It was Dante on the other end.
“Am I interrupting anything important?” he asked. “I can call back later.”
“No, no,” she said, lightening her tone with an effort. “Look, about yesterday afternoon—”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I acted like a horse’s behind, walking out that way, and I’m sorry.”
“Never mind,” she said with a covert glance at the executive sitting across her desk. “I suppose I should have told you what was going on. Why don’t we have dinner and—”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. It’s really not my business, is it? I can only plead overwork, and worry about this mess with the Ecstasy out at the place on the lake.”
“Still no word on who’s peddling the drug?”
“None. It’s almost as if there’s more than one, as if my place has been targeted. I have some feelers out about it, but everybody’s keeping a tight lip. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about getting away from the whole thing for a day or two to get a new perspective on it, maybe going to the mountains or something. I don’t suppose you’d like to come keep me company?”
“I wish I could,” Riva said, and meant every word. “But I just can’t leave with the house full of guests and this thing with Edison. But I tell you what. Why don’t you go up to the house in Colorado? It’s just sitting there. Somebody ought to get some use out of it.”
“That would be grand, if you don’t mind.”
The last was mere politeness. “You know I don’t,” Riva said. “I’ve been telling you for years you could have it anytime.”
“You’re sure I can’t persuade you to come?”
“It’s tempting, but I’m afraid not.”
Riva promised to have her secretary call the young couple who kept the mountain place ready for visitors, former flower children who made and sold herb tea on the side. After another pleasantry or two, she hung up. She was smiling, conscious of a great feeling of relief. She hated to be at odds with anyone, but especially with Dante.
Smiling still, she returned to business. Her last thought before plunging back into contractual obligations was that she just might be able to get away after all, at least for Saturday night and Sunday. If she called Erin and arranged to take her with her, there might be a chance to deflect her from this Colorado biking tour with Josh. Margaret wouldn’t mind then if Erin left for a short trip. At any rate, it was worth a try. Dante was such a reasonable man and a faithful friend. He deserved a surprise.
SEVENTEEN
THERE WAS A STORM BREWING IN THE GULF. Anne had gotten a report on it from her taxi driver on the way to the airport. It made the air muggy, so thick with the tropical warmth and humidity boiling up from the Caribbean that it was almost like breathing hot bathwater. Walking beside Dante on the concrete apron, Anne could feel the wet heat rising around her ankles, see it shimmering in waves between her and the planes taking off on the far runways. It made the Cessna 310 that Dante had chartered for their flight to Colorado seem to be doing a shimmy on its rubber wheels. It also made Anne feel sick.
It wasn’t the damp heat alone, of course. It was sheer nerves, paroxysms of terror that attacked her stomach and made the palms of her hands clammy with sweat. She had never done anything like this before. How banal, but how true. She had never met a man secretly at an airport, never deliberately set out to disguise her appearance with dark glasses and a hastily bought blond wig. She had never bought fancy lingerie that she might wear only once, then destroy; never entrusted her body and good name to a man she hardly knew. It was no wonder she was terrified. It was a good thing she was equally determined or she would have cut and run.
Dante, walking beside her, looked grim. She thought he was no happier about the need for subterfuge than she was, maybe even less so. Oh, he smiled when he looked at her and told her how well she looked and how much fun they were going to have, but she didn’t think it was the most exciting day of his life. That was another reason for her anxiety. She felt as if she had forced him into this weekend since it was she who had suggested it, putting him in a position where he could not refuse to honor the commitment to be of service he had made so lightly. It might all be in her own mind, of course. She was of a generation of women used to waiting for the man to do the asking. To step out of her assigned role made her uncomfortable even as she enjoyed the freedom it gave her.
And she did feel free. Despite the terror and the sickness, there was rising inside her, like yeast in a warm kitchen, a swell of exhilaration. It was going to be all right when they were in the air. Everything would be better when they were finally out of New Orleans.
It was a jolting, jouncing ride. The tropical storm gathering somewhere northeast of the Yucatan peninsula had disturbed the normal weather patterns over both Texas and Louisiana. There were tornado watches in effect for southeast Texas that were expected to spread northward, becoming more severe as the storm moved closer to the mainland. It was going to be a wet and unsettled weekend along the gulf coast, a good one to leave behind.
The pilot of the Cessna was a Texan, young and tall and friendly, but with a professional air about him. Anne thought he had given Dante and herself a curious glance or two as they boarded, but for the most part he ignored them while he got on with his job. The plane was roomy. She and Dante sat on opposite sides of the narrow aisle so that they could talk across it. However, comments worth shouting above the roar of the engines were not easy to find. Once Dante leaned to point out a landmark below that was visible through her window. Her bare arm brushed his shoulder, and for an instant she could feel the musculature of his shoulder and the warmth of his skin through his shirt sleeve. The shock of pleasure it gave her was disturbing. A moment later, as he drew back, his fingers touched her crossed knee. So tightly strung was she that her leg muscles twitched, and her knee jerked in reflex as if it had been struck by a doctor’s precision hammer. She gave a light laugh but could feel the flush that mantled her face, and she was unable to meet his eyes in her embarrassment. It was some moments before she thought of anything to say to gloss over the incident.
Finally Anne took refuge from both her nerves and the strain of talking by opening a magazine. In time, the droning of the engines and intermittent swing and bounce of the aircraft, combined with her broken rest the night before, made her drowsy. She closed her eyes.
It was just as hot in Denver as it had been in New Orleans, but at least the air was dry and the serrated purple line of mountains that lay on the western horizon held the hope of change. Dante turned on the air-conditioning the minute the doors were closed on the four-wheel-drive Jeep Cherokee they picked up at the rental agency. With it going full blast, they hit Interstate 25 and headed out of town.
The change, when they left the superhighway and began to climb into the mountains, was almost miraculous. They turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the windows, letting the cool, fresh, oxygen-rich air filter through their fingers and swirl into the Jeep. They exclaimed over the awe-inspiring views that appeared around the curves, views doubly amazing because they were so scarce in low-lying Louisiana. The colors of the wildflowers, the blue lupine and brilliant red-orange Indian paintbrush, were so much more vivid than the wildflowers they knew, and the rugged rock formations, tumbled and jumbled and lying on a slant in every direction, were also a novelty. Anne pulled off her wig and tossed it in the back, loosening her hair with her fingers and letting the wind blow through it. Her spirits rose, and she and Dante looked at each other with sudden laughing pleasure laced with anticipation.
The mountain cabin was perched on a slope covered with pine and spruce and overlooked a winding, rippling stream edged with a tender green band of willows. Solidly embedded in the rock, with a huge boulder jutting up through the deck on one corner, the cabin had a view down the stream’s valley toward a far range of blue mountains veined With the silver of unmelted snow.
The house was a cabin in name only. Actually it was a
sprawling architect’s dream of cedar and glass, of angles and light surfaces and carefully planned vistas. There was a great room with a fireplace faced with gray stone to which lichen still clung. Indian rugs were scattered on the hardwood floors and hung as tapestries on the walls, and there was a wall of windows at one end reaching as high as the cathedral ceiling two floors above. Stairs made of polished mountain pine led up to the balcony, which surrounded the upper level of the great room and gave access to the bedrooms.
The focal point of the great room, and therefore of the house, was a bronze fastened to the tall stone face of the fireplace. Imposing in its size, it was a figure that was half Indian and half eagle caught in a moment of an attempt at soaring flight. Its wings were spread and straining, but flight was impossible, for the feet were embedded in rock. On the bronze Indian’s face was a look of superhuman effort combined with torment for the indignity of his earthbound state.
Staring at the bronze, Anne felt the pain and the joy of the artist. It mingled with her own, becoming a consuming ache inside her. Then Dante, moving close behind her, wrapped his arms around her and held her close. Forgetting the bronze, forgetting everything, she turned to him.
What Anne liked best was that Dante did not talk. She could not have borne the humiliation of it if, like Edison, he had mouthed vulgar, degrading words and lascivious suggestions as he made love because it excited him and made her focus on him. Dante was quiet and skillful and lovingly concerned. He touched her with the same knowing gentleness with which she touched herself, but with a firm persistence that made her feel as if she were made of fine crystal, strong and clear and resonant. Ecstasy, she found, was no less powerful for being silent.
Curled together, with their legs entwined and his chest against her back, they slept and breathed the cool, intoxicating, evergreen-scented mountain air that poured in the open window. They woke refreshed and made love again, then, driven by starvation, padded naked through the quiet house in search of food. It was then they found the note left by the young caretaker and his wife, the first time either had thought of where that couple might be. They had gone to the Springs, the note said, meaning to Colorado Springs, and would not be back until Sunday evening.
Dante and Anne took the food back to the bed, where they consumed the barbecue and beans, the sourdough bread and fruit and wine with gusto. Then putting aside the leftovers, they turned their attention to getting to know each other.
Made bold and even generous by her joy, Anne explored a man’s body for the first time. Thinking to bring pleasure, she found it. And when she began to cry, Dante held her and soothed her, and gave her peace in equal measure.
“You must be the last of the gentlemen, the last of the gentle men.”
Anne was sitting propped on three down pillows piled against the headboard of the king-size bed. She had a view through open, uncurtained second-floor windows, a view framed by the gray-blue of tall spruce trees growing around the house and of the distant mountains that veiled the morning in drifting white swaths of clouds. Her view also included the long stretch of Dante’s uncovered body. His head was in her lap, and she was feeding him grapes one by one in a playful parody of a thousand such scenes enacted between illicit lovers. It was the very corniness of it that appealed to her. She felt mushy and stupidly infatuated, all those things she had so carefully avoided in her life. Before she had thought them tasteless. Now, for this moment, she wanted nothing more.
Dante, crunching seedless red grapes between his square white teeth, swallowed before he answered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m no gentleman, I’m a restaurateur.”
“It’s a great waste of talent. You could make millions as a paid lover, maybe billions.”
“I don’t think I have the stamina for it,” he said sadly. “Now maybe when I was younger—”
“When you were younger, you probably didn’t have the…shall we say, training?”
He opened his eyes wide. “That’s the answer! You’re a genius, chére. You’ve discovered why gigolos went out of style. Young men today don’t have the patience, and by the time they learn, they’re too old.”
“Young men lack self-control.”
“A woman after my own heart—and gray hairs.”
“Of course,” she said pensively, “some older men aren’t much better.”
“Only the stupid ones.”
“And the ones too engrossed in getting off themselves to learn. There are a lot of those. As I said, you are the last of the gentlemen.”
He ignored the grape she held for him, his gaze steady upon hers. “That bad, huh?”
She moved her shoulders in a gesture of resignation. The motion jiggled her breasts. She was a little self-conscious about sitting there naked in the morning sun, but not too much and then mostly because she thought her breasts had seen too much of the effects of gravity. She kept her mind on that, deliberately blocking out thoughts of Edison.
“Then as I’ve said before—”
“I know, I know.” She absentmindedly ate the grape she held herself, at the same time transferring her attention to the mountain view and unconsciously inhaling deep breaths of the pure air flowing through the windows. “I’ve been thinking, since our lunch at the Riverwalk, in fact, that if I was on my own I could go back to school. I used to be good at languages. I could take some education courses, brush up on my French and maybe be a French teacher. Or I might use my contacts as a political wife to start a decorating business specializing in historic preservation; I think I would enjoy that.”
“Good for you, chère!” he said, his eyes widening in surprise.
“Money would be a problem; I’d have to change my style of living, though I do have a small income from my father’s estate. There’s the difficulty of abandoning a life I’ve spent more than twenty years building, of leaving my friends, my clubs and committees, my whole carefully constructed social world. I don’t kid myself about these things, because I know they would change. Making Josh understand and accept it would be another big step. But worst of all would be facing Edison and all the threats he will probably use to try to stop me from going.”
“If he becomes too abusive you can always go to the police—or to me.”
Her smile conveyed her gratitude for his last suggestion; still, she shook her head. “I just don’t know. It’s such an enormous change, and once it’s started, there’s no going back. The truth is, I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “It takes courage to stay as well as to go.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Let’s talk about something else, shall we. It took courage to come here, too, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Nor would I,” he answered, his voice firm as he followed her lead for a change of subject.
“So gallant.”
“I don’t know why you say that.” There was a hint of irritation in the words.
“Because it’s true. Because I know that your heart isn’t really in this.”
“And just where is my heart?” he demanded, pushing himself up and turning to face her with his upper body braced on one elbow.
“Back in New Orleans, I think,” she said quietly, “with Riva Staulet.”
He blinked, and a flush of color rose under his olive skin. “We’re friends, that’s all.”
“Oh, I don’t mind, really I don’t. I never thought you were dying of love for me.” She reached out to brush the dark and fine hair back over his ear where it had curled forward. “It’s just something in the way you mention her that makes me think you’ve been hung up on Riva for a long time. Just as Edison is, though in a different way.”
He turned his gaze to the view lying so conveniently before them. “If I’m hung up on her, as you say, maybe it’s because I want it that way. It almost seems that as long as she wasn’t free, then there was no risk for me. I had someone to love, someone to be with now and then. At the same time, I c
ould go my own way, could concentrate on my business. What do you think of that?”
He really wanted to know how she viewed his situation. It was a compliment. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it depends on how you feel now that she’s a widow.”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes I think that if she was ever going to be with me, she would have left Cosmo Staulet long ago, that he would never have been an obstacle. And I think that I don’t want to go my way alone anymore. I think about maybe having a family, children. It’s not too late, you know.”
“Heavens, no. Men in their fifties and sixties—”
He made a quick gesture with one hand. “I know all that, but the thing is, it could be too late for a real marriage, one of those married love affairs where even growing old and gray together sounds pretty good.”
She smiled. “As I said, the last of the gentlemen, and a romantic to boot.”
“If I’m such a perfect guy, why are you renouncing me?”
“I’m not, not really,” Anne protested.
“It sounds that way to me,” he said as he met her gaze.
“But you want a young woman who can have those children you mentioned.”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “Oh, well, if the urge to father little Romolis had been all that strong, I expect I’d have done it long ago instead of generating restaurants. It could well be I’d make a better grandfather, since you can always send the offspring home with their parents.”
“To be a grandfather, you have to be a father first,” she pointed out.
“Or marry somebody who already has a child, such as a son old enough to be a father.”
Anne hovered between wry humor and gratification. “You can’t be serious.”
Crimes of Passion Page 133
