Thorne an amused look.

  “I got bored with Paris, dear, and I came over here to spy on idiot men who get some kind of sick thrill out of going down a very steep hill on two little slat boards.” She glanced at Jamie. “I’ve heard something about you. I’ve heard you’re a witch.”

  Jamie tried to sound friendly, even though she was beginning to like this place less and less.

  “I’m only a witch on weekends,” she said lightly. “During the week I work as a typist.”

  “More than a typist, I’ve heard.” The woman’s voice was somehow nasty. “I hear you did something to David and suddenly he’s working again. You must have some vastly marvelous secret.” She smiled. “One as old as the world itself.”

  “Now wait a minute, Lydia.” Thorne’s voice was angry. “I’ve never hit a woman,” he said quietly. “Not yet.”

  The dark-haired woman stood up, still smiling. “Hitting women isn’t in this season, lover. Well,” she told Jamie, “lovely meeting you, dear.”

  Jamie watched her move into the smoke and darkness of the room. “I take it you don’t much like her.”

  “I’ve no taste for women who should have been born sharks. Would you like a drink, Jamie? Everything is terrible here.”

  “Then why did we come?”

  He took her hand again. “Do you know—that’s a very good question. Let’s leave. Let’s go to my place. Will you?”

  Her heart began beating very hard. “I don’t—Maybe we’d better stay in a crowd.”

  His blue eyes deepened. “I won’t touch you; I won’t come anywhere near you unless you ask me to, okay?”

  “No, it isn’t okay. I just think we’d better not—”

  “I’ll even cook for you. Did I tell you my mother used to be a gourmet cook and she taught me how to cook fish over an open fire? The fireplace at my place does a very nice job on mackerel with saffron seasoning.”

  His face looked very boyish and honest; his hair had slipped onto his forehead a bit. Without thinking, Jamie reached out and pushed it gently back.

  “How could I turn down a meal like that?”

  She did not know clearly just what she expected to find at Thorne’s place high on the mountain, leftovers
from a cocktail party, perhaps. But she certainly didn’t expect to find a shower of glass all over the floor by what had been a glass door leading to an outside porch, with a breathtaking view of the sweeping valley beneath.

  “Watch out for glass,” Thorne said, turning on the lights. “I had a little accident before.”

  She took off her coat, settling herself once again on the long couch facing the mountain, just as she’d done the night before. Twenty-four hours had gone by and, she realized with a mild start, most of them had been spent with Thorne around the edges of her mind. Even when she’d been doing her work for David, she had found that from time to time her mind jumped back to this room, with its casual elegance, the long, gleaming window and the huge fireplace.

  Someone had put up plastic over the place in the window that had been broken.

  “Did you cut yourself, Thorne? It could have been very serious.”

  He was making a fire, quickly, with great precision. “Only a scratch on my arm. Stupid of me to think the door was open. I was going out onto the porch for coffee and I walked right into the glass. There, it’s going now.”

  He had settled himself next to her on the soft, low couch. It was almost impossible to sit up straight on that sofa; it was made so that leaning back was the more natural position.

  “I’m glad you came back here with me,” he said, his voice warm. “I’m glad you didn’t let David talk you into not coming. Did he try?”

  Why was David Saunders being brought into their intimate conversation, as if somehow he belonged there as a part of her romance with Thorne?

  “I work for David,” she said quietly, “that’s all. I’m sure I’d be at his house, probably reading tonight, if you hadn’t called me.” She frowned. “I don’t like what some of those people are saying about David and me. It isn’t fair. He’s a wonderful man and simply because he’s come back to life in a way—doesn’t mean that I had anything to do with it.”

  He had a fat, round glass of amber brandy in his hand. His blue eyes looked at her over the rim.

  “You’re magic, you know. I knew it from the start. You can weave spells around people.”

  “That’s not very funny,” she told him.

  “I don’t mean for it to be—”

  He was kissing her. She realized this with a kind of surprise, then a feeling of sweeping delight. It was a very expert kind of kiss, getting deeper, gaining in feeling, the kind that could easily end by shaking the earth under her.

  “I can tell you exactly what it means,” she said, pushing him away, turning her face from him. “It means ‘Never, not ever, at no time whatever.’ They used to tease me about that.”

  “Are you angry with me because I kissed you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.” He gently put his hand at the back of her head and slowly, deeply, kissed her again. “Never—at no time whatever—you surely don’t mean that, do you?”

  Her eyes were closed. “You promised you wouldn’t—”

  He was still very close to her, his mouth so close to her own, but his eyes had shifted so that he was looking toward Ajax.

  “I know,” he said quietly, “maybe eat, drink and make love isn’t the answer after all.”

  She sat up straighter, still in his arms.

  “The answer to what?”

  “The race,” he said. “The big, long, hard race. Look—would you like a drink? I think I’ll fix myself one.”

  Jamie realized suddenly that once again, in a split second’s time, they had become strangers. The moment of closeness was gone.

  SIX

  They’d had coffee and some kind of sweet rolls which he said a friend of his had sent up that morning, and then, while it was still quite early, he drove her back to David’s.

  “There’s some kind of thing going on at Cassie Belsham’s,” he said, just before Jamie got out of his car. “Will you go with me?”

  His invitation took her by surprise. She had thought that, for whatever reason she didn’t understand, he had decided not to see her again.

  “Would you mind telling me why you want me to go to whatever-her-name-is’s party? I thought you’d decided the brief, merry life wasn’t for you.”

  “I want to see you again. Will you go? Frankly, I’ve been trying to think of someplace to ask you to go to, and I suppose Cassie’s party is as good an excuse as any.” He leaned closer to her, his elbow and arm around the back of the seat. “What I decided was not to try to talk you into doing something you might not be happy about later on. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you near me, because I do.”

  Pleasure filled her. Perhaps she was beginning to understand some of his strange moods; at any rate, now she felt she could weather his being polite but remote one moment and then charming and loving a short time later.

  “I won’t be free until I finish typing up David’s daily work. Then I could go.”

  He smiled into her eyes. “Good. Give me a call when you’re ready.”

  He kissed her good night at the door, and as Jamie let herself in with the key David had given her earlier, she suddenly saw movement of some kind in the dark living room to her right, off the main foyer.

  She found the light switch and flicked it.

  “David!”

  He was wearing pajamas but no robe, and his feet, rather long, skinny ones, were bare.

  “I’d just come down for a glass of milk,” he told her, “when I saw the car. One can’t be too careful about break-ins around here.”

  He had started toward the stairs and was halfway up when she spoke to him from the hallway.

  “You were spying on me and you know it.” She sounded scolding.

  “My dear, dear child—” He didn’t turn around to face her.

  “David,” she said, beginning to come up the stairs, “you know perfectly well it’s true! Look—would you mind telling me why you dislike Thorne so much?”

  Finally, he had turned to face her. His brown eyes had a rather thundering look to them, as if he were about to make a long and loud speech to her, reproving her like the Dutch uncle he seemed to want to be to her.

  “Yes, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I dislike him very much indeed, because I happen to like you very much indeed. It’s as simple as that. There’s something wrong with him; he’s got a kink of some kind in him, some kind of—murderous, self-destructive drive, and in the end it will hurt you, Jamie, wound you.” He touched her cheek. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  Suddenly, he seemed very dear to her, like some tall, kindly cousin, or maybe a brother. Jamie leaned against him, putting her head against his chest.

  “I know it seems very quick and maybe even very foolish to you.”

  She took a small breath and felt his protective arms go around her. “I’ve never felt like this before,” she said softly. “I’m not really sure how to behave—”

  At that moment, the door at the end of the stairs flung itself open. The housekeeper stood there in her long nightgown; her embarrassed husband stood in the background.

  “I’ll be leaving you in the morning, Mr. Saunders.” Her oyster-colored eyes flicked to Jamie, who still stood with her face pressed close to David’s bare chest. “I knew a lot went on in this town, but I never for a moment thought you’d be a part of that kind of thing!”

  “I’m not a party to anything, Emma,” he said tiredly. “Now go to bed, please. Good night to you all,” he said, and he bounded up the stairs, his brown and white pajama jacket flapping at the sudden rush of speed.

  Jamie, her face burning, hurried past the housekeeper to her own room. That’s done it, she thought, sitting unhappily on the side of her bed. The way gossip travels around this town, everybody will think David and I are secret lovers!

  She sat having late dinner with Thorne the following evening. She had hurried to one of the lesser Aspen shops to find a suitable dress and finally she’d found an emerald green silk that looked as if it came from the thirties.
It was “dinkier,” as her mother would have put it, than any other dress she’d ever worn. She had hesitated at first, seeing her firm, round young breasts peeking over the green material, but then she had realized she liked this new look of herself—it was mysterious and worldly and yes, even chic—something which Aspen adored.

  “You’ve got men drooling over you, do you know that?” Thorne poured more wine into her glass. They sat at a wall table at one of the most expensive mountainside restaurants in, or rather out, of town. “I’m not sure if I should take you to Cassie’s party or not.”

  “So far, the parties around here get a very low rating from me,” she told him, smiling. “At the last one I went to, nobody seemed to be having a very good time.”

  “Especially David.” He drained his glass. His tanned, handsome face looked slightly flushed. “He’s very fond of you, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose so, yes.” She felt her heart give a little catch. It was very possible that Thorne had heard the gossip that Jamie felt certain David’s housekeeper would have started by this time.

  “He’s actually a very hard man to dislike,” Thorne said quietly, “even though he probably wishes I’d disintegrate over there on Silverlode.”

  Her heart went cold. “Don’t say that! I don’t think that’s—funny,” she said in a voice that nearly trembled. “David wouldn’t wish you or anyone harm—he’s a good, kind, decent—”

  “Skip the last part,” Thorne said, and for a second his eyes met hers. She saw accusation there; she was certain that was what she was seeing in those suddenly cold, vividly blue eyes.

  “So you’ve heard the story. You have heard it, haven’t you? All about how I was caught in David Saunders’ arms—”

  “I’ve heard,” Thorne said easily, “but I don’t believe it. Now drink your wine because it’s far better to have a glow on when you go to one of Cassie’s terrible parties.”

  She didn’t like the wine; it made her feel heady and reckless, but she found herself drinking it anyway.