Fire in the Wind (4 page)

When, unable to stop herself, she cried out her surprised joy to him, Jace looked down into her eyes with a triumphant possessiveness.

"You're mine," he said hoarsely. "There'll never be another woman in the world for me, Vanessa, and there'll never be another man for you! Tell me!" he commanded. "Say it!"

"There'll never be another man for me," she promised wildly, and beside the blinding truth of it, everything else was shadow.

He kissed her until she was breathless, and the next day he caught his plane for Vancouver, promising to wire her a ticket in time for her Easter break....

Vanessa, not sure how many of her memories she had communicated to Jake Conrad, lapsed into silence, letting her thoughts wander.

"Are you telling me," Jake's voice broke in on her, "that you were waiting for him to send for you, and you simply never heard from him again?"

"What?" Vanessa asked, breaking out of her reverie. "Oh—no. No, I sent him a Dear John letter and married Larry a few weeks later."

Chapter 2

TopMarx, the manufacturing house Vanessa worked for, was third on the list at the afternoon showing of ladies' suits, but when her first model appeared Vanessa's thoughts were far from gauging how the trade in Canada would like her simple lightweight wool suit with the softly pleated skirt. Designing a women's medium-priced ready-to-wear line need not have been the constant unhappy grind that the past three years had been, but Tom Marx was committed to giving as little value for the money as he could, and that meant constant battles between them on the subject of quality. Battles that Vanessa, in a process that she felt was finally eating away her soul, invariably lost.

The suit as she had conceived it had a jaunty English school-miss flavour, as though the school miss had grown up and become office manager. But the perkiness of line had disappeared with the few inches of fabric that Tom had insisted could be saved on the skirt. Vanessa kept the needs of middle-income, self-supporting women at the forefront of her mind when she designed. But she knew that once a design had been through Tom's "process," a woman looking at it in Eaton's or Simpsons, the big Canadian department stores, would first think,
yes,
and then, trying it on,
well, maybe if I can't find what I really want.
But thinking of it was futile, and Vanessa's mind was wandering....

It wasn't that she had expected anything to come of a meeting with Jace even if she
had
found him after ten years. She had not imagined him single and waiting for her. He would have been thirty-three, after all. No, she had thought of him as being happily settled, competently running his father's business—what had it been, a trucking firm—but devoting most of his time and attention to his family. She had imagined going to visit him in a pretty townhouse, or perhaps a house in the suburbs with all the neighbourhood children shrieking happily around the pool, a house that her designer's eye would have found pleasing and tastefully done....

She would have worn one of her own designs—not one of the ready-made, skimped-on models, of course; for her own wear, Vanessa always made her designs up individually—and his wife would have admired it and Jace would have congratulated her on making a career for herself. And then, in a quiet moment, when his wife had left them alone, she would have told him why she'd married Larry, why she'd written him that letter without explaining anything... and then Jace would have understood and forgiven her, would have told her how happy he was without her, and she could have gone on with her life without the guilt and perhaps with a little less bitterness for her ten lost years.

Her worst nightmare had been that she would find him unhappy, cheating on his wife and yelling at his kids. She would have hated that. She wondered now if the fear of it would have kept her, in the end, from dialling the phone....

But her fears and imaginings had been for nothing. Jace was dead. If she had looked up Jason Conrad in the Vancouver directory she would have reached the cynical Jake.

Jake. When she had told him about the Dear John letter and marrying Larry, he stood up to refill his glass with an awkward abruptness that made her pause. The story wasn't unfamiliar to him, she was convinced of that. He had known.

"Were you close to your cousin, Jake?" she asked tentatively.

"Pretty close," he said shortly, his back to her, taking a drink of Scotch.

"Did... did he get my letter?" Vanessa swallowed over the lump that was in her throat. Perhaps he had died without knowing.

"Oh, yes, he got it," Jake said in a firm voice, turning around to face her. "He got it when he was lying in hospital awaiting surgery. He didn't wake up from the anaesthetic. I've always thought it was your letter that killed him."

She felt as though she'd been shot in the stomach at close range. She actually made a small animal grunt, wrapping her arms across her stomach, hugging the pain to her. "No," she whispered hoarsely, begging. "No."

"I found the letter on his bedside table when I was clearing out his things," the voice that was suddenly so like Jace's went on inexorably. "I kept it. I think I've still got it somewhere. I give it a prize for the most concentrated cruelty in the most innocent schoolgirlish handwriting I ever expect to see."

Vanessa remembered her misery as she had written the letter, the torment of her mind. "Cruel..." she repeated. "Was it cruel?"

"It was, if I remember, a very bald statement of the fact of your preference for another man, written almost on the eve of your wedding. By the time he got the letter you were already married."

"Oh, God," she whispered. She was incapable of saying anything else. She hadn't meant to be abrupt or cold in the letter. She had wanted to beg, but she hadn't known how....Suddenly, remembering, she sat up with a small helpless laugh.

Jake Conrad's eyes narrowed and the muscles of his face tightened till he looked like a carved wooden mask. The muscles pulled on one side of his face, so that the straight harsh line of his mouth was drawn up on one side, giving him an even crueller look.

"Enjoying your victory?" he asked grimly.

Vanessa sat up straight. "No," she said, "no, please don't think... I was just thinking about fate. I just remembered that all the time, I was half expecting Jace to turn up and stop the wedding. Even right at the last minute I was hoping he might be there and stand up—you know, when they say, 'Speak now or forever hold your peace.' And when he didn't come, I thought...." Vanessa set down the brandy glass and stood up. "And now you tell me the damn letter never even got to him till the wedding was over." She laughed once, harshly, feeling light-headed with pain.

The most incredible animal look passed over Jake Conrad's features, and he moved to her in a couple of quick steps and grasped her shoulders. "You were
hoping
?" he demanded. "You were standing in church marrying another man hoping that... that my cousin would come and stop the wedding? Why were you marrying him, for God's sake, if you wanted Jace?"

He was looking at her with fierce anger and she realized that he hadn't said what he'd said just to shock her. He must truly believe that her letter had caused his cousin's death, and he must hate her for it. But there was no point in making explanations. No amount of explanation would change the facts.

"I loved Larry, too," she said simply.

His hands on her shoulders shook her a little. "But you didn't want to marry him?"

Vanessa sighed. It was all so long ago, and none of it was important any more. Jace was dead, she was alive, and life had to go on.

"I'm tired," she said, pulling against the harsh grip of his powerful hands. "I'm going to go to my room and get some sleep."

He didn't let her go. His grip tightened and his eyes glinted down at her. He said, "You came looking for Jace Conrad for a reason, little widow. Were you maybe hoping for a brief nostalgic affair, just for old time's sake? Was that it?"

Vanessa moved her shoulders uncomfortably under his hands. "No, of course not," she said.

"Sure now?" he asked. "Because you're very beautiful—just as beautiful as Jace described you. In fact, even more beautiful now; women like you improve with age." His deep voice had taken on a seductive tone and, incredibly, started a spiral of fire deep in her stomach. She gasped in astonished protest at her own feelings.

"If that
was
what you were looking for, I'd be happy to stand in for Jace," he went on. "I like beautiful women." He bent and kissed her lips, and the spiral spread its sensuous burning languor through her body. It was a response she hadn't felt for a long time, perhaps not since Jace had last kissed her. Larry's lovemaking had been sometimes gentle, sometimes passionate, and she had enjoyed his touch, but for him she had never felt a passion that threatened to engulf her, as she had felt with Jace, as she was halfway to feeling now, for Jace's cousin....

She pushed him away and stared at him, her heart pounding in her chest and temples. "No, thank you," she said coolly.

Jake threw back his head and looked down at her out of slitted glittering eyes. "No?" he queried. "But you're hungry, little widow," he half whispered in a seductive voice so like Jace's she could have screamed. "I tasted hunger on your lips." He ran a hand lightly down her bare arm. "Why so hungry?" he asked.

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.