Fire in the Wind (34 page)

She began to see how love could turn to hatred. That primal force in her that would have destroyed the world for Jake Conrad might easily turn its dark necessity toward rage. She began to see how Jake had ended up hating her... by how easily she might end up hating him.

She had to think. She had to think what to do. Leaving the file on the sofa, Vanessa got up and went to the kitchen. It was dark now; she had been reading by the light of one small lamp, and she turned the lights on as she went.

In the kitchen she filled the electric kettle and plugged it in. She was still not used to the appliance; she marvelled every time she used it. The first one she had seen had been Maria's, the day she moved into this apartment. Maria's emergency moving supplies had included mugs, coffee and an electric kettle.

"Never seen one before?" Maria had repeated. "What do you boil water in, then?"

"In a kettle on the stove top," Vanessa had replied, and after she finally convinced Maria that most Americans did the same, Maria laughed incredulously. "You mean to tell me that there is a great untapped market of 100 million American households, none of which has an electric kettle? My gosh, someone should tell Jake. He'd make a fortune!"

Vanessa never told Jake; she'd supposed he knew. Anyway, somebody, somewhere, surely, had already tried to sell electric kettles in the United States on a large scale.

Or maybe that was the difference between millionaires and ordinary people: perhaps millionaires tried the ideas that ordinary people assumed had already been tried.

Vanessa unplugged the kettle and made coffee, adding larger amounts of sugar and milk than usual, as comfort. Then she went to the bedroom and undressed, slipping on her black robe. She couldn't get her brain to function. She kept thinking that she had to think, but her mind was like a mule: no matter how she whipped it, it couldn't be forced toward that dark abyss.

Child labour. Slave labour. She was exploiting the weakest of society in order to make money, like any nineteenth-century capitalist. "Well, that's three quarts of milk I wouldn't be able to give my kids otherwise, isn't it?" one of the women had said, in response to the interviewer's comment that the young single mother of two worked all day for enough money to buy three quarts of milk. She wondered if the interviewer had been Jake.

Vanessa's mind balked again, and numbly she carried her cup back into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa.

She stared at the papers. She was a criminal, wasn't she? Was she? Morally she was a criminal, but legally? God, what were the penalties for being in contravention of the minimum-wage laws? Was it a criminal or a civil offence? A slow prickling fear began to creep over her. What had Jake said all those months ago? "The laws are there... half the population could be in prison if they were enforced."

He would want that, wouldn't he? she thought grimly. That would be the ultimate revenge: have her locked up in prison. Yes, that would be the kind of thing Jake would think of. That would be why he called this "the best of all." She would be condemned to hell by her own actions. She would not even be able to blame him. That would make the revenge perfect.

My God,
she thought,
prison.
Suppose it really came to that? How could she bear that? How did anyone bear it? Her heart began to thump frighteningly. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Or maybe they would simply deport her as an undesirable. Then, if Canada's laws were anything like the States', she would never be allowed back into the country. That would suit Jake just as well, she supposed: either way he wouldn't be seeing her again unless he came to her.

He had told her he hated her, but somehow she hadn't believed him. She had believed him angry, believed she had hurt him unbearably, believed he had long ago stopped loving her. But even though she had thought she was accepting that he hated her, even though intellectually she had accepted it, emotionally she had refused to believe it, had rejected the reality of it.

Now she had to believe it. Vanessa looked down at the proof of his hatred, the trap so delicately baited, so carefully laid, the evidence so painstakingly gathered, lethal.

A kind of blackness was filling her, a hurting horrid blackness that she couldn't remember ever feeling before. Jake hated her. She couldn't evade the realization any longer. He hated her, wanted to hurt her, wanted her to suffer the worst human-devised torment possible in the so-called civilized western world. He wanted her to be branded a criminal, to go to prison. He wanted her to be beaten and spat on and maltreated and shackled whenever a tormentor felt the whim. He wanted her life to be permanently blighted, wanted her scarred.
Believe it,
she told herself, forcing herself to accept it.
He wants this.

Lou Standish had told her about prisons once, when she had asked him why he had abandoned criminal law and moved into corporate. He had told her of the hopeless waste of humanity, the irreversible personality damage that such degradation caused. He had discovered that he could do nothing to change it, and he was, he had said, too much of a coward to face that information day after day.

After that Vanessa had never again hoped anyone would go to prison. She knew it was a nearly insoluble problem. She knew that there were some people who couldn't be left free in society, but she could not be vengeful enough to wish to subject a human being to that.

But Jake Conrad was wishing that on her. He had not engineered it—she had given him the opportunity on a plate—but he was prepared to make use of it.

Every time she thought of it, it was as though a bludgeon fell on her heart. Nothing had ever hurt her like this, not the death of her mother or her father, not the pain of her wedding day, nor anything in the long years since. Not even the moment when she had heard that Jace was dead.

There was a sudden knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs, and Vanessa made a quick instinctive move toward the incriminating papers beside her, her heart beating in her mouth. Then she laughed and forced herself to relax. It could only be the downstairs tenant, since anyone else—even the police—would have had to ring the outside doorbell.

She didn't know her neighbour downstairs very well, except to know that he had two beautiful pedigreed cats named Barney and Jezebel and that he was a private person and did something bookish for a living. She had spoken to him briefly once, on a day when Barney had come up for a visit and stayed the whole day.

Vanessa jumped up, pulling the terry robe more snugly around her. She glanced around the room, wondering if Barney had come up without her noticing, then padded barefoot down the stairs.

The door opened rather awkwardly outward, and Vanessa pushed it slowly, in case she caught her visitor behind it.

But she needn't have worried: her visitor knew enough to stand to one side, and his dark overpowering shape filled the opening immediately.

Jake.

Chapter 16

Vanessa tried to pull the door shut, but Jake slipped his shoulder inside with a violent move that made the handle fly out of her grasp. The door hit the wall with a loud bang, and Jake started up the steps toward her.

She flew at him like a wild animal whose lair is invaded, feeling as though she must protect her home from him at all costs. The force and unexpectedness of her attack drove him across the small foyer and up against the entrance door, but she was hampered by the full sleeves and long skirt of her robe, and he was stronger.

They fought, extraordinarily, in a grunting silence, neither of them saying a word until, having forced her back up the stairs, he held her heaving body at the top.

"Get out of my house!" she wailed, her voice a long high animal cry interrupted by a sobbing gasp for the air she needed. "Get out."

"No," he said flatly, his breathing just as erratic, and then he loosened his clasp to let her go. Without a second's hesitation she raised both arms and thudded them against his chest to push him downstairs. Jake caught the railing to regain his balance, then lurched forward, grabbing her angrily and forcing her around the gallery and into the sitting room, where a push sent her headlong onto the sofa.

It was insane, the rage they ignited in each other. Vanessa glared up at him through the tangle of hair spilling over her face, aware but uncaring that her robe had pulled open over her breasts and that her long legs were uncovered. She clawed her hair savagely off her face, her burning stare not leaving his.

"I'd like to kill you!" she rasped.

"I'd like to kill you, too," said Jake, breathing with exertion and glaring down at her. "Little hell-cat."

There was tension humming in the air between them, as though that violent confrontation had turned on a distant power source that now gripped them both in its heavy field. With trembling, clumsy fingers Vanessa pulled the black robe over her breasts and legs, helplessly watching his eyes watching her every move.

"What do you want?" she demanded, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

Jake's glance broke away from hers to take in the papers from the file she had stolen from his desk. She had landed on the sofa among them, and they lay littered all around her now, on the sofa and floor. "You're a thief, too," he observed flatly, cruelly, but she saw that he had to swallow before he spoke.

"And who are you?" she demanded contemptuously. "The angel Gabriel? Nobody makes a million dollars these days without stepping on a few toes, do they?" A lock of hair fell over her eye and with an impatient jerk of her head she tossed it back. "Is this how you deal with your business rivals? Get them thrown into prison for doing the same kind of thing you do yourself?" She felt a paper under her hand on the sofa, and closed her fist on it. "Is this what you came for?" she demanded, holding the wrinkled page up to him. "This nasty, spying little bunch of documents that's going to cause my final downfall? Take it!" She threw it violently toward him, but the paper floated ineffectually down to the floor. Vanessa jumped up, grabbing other papers as she did so.

"You hate me!" she exclaimed, ripping, crumpling, tearing the papers between her hands and throwing them wildly at his dark angular face. "I didn't believe it before, but I believe it now! I know it now! I've seen this, and this, and this—" she threw the torn pages at him "—and nobody could do what you're going to do unless they were filled with hate!

"Well, all right, here's your revenge! Take it! Make me a criminal, get me sent to prison! No matter what happens to me there, I still couldn't become a worse animal than you are right now, Jake! Because I loved you—in spite of everything, I
loved
you—right up to this moment! And you've let life poison you—you're full of hate, and that makes you the lowest form of life there is! I look at you now and I can't imagine how I ever loved you."

She stood straight, the shredded papers between them on the floor. Jake was unmoving, watching her. "You're contemptible. You haven't the faintest idea about life or love. And when I think I let you touch me, let you make love to me,
wanted
you to—" she shuddered, "—it makes me cringe. It makes me feel as though I'd let spiders and snakes crawl over my body and—"

He reached out and jerked her against him, the look on his face almost a snarl. "That's enough," he said. His hand touched her throat. "Shut up."

The electric humming in the air was suddenly so powerful it deafened her. Vanessa felt panic hit her in a giant slapping wave that nearly carried her way. "I won't shut up!" she shrilled. "Let me go!"

The look in his dark eyes changed as he stared at her, and his arm around her back tightened its hold. "My God, Vanessa," he whispered, and bent and kissed her.

She wanted to scream. She felt as though a trap had suddenly closed around her, the trap of his arms and his mouth, making it impossible for her to move.

She had to force herself into action, lifting her arms to fight him, jerking her face away from the hungry pressure of his mouth. She dragged in a ragged gasp of air, pressing away from him. "Let go of me!" she cried, and with her free hand she slapped his face.

Jake let her go so suddenly that she fell backward to the floor. She lay there in momentary shock, then was suddenly seething, as angry as she had ever been in her life. Jake's eyes were black as he stared down at her; he hadn't moved even to touch a hand to his flushed cheek. He stood like a street fighter, his arms loose at his sides, waiting.

"Get up," he commanded. His lips hardly moved, but a pulse was beating in his throat, and suddenly Vanessa's stomach was a swirl of confusion. Slowly she got to her feet a short distance from him, facing him and watching his eyes take in the flash of her flesh in the black robe's opening.