Fire in the Wind

by Alexandra Sellers

  She was shaken enough to answer, "I told you my husband was very ill for several years before he died." She wanted him to believe that was the reason, not wanting him to know the hunger had been for him because he reminded her of Jace.

  "For several years?" he asked, astonished. "And you never cheated on your sick husband, little widow?"

  "Of course not!" she snapped. Her eyes flickered into flame with her anger.

  "There's no 'of course' about it, Vanessa," he said. "In this day and age not many women would remain sexually faithful to a dying man, no matter how loyal they otherwise were."

  Yes, many men had told her that, particularly Tom Marx, who had never stopped trying to start an affair with her. But Vanessa hadn't been able to give in to their reasoning or their demands.

  "In any case, he's been dead for a year," Jake Conrad said cynically. "In all that time has no one tried to efface the memory of your beloved Larry?"

  Yes, they had tried. But she merely shook her head at him, wondering what would have happened if Tom had ever kissed her the way this man had just kissed her. A man she had met only a couple of hours ago.

  He said slowly, "I begin to see why you came looking for Jace. It was for more than just a nostalgic affair, wasn't it? You wanted him to release you from the memory of your husband. You thought you could give in to him because he'd made love to you before, isn't that it? And then you'd be free of Larry's memory."

  Only it wasn't Larry's memory she'd needed to be freed from; it was Jace's. She understood that now.

  She'd needed to see him irrevocably tied to another woman so that she could try to find her happiness without him....That was why she'd dreaded finding him unhappily married, because if Jace had still wanted her after all this time, if he'd wanted her on any terms at all, she couldn't have refused him.

  "When we were kids," that caressing voice was suddenly saying, "everybody thought Jace and I were twins. You almost thought I was Jace yourself."

  But that hadn't been because of his looks. Jace's face had been so disfigured by the scars of the accident, still fresh and angry when he had left her to go home, that physically she might not have recognized him now. It wasn't the fact that he looked like his cousin that caught at her throat, it was the little things: his eyes when he was laughing, his voice, his hands. In other ways, Jace and his cousin were quite different. Jace had been thinner, more wiry. His cousin had a muscular build and was at least an inch or two taller than Jace.

  "You could tell yourself that I was Jace and get the cure from me," the voice finished. "I'd play the game."

  Vanessa gasped in outrage. "How dare you?"

  "It isn't I who will need to be daring," said Jake. "But you look like a woman who's never lacked for courage."

  She had left him then without a word, pushing coldly past him, her mind an angry race of emotions she hadn't dared to examine too closely. It had been hours before she had fallen asleep last night, and now she was paying for it, her mind slow, unable to concentrate on the show.

  She was sitting in the last row of seats, and when the show broke for coffee, Jake Conrad was standing behind her. In the sudden hubbub of sound in the room he bent down to speak into her ear.

  "Can I take you to dinner tonight?" he asked, his voice a half-whisper. Vanessa jerked back from his lips as though he had bitten her: she was unprepared for the sensations that shot along her skin at his near touch.

  Tom, getting to his feet beside her, threw her a look and then one at Jake, but he said nothing. In a moment he was moving along the row in the wake of a woman buyer from Toronto he had met last night.

  "What for?" Vanessa demanded coldly, all the more hostile because she felt so threatened by his close presence. "More of the same? I had enough last night, thank you."

  "So that I can apologize," Jake said firmly, fixing her with a look that she couldn't break.

  "You're sorry, are you?" she asked, raising one eyebrow and, except for the tingling sensation his nearness had caused in her neck and breast and arm, feeling much more like herself and in control than she had last night.

  "Yes," he said. "Of course I am."

  "So apologize now," she returned. "I don't need food to make me susceptible to apology for ugly behaviour."

  Other people in the row were having trouble getting out past her, and he took her arm over the chair backs and led her to the aisle.

  "Ah," he said, "but I need good food to drown out the flavour of the crow I'm going to be eating." He smiled his slightly crooked smile at her, and his eyes for a brief moment held the warm intensity of Jace's gaze. "Humour me," he said quietly. "I want to see you."

  She found that she simply could not say no. However much her reason told her to stay away from a man who so obviously had an axe to grind with her, her emotions did not want to obey. Talking to Jake was a bittersweet reminder of Jace that she could not leave alone. She looked him in the eye, tasting the sensation of logic losing the battle to emotion.

  "I've heard that British Columbia salmon is a taste not to be missed," she smiled with a sudden exhilarating feeling of devil-may-care.

  He gave her an admiring smile for the manner of her capitulation. "Nine-thirty?" he asked.

  This evening's showing of day dresses was scheduled to end at eight-thirty, but it would be later than that before she could get away to her room to change. He had judged it nicely. Vanessa nodded, and in answer to an imperative wave from a friend across the room she moved away, uncomfortably aware that she didn't want to.

  Colin James was a designer with whom she had studied at school; now he designed medium-priced sweaters for a New York firm. They had remained friendly over the years, following the changes in each other's careers, talking shop over innumerable coffees in the little greasy spoon that was midway between their two places of work.

  "Super stuff, darling!" Colin said now, kissing her cheek. "I especially liked the last two numbers. Tell me how you squeezed them by the Philistine."

  They always called their current employer the Philistine because, to a greater or lesser extent, the age-old conflict between business and art was always present between manufacturer and designer. Colin's eye was excellent. He had unerringly picked the designs she had had to wage a battle royal with Tom to get included in the fall line. Vanessa smiled delightedly.

  "They'll be the better sellers, won't they?" she said. "But it was a battle. I only half convinced him to go for fall colours. Tom's convinced that if they buy blue in New York they'll buy blue everywhere."

  It was a fact of fashion that generally Canadian women preferred the soft warm beiges, reds and browns of fall to the colder blues their sisters south of the border liked to wear, but Tom, attempting to break into the Canadian market for the first time with this trade show, didn't like change, and he didn't like to be told. Only the two outfits that he did not like were being offered in the full range of those autumn colours, and Tom confidently expected that those designs would be ignored by the major Canadian buyers. Vanessa was aware that Tom had finally given way to her ideas only because in some odd way he wanted her to fail.

  "You're going to fall flat on your face, Vanessa," he had said at last, capitulating. "Flat on your face." And the tone in his voice had told her Tom would like the taste of that.

  "Good for you," said Colin, who had given her this pointer on the Canadian market. Colin's firm had been marketing in Canada for some time. "Am I going to see you tomorrow afternoon?"

  "For the sweater show?" she asked, and at his nod, "I'll be there. Are you coming tonight?"

  In the push of the crowd they moved closer to the bar, and, deep in their shop-talk, obtained coffee. When they had moved away to a more open space by a wall, Colin interrupted himself suddenly to say, "Who's the eagle-eyed admirer, darling?"

  "What?" Vanessa asked stupidly.

  "The moody corsair over there who can't take his eyes off you," said Colin, who had a knack for labelling people. "The one you were talking to earlier."
>
  "Can't take his eyes off me!" she repeated in amazement. "Who...?" She turned her head in the direction Colin was looking and caught Jake Conrad's gaze head-on, getting the full emotional content of it in one stunning blast before he disguised it. Vanessa sucked in her breath in audible dismay—because the look was one of brooding fiery anger, an anger whose heat she could almost feel.

  Jake Conrad didn't look like a man who intended to apologize to her for anything at all.

  * * *

  The evening showing of day dresses was little short of disaster for TopMarx. The order of the showing of the dresses got mixed up; several of Louisa's accessories were almost garishly wrong; and the model also mistakenly came out in Vanessa's best design, which was a size too big for her. She looked like a frump. To Vanessa it all looked very bad indeed, and Colin, who was a perfectionist in matters of dress and style and who sat beside her for the show, did not help. In a steady stream of asides he unerringly picked out every mismatched accessory, every single thing that went wrong. When the tiny Louisa came out in the too-large wool shirtwaist that was the pride of Vanessa's heart he groaned and shut his eyes.

  "Navy shoes and a russet tent," he muttered. "A bit girl scoutish, isn't it, darling?"

  The thing was that Colin took what he called sartorial solecisms personally, so that even walking down Fifth Avenue with him could be an exercise in torment. He was an avid clothes watcher and he would tear a passing pedestrian to pieces in a few choice phrases, always in a scathing undertone that only Vanessa could hear. But this was the first time she had been personally subjected to his systematic biting sarcasm. The fact that he was attacking not her designs but the presentation really only made it worse. When her company's parade mercifully concluded, Vanessa, with Colin in tow, stormed out to the dressing rooms and through the door marked TopMarx.

  The first thing she saw was the reflection in the large lighted mirror that ran above the make-up table all along one wall. The mirror showed her Louisa's white naked back, crossed at the bottom by a very tiny, very frilly thong and held at the curving waist by the bronzed hands of the man to whom she was passionately clinging. The second thing she saw, turning her eyes from the mirror to the actual figures in the centre of the room, was that the bronzed hands and the dark hair above Louisa's fairness belonged to Jake Conrad.

  For a reason Vanessa couldn't define, it was the ultimate outrage. Her anger threatened to swamp her. In a voice of chipped ice she said to Jake Conrad, who was just lifting his eyes to hers, "Do you think you could make love to my models on their time, please?"

  Louisa, who had been oblivious to everything except Jake's embrace, gasped and whirled, covering her breasts with her arms. All at once Vanessa realized that most of the mistakes in tonight's show had involved Louisa. She felt an almost overwhelming urge to slap the pretty, vapid face.

  "You could at least knock," Louisa protested sullenly, at which Vanessa looked at her so witheringly the model's gaze dropped, and she turned mutely to reach for the bright turquoise robe that was draped half on a chair, half on the floor behind her.

  Vanessa held the door wide, aware that Jake Conrad was looking at her through hooded calculating eyes, a crooked half-smile on his wide lips.

  "Would you get out please?" she demanded.

  Before he could respond, Louisa said in her high voice, slipping on the robe, "It's his hotel, you know!" Her tone was childishly triumphant, as though this was a telling blow in a close battle. Vanessa gazed at her, her anger sharpening at this evidence that Louisa was showing no professional remorse over the way she had botched the show. She wondered suddenly if Louisa had been trying to get back at her for last night, when she had lost Jake to Vanessa at the party.

  "I'm sure that gives Mr. Conrad special rights with you," Vanessa said silkily, in a voice whose sheer female bitchery surprised her, "but he can hardly expect it to work with everyone. Mr. Conrad?" she finished, indicating the still open door.

  "Vanessa," he returned politely, inclining his head as though at a greeting. His voice was soft, but his dark eyes took in everything. He took the doorknob from her clasp and closed the door softly as he went out.

  Vanessa ripped into Louisa with the ferocity of an avenging angel. As soon as the door closed behind Jake Conrad she began coldly listing the mistakes the model had made that evening, outfit by outfit, counting them off on her fingers with a catalogue's accuracy. When she got to the issue of the size of the russet dress each word came out like a small shard of ice.

  "That dress," she said, through her teeth, "is for the sophisticated white-collar working woman who has some sense of style. You looked like a charity patient at Bellevue Hospital. It was supposed to be worn by Martita, who came out instead in the navy A-line. You were supposed to show that. Now just what the hell was going on here tonight?"

  Colin was leaning negligently against the door saying nothing, but Vanessa was wishing she had asked him to leave, too. Louisa's sullen pretty mouth was setting into a mulish line and it was probably a mistake to have taken her to task in front of an audience. Angrily she wondered where Tom was. He should have been here, too, or was his fashion eye so bad that he hadn't seen what had happened?

  "It didn't look that bad," Louisa said. "It's a shirtwaist—and anyway, I pulled it in at the waist and rolled up the cuffs."

  "Why were you wearing it?" Vanessa demanded.

  "Because I was busy talking and Martita was nagging me to put on the navy because I was going to be late and finally I just told her to put it on herself, and she did, so I put on hers."

  Vanessa closed her eyes and thanked God for the Martitas of the world, who felt some sense of responsibility to the job. Martita was a regular TopMarx model who had travelled with them from New York. Louisa and two other local models had been hired on their arrival in Vancouver for the duration of the show. Vanessa wondered what kind of evening Martita had had, trying to organize not only herself but Louisa, too.

  "Where are Martita and the others now?" she asked.

  "Alison and Jenny are over at the West Coast Sportswear dressing room." Most of the local models worked for more than one manufacturer at these shows. "And I don't know where Martita is." Her tone added, and I don't care!

  Vanessa took a breath, the anger somehow drained out of her. "All right, you won't be needed here any more. You may as well take your things with you when you leave tonight."

  Louisa's mouth opened. "But the show goes on for three more days!" she protested.

  "We'll be getting someone else in," Vanessa said. Tom wouldn't argue this decision. If absolutely necessary three girls could do the show.

  "But this is my first job!" she wailed, like a child being robbed of a promised treat.

  "Well, watch out it isn't your last," Vanessa said unfeelingly, making a mental note to tear a strip off the woman at the modelling agency. "If you don't act like a professional you won't be hired as one."

  Louisa's eyes narrowed and glinted green as she gazed insolently back at Vanessa. "Well, anyway, I don't care," she said. "Jake's taking me out to dinner tonight, and I won't need a job after that. Jake'll look after me. He's always wanted to look after me, and tonight I'll tell him he can."

  Chapter 3

  At ten o'clock that night Vanessa lay in bed thinking very unkind thoughts indeed about Louisa Hayward. She had gone to bed early in the hopes of catching up on last night's missed sleep, but so far she hadn't even bothered to put out the bedside lamp; she knew her mind was too busy to let her sleep.

  She had been looking forward to dinner with Jake Conrad, damn him. How dare he suddenly decide to take out another woman, just like that? Men! Vanessa sat up and punched her pillow. What did they see in all that vapid beauty?

  She was hungry, she realized with increasing irritation. Famished, in fact. Suddenly she was no longer counting up Louisa's sins, but Jake Conrad's. She was hungry because she'd deliberately not eaten since lunch in order to be able to do justice to B.C. salmon! He could at
least have told her! Damn all the pretty, frail blondes in the world, anyway, and all the cruel dark men with Jace's eyes....

  She heard the quiet knock on her door with welcome relief. Someone to take her mind off her troubles, that was what she needed, and this could only be Colin, since Tom was entertaining the buyer from Toronto tonight. Vanessa had wanted to point out that the woman was buyer for only a small chain of Toronto-area stores and that he'd be better advised to entertain the buyer from Eaton's or Simpsons, whose chains extended right across the country. But she didn't. If Tom wanted to put pleasure before business that was his affair.

  The knock sounded again as she was pulling her bathrobe from the hanger, and she sang out, "Coming!" as she slipped into its black terrycloth folds and tied it around her. Vanessa was naked, or she wouldn't have bothered with a robe. She would have greeted Colin in pyjamas without even thinking about it. In her first year of college she and Colin had shared an apartment platonically, and he was used to seeing her in just about every state of undress.

  But a moment later she was very glad of the robe. It wasn't Colin James at her door, but Jake Conrad.

  "Hello!" She blinked, her hand going to her loose hair in self-conscious surprise. "What are you doing here?"

  He smiled at her. "You're a little late," he said tolerantly, as though that was what he expected from a woman. "I thought I'd just check to make sure you hadn't locked yourself in or something. May I come in?" he asked, doing so. He paused beside her, looking down. Suddenly his eyes narrowed.

  The only light in the room was the lamp by the bed, and he seemed to catch sight of the rumpled sheets and take in her lack of make-up and the black robe all at once.

  "Are you in bed?" he demanded in surprised concern. "What's wrong? Are you sick?"

  Just in time she remembered how angry with him she was. "Yes, I am. Sick of you. What happened—Louisa pass out already?"

  He had taken the door out of her hands and closed it, and he turned his dark head now and eyed her in mute surprise. After a moment he said slowly, "Let me get this straight. You were going to stand me up tonight because you saw a naked girl clinging to me?"