Dark Angel 03: Broken Dream (14 page)

It was growing dark and we were in a penthouse room with the best view of the Carlsbad range – snow-covered mountains glowing with a pale-violet light as the sun finally vanished. Macy and Orlando had already gone with Charlie for a tour of the hotel facilities – spa, pool, gym – before cocktail hour in the private bar on the ground floor of the sprawling, chalet-style building.

‘There’s Adam.’ Natalia pointed out a tiny figure in a bright-blue jacket, wobbling down a nursery slope, then Phoebe falling over and being put back on her feet by Charlie. ‘So cute,’ she sighed. ‘We actually kept the press at bay for two whole hours so the kids could have fun.’

‘It looks cool.’ Actually, it did. I enjoyed watching Adam get his balance and gather speed. He grinned, then whirled his arms and yelled as he ploughed into soft snow and came to a sudden stop. But since my mind was still on the recent talk with Orlando, I must have come across to Natalia as less than enthusiastic.

‘Are you OK?’ She pressed Pause, just at the moment when the screen showed Adam’s smiling face in close up, looking directly at camera. ‘How are things with Orlando?’

‘Better, I guess.’ He’d said sorry, but what exactly did that mean? Sorry for the way he’d been acting, or sorry for what he was about to do to me? I felt the same old sword hanging over me; dreaded the cut of its blade.

‘So you don’t want to be sitting here watching Adam and Phoebe taking skiing lessons,’ Natalia realized. She pressed the Off button. ‘Right now you’d rather be with him.’

She checked herself in the mirror – dress-down movie-star style today included designer jeans and Louboutins, skinny black top and hair swept up but with tendrils escaping, chunky green stone necklace to match her eyes – and led the way into the elevator to take us down to the bar. ‘Don’t worry, Tania – Gwen won’t be here,’ she promised.

It turned out she was right. Classy cocktail hour at the Carlsbad featured a guy at a piano playing nineteen-forties swing, lots of colourful drinks served by incredibly good-looking bar staff, acres of black granite bar tops and a bunch of A-list actors having a good time.

Though there was no sign of Gwen, Rocky Seaton was there with his long-term girlfriend, Lisette (note: dark hair, well-defined, sculptured features). So was Angela Taraska, working the room in a low-cut scarlet dress and sky-high heels.

At the time I showed up with Natalia, Angela was cosying up to Larry King, who looked like he was enjoying the Taraska experience as a perk of the job. But soon after we arrived, Angela split from Larry and zoned in on Jack.

Jack was at the far end of the bar, sitting on a stool, hunched over an empty glass. From a distance it looked as if he’d started the party early.

I watched Angela sit beside him and give a lip-gloss smile as she leaned in with her head tilted at a flirty angle. She asked him a question, listened to the answer then wiped the grin. Quickly she slid off her stool, fixed the smile back on and made a beeline back to Larry – aim again and fire.

‘Did you see that!’ Macy had sneaked up behind me. ‘What an idiot.’

‘Why, what did she do?’ I imagined an exchange of words – Angela coming on to Jack as usual, Jack slurring his speech, cussing, cutting her down. Angela in retreat.

Macy laughed. ‘She thought Charlie was Jack. How dumb can you get?’

I looked again at the figure sitting at the bar. There was a handsome bartender nearby – around twenty, fair-haired, Nordic fitness freak – who filled the empty glass with something that definitely wasn’t whisky. The purchaser lifted it to his lips with a steady hand.

‘Charlie!’ Macy called to him across the room and he waved back. He set off towards us without stumbling or swaying, stopping only to have a short conversation with Lucy Young, then with Rocky and Lisette.

‘Charlie knows everyone here,’ Macy sighed impatiently. ‘They all want a piece of him.’

‘So where’s Jack?’ I asked. By this time Natalia had moved off to chat with a bald-headed guy I recognized as a member of the technical crew.

Macy shrugged. ‘In the air, somewhere between LaGuardia and Aspen. He missed his plane so they hired a private jet to fetch him.’

Watching Charlie network, I made a quick mental note that the great Jack Kane was rapidly becoming superfluous, not only professionally but socially too. The piano player launched into a new number, and meanwhile I scanned the dimly lit room. ‘Have you seen Orlando?’ I asked.

‘Not in a while.’

‘But he did come down to the bar with you and Charlie?’

She nodded. ‘He seemed quiet though. Said he wasn’t in the mood to party so I guess he left.’

‘Where would he go?’ Apart from anything else, he was our driver back to Bitterroot so he couldn’t stray far.

‘He’ll be back,’ Macy assured me. As Charlie finished talking with Rocky, Macy broke away to claim him, but glancing round at me she seemed to have second thoughts and hurried back. ‘Sorry, Tania, I wasn’t totally honest with you about Orlando.’

‘You do know where he is?’

‘Yeah, he didn’t just leave the party for no reason. He got a text from Gwen.’

‘Saying what?’

‘This time I really don’t know. But whatever it was, he was out of here in a hurry. Don’t tell him I told you, OK?’

Macy left me with the blade swinging down and cutting into my flesh. Multiple stab wounds to the heart.

Blindly I left the room and ran through the quiet hotel lobby, knocking down a sign that said ‘Private Party – No Entry’, rushing out into the cold, dark night.

Alone under the stars I struggled for a new perspective. I was small; the universe was immense. However bad I was feeling, what happened here and now made no impact on the fact that the world turned and orbited the sun, the moon waxed and waned, stars exploded in a cloud of gas and fell from the sky.

I welcomed the darkness and the blasts of icy air as I walked down the drive and through the gates away from the hotel towards the ski-lift terminal – a vaulted structure on giant steel stilts with a viewing platform overlooking steep, undulating slopes. Cables radiated from the far end of the terminal, each stretching high on to the mountain, supported by steel pillars – the only man-made features in a white, empty landscape.

I sat on a frost-covered bench beneath the raised platform, fighting the urge to cry, not noticing the two figures – a guy and a girl – that walked down the mountain until one of them strode towards me and shone a flashlight in my face. It was his loose, loping walk that I recognized.

‘Tania, you went too far.’ Orlando directed the beam into my eyes and seized my hand. He dragged me to my feet. Gwen hung back and came to a stop about five metres away. ‘How does it feel? Come on, tell me – does it feel good to get Gwen thrown off the movie? Do you think you won some kind of battle?’

More pain for my battered heart. ‘I didn’t do it,’ I gasped. ‘I swear it wasn’t my idea.’

‘You’re a liar!’ he sneered. ‘Who else has a reason? It was you – you made this happen. Come here, Gwen. Tell Tania what your brother said to you. Let her see what she’s done!’

‘Don’t!’ I pleaded, trying to twist myself free of his grasp. The force of his anger left me reeling. I felt sick with shock.

‘Orlando, don’t hurt her.’ Gwen came forward and took his free hand. She was shivering in the moonlight, her face ghostly pale. ‘Leave her alone, please!’

‘OK so I’ll tell you,’ he went on, still gripping my wrist. ‘Charlie admitted he was under pressure. He said he was carrying out orders and he was sorry Gwen lost her job but he was sure Natalia would soon get her some work on another movie. But right here and now she had to step back and give you some space. You, Tania! You’re the reason.’

‘I didn’t ask anyone to do that, I swear.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t, Orlando.’ Again Gwen pleaded for him to let me go. ‘It was Natalia’s idea to protect Tania. I know she really values you both. It was her way of fixing things between you.’

‘They didn’t need fixing!’ Beside himself with anger, Orlando finally released me and flung me sideways so that I fell to my knees in the snow. ‘And if they did, that’s between Tania and me – no one else.’

It was Gwen who helped me to my feet. ‘I understand,’ she told me under her breath. ‘I can see how you might have got the wrong idea about me and Orlando.’

I stepped back, saw her pretty, delicate face in the moonlight and was about to believe her but then I suddenly glimpsed something dark and cold in her eyes that stopped my breath.

‘Yeah, well, I can’t,’ Orlando stormed. One by one the ties that bound our two hearts were stretched to breaking point. ‘I blame you for this, Tania, and only you. You went too far. It’s too much.’

‘Orlando, come back,’ Gwen pleaded, as, with a gesture of disgust, he strode down the slope towards the hotel. ‘Tania, I’m so sorry …’

I stared at her and again the softly spoken words didn’t fit with the cruel glint in her eyes.

‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ she said, turning to run after Orlando.

I was alone again, with the same feeling you would get if you were stranded on a narrow ledge overlooking a frozen crevasse. Fear paralyses you, almost stops your heart as the ice creaks, the ledge crumbles and at your feet the glacier starts to shift. My whole world was splitting and sliding, my starry-night dream was broken. I would never get the old Orlando back.

I
 don’t know how long I stayed on the steel bench beneath the ski station, only that I was shivering with cold and shock when Charlie eventually came to fetch me.

‘Gwen told me you were out here,’ he began. ‘I figured you might need a shoulder to cry on.’

I let out a heavy sigh. ‘My life is all out of control,’ I groaned.

Immediately he tuned in to my mood. ‘I know the feeling. It’s like you’re being carried along on a huge avalanche and you have no power to stop it. You’re just one little tiny figure alone on the mountain.’

‘Exactly.’ Our synchronicity dragged a fleeting smile out of me. ‘You’re smart, Charlie.’

He smiled back. ‘No, really. I can see you’re going through a tough time, that’s all.’

‘How can I get Orlando to understand me the way you do?’ I asked. ‘I almost did, down there in the parking lot. For a few seconds I broke down the barrier that went up between us when we were in New York, but that was before he found out what happened to your sister.’

‘And now?’

‘Now he blames me and we’re being torn apart. It hurts so much.’

‘I truly am sorry,’ Charlie said, sitting close beside me. ‘I hate to see you like this.’

Aching for comfort, for a way out of my cold, deserted loneliness, I let him put an arm round my shoulder.

‘Here, take a drink,’ he said, pulling a bottle from his pocket. ‘It’s strong, so just a small one.’

Without pausing to think, I took a swig from the bottle. The alcohol burned as it hit the back of my throat.

Charlie grinned. ‘I’m like a St Bernard dog. They’re the ones who come into the mountains looking for avalanche victims with a miniature barrel of brandy strapped to their collars. Did it hit the spot?’

‘Whoa! What’s in that bottle?’

‘Don’t ask. But it’s good, huh?’ He took it and tilted his head to take a drink. ‘At least it makes you feel warm, even if it’s only an illusion. Here, Tania, take this.’ Without waiting for me to protest, he slid out of his jacket and placed it round my shoulders. I shuddered as I felt his body heat still in the jacket and the gentleness of his fingertips as they brushed my neck.

‘Now it’s you who’ll freeze to death,’ I mumbled.

‘Not me – I’m the tough-guy stunt double, remember.’

His jacket felt and smelled good in the crisp night air. I accepted the bottle and took another drink. ‘Remember when you told me we were just specks of dust?’

‘Outside the boathouse? The sky was like this; the moon was a thin slice of melon. We said how we loved star-gazing.’

‘I was sitting here thinking the same thing all over again – we’re tiny and so are our problems. But then they all blew up in my face and grew huge again. I just found out how much Orlando hates me.’

‘Hate’s a strong word.’

‘It’s true – he does.’

‘He must be out of his mind.’ Drawing me to my feet, Charlie made me slip my arms into his jacket then took my hand to lead me off the mountain.

‘Whoa!’ I said again. By now my head was swimming. I had to rest against him as we walked to the hotel. More than swimming, actually. It was as if the top of my head had come off and released my dark thoughts and my inhibitions all at once. They flitted like bats around a church steeple then flew off into the ether.

‘Orlando doesn’t realize how lucky he is.’ Steering me away from the main entrance, Charlie led me down a side path between two high banks of cleared snow towards a side door into an annexe to the main hotel. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make that sound so cheesy.’

‘No, it’s OK. Thank you,’ I told him. ‘You’re always good to me, Charlie. It means a lot.’

We were through the door, walking hand in hand down a warm, carpeted corridor into a room where the moon and stars shone through the window and where there was a cream leather sofa, a table with a TV and a bed with a crimson satin throw.

‘Where are we?’ I wanted to know. I wasn’t feeling scared, just curious.

‘This is my room. Come over here, sit down.’ He drew me to the sofa and took off the jacket.

‘Hey, what about Macy?’ I realized suddenly. ‘She won’t like us being alone like this.’

‘So?’ He stayed close, snuggling me against him.

‘You don’t care?’

He smiled. ‘What exactly did she tell you?’

‘Everything.’

‘What toothpaste I use? What I eat for breakfast?’

‘Pretty much.’ I grew fascinated by the colours in Charlie’s eyes. Macy was right – they were hazel mixed with a darker chestnut brown and flecks of green. I liked the smoothness of his skin, the angles of his cheekbones and jaw.

‘She told you we’re an item?’

‘Totally.’ I floated. All thoughts, good and bad, had flitted out of the hole in the top of my head. Everything around me looked warm and inviting – the soft red cushions behind my back, the yellow glow of the bedside lamp.