Fire And Ice

by Diana Palmer

  “That’s not so, darling,” Margie protested softly.

  Jan laughed bitterly. “You know it is. I only make things worse for you.” She looked back at Cannon. “Larry didn’t carry insurance, and his parents wanted nothing to do with us at all—they were fairly well-to-do, but our family wasn’t socially acceptable to them. So they turned their backs on us. Except to have their attorney demand their share of his small estate. He died intestate,” she added. “So Margie was left with nothing—except me and a fistful of debts and horrible memories all around.”

  Jan took a deep breath. “Well, she took a job on the newspaper so that we wouldn’t starve while I finished school. I won’t tell you how many nights she was on the streets covering murders and drug busts and fires. The only job open, you see, was the police beat, so she took it.”

  Cannon’s dark gaze went to Margie, and there was something in it that she couldn’t endure. She dropped her eyes to the floor.

  “She did that and wrote at night,” Jan began again, “and one day she sent off a manuscript that an editor liked. The editor bought it, helped her polish it—and within months she made the bestseller list. I was so proud of her, I thought I’d die of it.” She looked at her sister with love and pride in her expression. “I still am. And I wish I’d never asked Margie to hide the truth. We aren’t rich. I make a fair salary at the law office where I work, and Margie is on her way to a Rolls-Royce if there’s any justice, but everything we’ve got she’s sacrificed for. None of our people ever made the social register, and we aren’t likely to, either.” She lifted her small chin proudly. “But we’re honest people for the most part, Mr. Van Dyne. I’ve done Andy a terrible injustice by not telling him the whole truth in the first place,” she concluded. “And I’ve compounded that error by asking Margie to pretend to be something she’s not. I’m very sorry about it all. And Margie and I will go home now. I hope we haven’t caused you any great inconvenience.” She looked at Andy with her heart in her eyes. “One thing was very true, though,” she whispered. “I love you with all my heart.”

  Andy’s face contorted. He went to her, crushing her to him, burying his face in her hair. “My God, what do I care who your people were?” he said in a husky voice. “I love you, you idiot!”

  Margie’s eyes filled with tears. At least Andy’s love was sincere.

  “I’ll get my things together,” Margie said quietly, turning away. “I’d very much appreciate it if someone could drive me to the airport.”

  “Margie, you can come with us,” Andy called curtly.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a deadline in two weeks,” she said with gentle pride, “and the reason I went to New York was to sign the contract for a movie they’re going to make of Blazing Passion.”

  “Oh, Margie, how wonderful!” Jan burst out.

  “Sure,” Margie laughed mirthlessly. “How wonderful.” She turned back toward the stairs. “One more thing to make me stand out like a blot on the family escutcheon….”

  Cannon hadn’t said a word, but his eyes were following her, and there was a kind of pain in his face that Victorine hadn’t seen in years.

  Her pale brown eyes looked worried as she tried to work out what to do. And all at once she smiled. It was so simple, really.

  “Oh!” she cried, and let her body slump gracefully to the floor.

  Nine

  Cannon carried his mother to her room, and grabbed the phone by the bed while Margie sat down and held the elderly woman’s hand tightly.

  “What are you doing?” Victorine asked in a ghostly whisper.

  “Calling an ambulance,” he said curtly.

  “No!” Victorine argued, trying to sit up. “No, don’t you…don’t you dare!” she gasped for breath. “You’re making it… worse!”

  He murmured something forceful under his breath, gripping the receiver hard before slamming it back down again.

  “Just get me…my pills,” Victorine told him firmly, catching her breath. “In the drawer, here…and put one under…my tongue.”

  Cannon took out one of the tiny white tablets and dropped it obediently into his mother’s mouth, just under her tongue. Then he stood beside Margie, with Jan and Andy stationed nervously at the foot of the bed, and waited impatiently to see if the medicine was going to help.

  “I’d rather get you to a hospital,” Cannon said curtly.

  “And I’d rather…stay here,” Victorine said breathlessly. She gripped Margie’s fingers. “It’s getting…better, now.”

  “Thank God,” Cannon sighed. “Home for you,” he added darkly. “I want you where I can get Howard when I need him.”

  “Howard…is our family doctor,” Victorine told Margie. “And our good friend.” She sighed, smiling her relief. “There, that’s better.”

  “What can I bring you?” Margie asked softly.

  “Not a thing, dear. But you’re coming home with me. I need company, and Jan and Andrew are going to be much too busy to dawdle around the house with me.”

  Cannon’s face clouded, darkened. But something flashed in his eyes that only his mother saw.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” Margie replied gently, knowing that it would hurt far too much to watch Cannon and not have the right to touch him, to love him.

  “You may bring your typewriter with you,” the elderly woman said firmly, “and the staff will look after you while you produce. In your spare time, you can do things with me. Can’t she, Cannon?” she added with a hard glare.

  He took a deep, short breath. “If it will keep you in the house, she’s more than welcome.”

  “I can’t…!” Margie cried, her eyes panic-stricken as they briefly met his and turned away again.

  He rammed his hands in his pockets. “I won’t be around that much, if that’s what’s stopping you,” he said coldly.

  “In that case, I’ll come,” Margie said, making her decision instantly. In a short space of time, Victorine had come to mean a great deal to her. If there were anything she could do for the older woman, she wouldn’t hesitate.

  “I’m glad that’s all settled.” Victorine sighed, leaning back on her pillows. “Now suppose you all go away and let me rest. Except Margie,” she added, still gripping her slender hand. “I’ll be fine, now.”

  Jan and Andy went reluctantly, but Cannon left the room immediately. Margie heard him leave the house shortly afterward and he spent the rest of the day away.

  He didn’t come home for supper, either. Margie ate with Victorine off trays that Nina, the maid, provided. Andy and Jan ate in the kitchen, and then went to sit with Victorine while Margie packed her things and took a quick bath.

  She’d just whipped her dark green robe around her body and was going down the hall from the bathroom to her own room when she froze.

  Cannon was coming down the hall toward her, his face harder than ever, his eyes accusing.

  She dropped her gaze and started past him, but he moved, blocking her path. She looked up, scared of him all over again, and when he started to reach out a hand toward her, she jerked away from him.

  His hand fell, and something dark and nameless appeared in his eyes as he looked at her, seeing all the old fears in her face, all the uncertainty that had been missing in the past few days.

  “Sorry, honey,” she drawled, back in character again. “I’m not available anymore. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “Margie…” he began stiffly.

  “No post mortems, okay?” she asked wearily. “Go back and make money, Mr. Tycoon, and leave me to my scandalous career. You don’t have to worry, I won’t stay in your home any longer than your mother needs me.”

  “For God’s sake, will you listen to me?” he said sharply.

  She shook her head, averting her eyes. “You don’t have anything to say to me that I want to hear. You said it all this morning.”

  “Damn it, why didn’t you tell me!”

  Her eyes narrowed with pain. “Because I knew what would happen.” Sh
e studied his broad, unyielding face with sad, hurting eyes. “And it did.”

  The words hung between them while he looked down at her, his expression giving nothing away. “You might have trusted me.”

  “I did trust a man, once,” she reminded him quietly. “I forgot, for a little while, but I won’t again. You’ll never get close enough to hurt me again, Mr. Van Dyne. No man will.” And she brushed past him before he realized what she was doing, and ran into her room.

  * * *

  The Van Dyne’s Chicago home was a shock. Margie stared at it as if she’d never seen Victorian architecture before. Unlike her grandmother’s wood home, this house was made of stone, and featured turrets and bay windows and ivy climbing gracefully up one side wall. Located far off the road and overlooking Lake Michigan, it was nestled among a grove of hardwood trees, a formidable rose garden and a maze of neatly trimmed hedges.

  Jan had smiled brilliantly when Andy described the girls’ Victorian home to Victorine, who burst out laughing.

  “Now that is a coincidence,” she’d told Margie with a smile. “Personally, I adore the architecture. It may have been a bit pretentious, but I prefer to think of it as a vanished art. Such style and attention to detail,” she added with a sigh. “Lost forever.”

  Margie had agreed silently, but her mind was on other things—foremost among them the taciturn man at the wheel of the car. She hadn’t paid attention to the Chicago skyline or the Sears tower or even the white sand beach that paralleled the highway. Her eyes had been helplessly drawn to the back of his dark head.

  It had taken Margie and Jan several days to get settled in and familiar with the routine of the house. There was a daily maid named Anna who kept the house in working order, and her husband Jack doubled as gardener and chauffeur. There was a cook, Mrs. Summers, who was heavyset and jolly and served the best cakes Margie had ever eaten. Besides the staff, there was a swimming pool and patio out back near the rose garden, as well as a tennis court, not to mention enough wooded areas around the house to lure a wildlife enthusiast into their depths.

  There was also a lake—like something out of a fairy tale, with swans and huge hardwood trees and a grassy area of flat land surrounding it. When Margie wasn’t working on the book—which took most of her time as her deadline approached—or sitting with Victorine, that was where she could be found, with a tackle box and a bucket of worms and a fishing basket.

  Jan and Andy were still doing their best to convince Cannon that their marriage wouldn’t be the end of the world, but he wasn’t showing any signs of altering his inflexible position. All that changed, however, the day Jan and Margie walked in on an interesting conversation Cannon was having with his mother in the living room.

  He was standing at the window with his back to the door, formidable yet strangely lonely looking, in a dark blue, pin-striped vested suit that made him look every inch the corporate magnate.

  Margie and Jan paused in the doorway, inadvertently eavesdropping.

  “If you feel I’m too weak, I could get someone else to organize it, you know,” Victorine was saying. Her eyes turned toward the girls then, suddenly gleaming. “As a matter of fact, I remember hearing that Jan did quite a bit of organizing for her boss. Didn’t you, my dear?” she added, alerting Cannon to their presence.

  Jan started. “Organizing?” she murmured. “Uh, well, I do organize quite a few dinner parties for him. His wife is an invalid, and he does a great deal of entertaining….”

  “You see?” Victorine said triumphantly. Jan and Margie stared at her.

  Cannon moved away from the window, his hands jammed into his pockets, and stopped in front of Jan. “Can you organize a dinner party for twenty people, and do it in a week’s time?” he asked bluntly, while his tone blatantly voiced his doubts.

  “Why, yes,” Jan said with disarming confidence. “If you’ll give me a list of the people you want to invite.” She grinned impishly. “I’ll even make the seating arrangements so that business rivals don’t go at it tooth and nail over the flan.”

  Involuntarily, he smiled, and the smile changed his whole look. “All right,” he said.

  Jan actually blushed, but she didn’t lower her eyes. “I won’t let you down, Cannon,” she promised.

  “He’s going to let me do the party!” Jan exclaimed once she and Margie were out of earshot in the kitchen, and she hugged her sister enthusiastically. “Finally, he’s giving me a chance to show him what I can do! Isn’t it great?”

  “Great,” Margie echoed with a smile. “Little does he know what he’s just done,” she added wickedly. “If I had a nickel for every party you’d organized…”

  Jan giggled. “If this doesn’t convince him that I know my way around society, nothing will.” The smile faded. “Not that Andy and I are going to chuck our plans just because Cannon doesn’t approve. Oh, Margie, you can’t imagine how I felt at the beach house when Andy said he’d rather have me than Cannon’s respect!”

  “I think you’re very lucky,” Margie said softly, “to be loved that much.”

  Her tone was wistful, and it didn’t escape Jan’s notice. She moved closer, putting a sisterly arm around the taller woman. “Things will all come right for you, too. Didn’t you see how Cannon was looking at you just now?”

  Margie shrugged. “How he looks and how he feels are two different things. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t even give me the benefit of the doubt, or try to understand my point of view.”

  “Are you trying to understand his?” came the quiet reply. “He hasn’t had a lot of reason to trust women, you know. Any more than you’ve had to trust men. It takes time.”

  Margie went to pour herself a cup of coffee, her face thoughtful. “Anyway,” she said, “what do I have to offer? Notoriety—especially since that movie contract—a flamboyant image, a wild reputation that even my friends don’t doubt…how would that fit in with the very conservative image his company projects? Can’t you just see the board of directors having a field day?”

  Jan eyed her sister, taking in the haggard look, the dark shadows under her eyes. It had been years since she’d seen Margie look like that, and it was disturbing.

  “I don’t think a man like Cannon Van Dyne would give a damn about what his board of directors said,” Jan told her. “Not if he was in love.”

  Just the thought of it made Margie tingle, but she knew all too well the nature of Cannon’s interest, and love didn’t enter into what he felt for Margie. She laughed softly, her green eyes faintly amused.

  “I can’t imagine him in love,” she murmured as she sipped her coffee. “It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t boggle mine,” Jan muttered. “But then, I’m not an old reporter like you. I’m not observant like you are; I’m not able to look at a man and tell he’s crazy about a woman. Honest to goodness, Margie, everyone else can see it—why can’t you?”

  “See what?” Margie asked blandly.

  Jan threw up her hands. “Never mind, never mind. I’m going to go upstairs and plot strategy. Let’s see, I’ll need a brace of dueling pistols, a few cannon…”

  Margie laughed to herself, watching Jan go. It would be a blessing if Cannon changed his mind about Jan’s potential.

  She finished her coffee and put the cup in the sink just as the kitchen door opened and Cannon walked in, a smoking cigarette in hand. He paused in the doorway, effectively blocking the exit, and leaned back against the doorjamb.

  “Want a cup of coffee?” she asked, and her face gave away nothing of the torment she was feeling.

  He didn’t answer immediately. His dark eyes were busy memorizing her, finding the small, tell-tale signs of her sleeplessness, of overwork. Her own eyes found the same signs on his hard features.

  “Can Jan really organize dinner parties?” he asked point-blank.

  “Yes,” she replied. She busied herself washing out her cup, and put it gently into the dish drainer. “She’s done quite a lot of it in the pas
t few years.”

  “Margie…” He moved closer, until she could feel his body heat behind her, as if he were touching every inch of her. His hands came down very gently on her shoulders and she jumped, as if they had burned her.

  “Don’t,” he groaned, and his hands contracted. “Don’t flinch when I touch you. I can’t bear it.”

  She closed her eyes, involuntarily giving in, weakened by the delicious weight of his warm hands, the mingled scents of spicy cologne and tobacco.

  “I wasn’t flinching,” she whispered. “You…startled me.”

  He was breathing roughly, the sound oddly loud in the kitchen. “You have to understand the way it’s been with me all these years. My wife made a career of lying to me, right up until the night I found her with another man in our bedroom…. I’m not making excuses, but damn it, I’m not used to getting the truth from women. I thought you were Saint Joan,” he concluded unevenly, “and you fell off the pedestal, that’s all. From saint to nymph takes a bit of getting used to, especially for a cynic like me. I felt like a fool.”

  “Don’t make the mistake of believing my publicity,” she said, her voice level and cool. “I’m no more a nymphomaniac than you are a throwback to Victorian times. But it’s the mold I fit into, and I can’t break it, any more than you can break yours. Besides,” she added with a short laugh, moving away from him, “our respective images are what make us successes. And they don’t mix, Cannon. They’d never mix. It’s just as well that things worked out the way they did.”

  “I don’t like the way you sound,” he remarked, watching her. “You’re years too young to be cynical.”

  “I had a crash course,” she replied. She folded her arms across her breasts. “My life hasn’t been any bed of roses, but it’s made me tough. And the first thing I learned was that if you let people get close, they can break you. I forgot that for a little while. But never again,” she added, with a meaningful glance and a smile that never reached her cool green eyes.