Fire in the Wind (18 page)

"But that'll take—"

"That'll take time. God." He shook his head. "Where the hell does all this youthful eagerness come from? You're twenty-nine years old and you still make me feel the way you did when you were nineteen: old." He let out a bark of self-deprecating laughter. "In my more sanguine moments I used to tell myself that that enthusiasm for life would rub off on me." Lou heaved a sigh. "All right, Vanessa. Leave it with me. Come back and pick me up for lunch and I'll tell you what I think."

She went through the rest of the morning in a daze, listening to Tom trying to blackmail and wheedle the fabric salesmen into increasing his orders on the colours he had ordered too lightly for the sales he had made in Vancouver. She felt completely detached from everything around her—the truly pressing reality was in her head.

Lou Standish was the second oldest of the four Standish sons. He had got married at twenty-seven shortly after opening his own legal practice and now, at forty-two, wore three-piece navy suits and well-cut hair and kept in shape at his club. Larry had never been very close to him and as a result nor had Vanessa. That ten years ago he had been thinking of divorcing Marjorie to marry herself astounded Vanessa. If it was true, he had never let her see the slightest sign of it. He had driven her home from a party once, she remembered suddenly, on a night when the Standish family had all been together in their parents' house and Larry had drunk a lot. Lou had behaved to her like an elder brother on the way home, listening with polite attention while she babbled her excitement about just beginning college to study fashion design.

"No, you said I could increase my order any time up to July for immediate delivery," Tom was saying in a hectoring voice, and Vanessa surfaced briefly to watch the blond, blow-dried young salesman try to appease a lying unreasonable customer who was obviously trying to pull a fast one but who could not be told so.

"Ah, now, Tom, you know I can't guarantee...."

Vanessa shut his voice out, her restless spirit feeling caged. While not looking anything like him, the salesman reminded her of Lou Standish. Of course he hadn't told her how he felt, ten years ago! He was afraid. Afraid of life, afraid of taking events into his own hands.

So he had looked around, not for an opportunity but for a convenient excuse to run away from whatever threatened his orderly life. Nineteen and thirty-two were not such disparate ages. Lou had lied to himself.

Involuntarily her thoughts flew to Jake Conrad, and a small laugh escaped her. He at least was a man who saw what he wanted and tried to get it! He had tried just about every way there was to get her into bed with him—from sweet seduction to outright bribery! And he made no bones about it.

Tom and the salesman were looking at her expectantly, probably because of the laugh. Vanessa reached out for her coffee cup and patted her chest lightly.

"Sorry, something in my throat," she apologized, wondering how they would look at her if she told them,
I was just remembering that a man offered me a small but promising gold mine if I would sleep with him!

When she spoke her voice came out perfectly clearly with no hint of anything in her throat, and she wanted to laugh again at the wonderful stupidity of life. The expression on their faces had moved from expectancy to blankness to, now, polite wariness. It wasn't the laugh, she perceived suddenly. They must have been talking to her.

"Sorry," she said again. "Did you say something? I'd wandered."

Tom's be-ringed hand caressed the gold chains and amulets around his throat.

"Brian's suggesting the wool-polyester blend as a substitute for the 077 line," he said. "We can get delivery next week. What do you think?"

Vanessa reached out to pick up the yard-square sample of coffee-coloured fabric lying uppermost on the desk. She shrugged lightly.

"Tom, it's the same stuff we decided against in the spring. It's got too hard a hand and too much of a gloss. You won't be able to sub this without asking your customers first, and that would take two or three weeks with the Canadian buyers. There's no point in talking delivery next week."

"Excuse me—"

They looked up to see the receptionist at the door. "There's a long-distance call for you, Vanessa. Do you want to take it? Line three."

Conferences were interrupted for long-distance calls because otherwise it meant calling the client back on TopMarx money. With a quick nod to Susan, Vanessa reached out across the desk and picked up the receiver while Tom pushed down the lighted button for her.

"Vanessa here," she said, and suddenly there
was
something in her throat, because the voice on the other end of the wire was Jake Conrad's.

"How's the rat race?" he asked, and just at that moment a siren shrieked along Seventh Avenue, ululating over the general hubbub of horns and engines that until now she had been blocking out of her hearing.

There had to be a better way to live.

"There has to be a better way to live," she said with a smile in her voice.

"Oh, yes," Jake said softly, and just for a split second she imagined that that was somehow a threat. She pushed the thought aside.

"Did you get the contract?" he asked.

"Last night," she said. All the excitement of her new future surged up in her again and she wanted to laugh.

"And is it signed and on its way back to me?"

She did laugh now. "Not yet!" she protested. "I'm having a... a friend look at it for me." She swallowed convulsively. She had almost said "a lawyer," forgetting that Tom was listening to the conversation, forgetting everything except that....

"And what does your friend think?"

She wished she could get off this subject. Tom was not stupid. In a moment he would realize it was not a client she was talking to.

"Well, they're very attractive designs and he thinks you've got potential, but he doesn't advise dropping everything too quickly. He thinks he'd be able to advise better next week...."

"What did I tell you about lawyers?" said Jake, correctly interpreting the coded message. "Is your boss listening to this?"

"I can't really go into it now," she said apologetically. "I'm just in the middle of a meeting, but if you'd like to...."

Tom had realized it was no customer she was talking to, and he had no intention of letting his employee's time and his own be taken up discussing the possible talents of a would-be designer.

"Get them to call you at home," he said impatiently, loudly enough for whoever was at the other end of the phone to hear.

"Jake, listen, I—"

"Domineering son, isn't he?" Jake said mildly. "Do you have to put up with that kind of rudeness a lot?"

"On paid time," she agreed.

"The hell with paid time," responded Jake. "Paying a wage doesn't entitle one human to be rude to another."

Tom had picked up the wool-polyester swatch and now he began to talk in a loud, deliberately carrying voice to the young salesman.

"Suppose we take a few hundred yards of this to keep us going till you can fill our order on the worsted?" he demanded. "How soon could...?"

Jake was speaking again and Vanessa plugged her other ear to shut out Tom's voice. "Say again?"

"I said, doesn't that kind of behaviour make you angry? You might be talking to someone very important to you. For all he knows, you could be talking to an old lover whom you desperately want to see again." His voice dropped. "Or a brand new lover whom you'd like to impress. Aren't you a little annoyed?"

He was right; it
was
making her angry, although normally she took Tom in her stride. She could feel adrenaline pumping into her bloodstream, making her heart beat fast in the ancient anticipation of battle.

"Yes," she said, "l am."

"I've got the perfect cure," said Jake.

She thought she knew what that was. "Really?" she said, laughing a little. "What is it?"

"You look at him and you say, 'Tom,' clearly and firmly," directed Jake.

More adrenaline chased through her heart and brain.

"I...."

"Just say it. 'Tom'," he directed.

An imp of irresponsibility took charge of her brain.
Well, why not,
it demanded.
What the hell!

"Tom," she said, clearly and firmly, and again, "Tom."

Silence fell in the little office whose walls were crowded with hanging garments of every shape and colour. Tom and the salesman looked at her, Tom's mouth still open on an interrupted word. Jake heard the silence at the other end.

"Now say, 'Tom, I quit'," he directed calmly.

Vanessa opened her mouth on a stifled gasp and froze.

"I guarantee you he'll never be rude to you again," said that low voice. A tone of persuasiveness might have made her wary, made her think, but Jake Conrad sounded detached, business-like, like a doctor telling her to soak in warm water. "'Tom, I quit'. That's all it will take. You'll enjoy it."

The imp considered it with delight.

"Tom, I quit," said Vanessa.

Tom's jaw, which had been on the point of closing, fell farther open, so that he looked like a fish gasping for oxygen. Vanessa stifled an insane desire to giggle. Jake was right: this was fun. She looked at Tom and knew he would never have any power over her again.

"What in God's name—?" began Tom angrily.

"Does he look like a fish?" Jake asked with calm curiosity, and then he laughed as though he could no longer contain it. Vanessa bit her lip against the need to join in.

The young salesman diplomatically stood up and disappeared out the door. "Tell him you're renouncing the fleshpots forever and—" Jake began.

"I'm emigrating to Canada," Vanessa told Tom firmly. "I'll be leaving in two weeks."

"Ah, Vanessa," said Jake's approving voice in her ear. "There isn't a woman in the world to match you."

Not for stupidity, that was for sure, Vanessa thought, suddenly calm. A little thrill of dismayed fear rushed up her spine. Well, she had burned her boats this time, and no mistake.

"I'll talk to you later," she said briefly, and hung up the phone.

Tom shouted angrily, "What the hell are you talking about, Vanessa?"

Chapter 8

Lou cast her a fulminating glance over his Perrier and lime. "Resigned already?" he repeated. "My God, Vanessa, what for? Why didn't you wait?"

An explanation of the why would leave him thinking her even more witless than he plainly already did. Vanessa shrugged. "I let myself get cornered, Lou," she said. The irritation that she felt both for her own silly rashness and for Jake Conrad coloured her tone.

"Oh, well, it's done now," Lou said. He seemed perfectly willing to imagine that it was Tom Marx who had cornered her and forced her into resigning, and Vanessa wondered if that was what made the difference between a criminal lawyer and a corporate lawyer: the instinct, or the lack of it, for querying human motives.

"Is there going to be a problem with the contract?" she asked.

Lou leaned back to allow the waiter to set down a crisp salad in front of him. Then there followed a pause while he eyed her curiously. "Funny," he said.

"What?"

"Funny how often one misses what's right under one's nose. I've always thought of you as having more than average intelligence and more than average talent. Now I have to take a good long look and wonder whether I shouldn't revise that estimate to brilliant."

"What?"
Oddly, her heart began to beat hard, as though some message of fear had been transmitted to her body.

"It's a pretty good contract, Vanessa," Lou said, reaching into his inside breast pocket and pulling the document out. "I don't think I could have drawn one up better if I'd been doing it for you myself."

Vanessa breathed a shaky laugh and felt an unbearable tension she hadn't been aware of leave her body.

"Congratulations, Vanessa—someone wants you very badly and they're willing to pay to get you." Vanessa stifled a laugh.
Yes, indeed,
she thought.
If you only knew how right you are!

He went through the contract clause by clause, discussing each one with her and pausing long enough after each to take in a few forkfuls of food. "The debenture comes under a separate agreement, which you ought to have a look at. Send me a copy if you can't sort it out. Now, about this five-year restraint of trade. Are you satisfied with that?"