Snowfire

by Heather Graham

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Justin grated out.

  “Never mind him,” Jack Jones said, walking across the room to her. He took her hand. She glanced down at his. The skin was soft, the nails were immaculately manicured. She stared at him, wondering about him. Justin had said that he was happily married.

  Justin had also said that there’d been a rumor floating about that he’d had an affair with Myra.

  When he was in front of her, Jack lowered his voice instantly. “Be my date for the evening. My wife couldn’t make it, and I’m bored silly with these folks. Don’t let Justin’s growl get to you. Who are you, by the way?”

  “Her name is—Krissy Doria,” Justin grated out, adlibbing by way of introduction. Obviously, he didn’t want anyone to know who she was. He knew that she had phoned Roxanne and obviously realized that she had probably given her name. “She’s a—neighbor,” he said flatly. He stared at her, still furious. “Well, do come on in then,” he said more quietly.

  Lethally quiet.

  He began a round of introductions. Besides Jack Jones, Roxanne and the two agents, there was a handsome woman of about thirty-three, Maria Canova, the woman taking over Myra’s role, and Harry Johnston, the dignified and fine character actor. He was as solicitous as Jack Jones.

  “And what do you do, Miss Doria?” Artie Fein asked her, suddenly awake and interested. “You don’t happen to be a young theater hopeful?” He was standing, reaching into his pocket. “I could put you to work modeling tomorrow, if you want. Here, take my card—”

  “Artie!” Christina Anderson interrupted him. “Justin is my client, and Miss Doria is his friend. If she needs an agent, she can call me.”

  “Excuse them,” Jack Jones said. “They do tend to act like children. It’s nice to meet you. Are you a budding starlet? What do you do?”

  Kristin didn’t have a chance to answer because Justin did so for her. “I found her in the library,” he said coolly. “And it’s a wonderful place for her to be. She loves research.”

  “A librarian!” Roxanne sniffed. “Well, honey, close yourself away! It makes life better for the rest of us out there.” She offered Kristin a gaze that was surprisingly warm and welcoming. Maybe she didn’t consider Kristin any kind of serious competition. “Doria!” Roxanne continued. “You must be some relation to that nice young couple we interrupted earlier.”

  “Yes,” Kristin said quickly, determined to answer something for herself. “He’s my cousin.”

  “Cute little country cousins,” Roxanne murmured.

  “My, my,” Jack murmured, “we do seem to have disrupted everyone. But you see, well, Maria was determined to come out as soon as she could after the storm. And if Maria was coming, well, I’m in debt to Justin. His play gave me my first big break, so I had to come, too. And Harry never likes to miss a party, and Roxanne can’t stand to be left out of one. So here we are.”

  “How nice,” Kristin said. She opened her mouth to speak again, then quickly closed it. Justin suddenly had an arm around her. A tight arm around her. “All right, so I’ve been trying to keep her from the dangerous likes of you, Jack. And you, too, Harry. As it happens, originally, I dug the lady out of the snow. She was all ice at first, but she has thawed rather nicely. She plays chess brilliantly, and we’ve become very good friends. And I think that it’s running late for her, and I’m exhausted myself. You all surprised the hell out of me, showing up tonight. So who’s staying here, and who’s at the inn?”

  “If you’ve got a room, Justin, Roxanne and I can share,” Maria Canova said in a husky feminine voice that was mature, pleasing … and very sexy.

  “And of course,” Roxanne added. “Ms. Doria is welcome with us, too. And Christina.”

  “I’m at the inn, folks,” Christina said, grinning. “Sleeping till noon. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, though. We’ll do something quaint together.”

  Something quaint. Kristin decided she didn’t like Justin’s agent.

  “Ms. Doria?” Roxanne asked.

  “Ms. Doria sleeps with me,” Justin said firmly.

  Kristin had thought she was prepared for anything he might choose to throw out that night, but she wasn’t. She felt the color flooding to her cheeks.

  So much so that she almost forgot to watch the others for reactions. She recalled that she should just in time and looked around.

  Jack laughed out loud. Harry cleared his throat. Artie merely looked aside. Maria seemed cool as a cucumber.

  But both Roxanne and Christina seemed to gain color. Their plastic smiles remained in place, though, and there was little that Kristin could tell from their reactions.

  “Ah, well, can I have my old room back?” Jack asked Justin, breaking the sudden silence that Justin’s last comment had brought on. “The one down at the far end of the hall. There are twin beds in it, Harry. You staying? Or Artie, how about you? Everybody seems to have a roommate.”

  “I called for a room at the inn,” Harry said. “I spend enough time with you young delinquents.”

  “I can drive you back,” Christina offered.

  “I guess I’ll stay here,” Artie decided.

  “Good,” Justin said. His hands were still on Kristin’s shoulders, holding her close against him. “Make yourselves at home. Help yourselves to whatever you need. You all know the place well enough. Christina, you and Harry are welcome to stay, too. All the closets upstairs have clean linens. But if you’d really rather not, see yourselves out. We don’t lock our doors here often, not in the quaint countryside. But anyway, excuse Krissy and me, will you? We’re turning in.”

  “Krissy” couldn’t protest. His hands on her were like iron clamps. He steered her around and toward the stairs. And when they reached them, he prodded her up.

  At the top of the stairway, he steered her to the left. And Kristin kept silent while he pushed her through the doorway to his suite’s sitting room, but as soon as the door had closed behind them, she broke free and spun around.

  “That’s enough!”

  “That’s enough!” he repeated furiously, advancing on her. “I told you not to come!”

  “If you don’t want me here, what the hell are you doing dragging me off up to your bedroom?”

  He stepped back, a mocking curl forming at the corner of his lip. His eyes moved slowly over the length of her. “Hell, honey, if you’re going to be here, you might as well be useful,” he commented dryly.

  “Oh, you son of a—” Kristin began, but he dragged her suddenly back into his arms. His hand landed over her mouth, hard.

  His whisper touched her ear. “Shush!”

  She wanted to kick him, hard. But she felt the pounding of his heart along with the pressure of his touch, and she held still.

  Then she heard the soft rapping against the door. “Justin! Justin, are you in there.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Be with you in a second!” he called out.

  “You shut up!” he warned Kristin with a whisper. “And don’t think of leaving these rooms. Don’t you realize you could be in danger here?”

  He thrust her away from him. “Get in the bedroom!”

  “I will not—!”

  “You will!”

  And she did, because he hiked her over his shoulder, walked into the bedroom and tossed her ignominiously down upon the bed. She tried to scramble up, but he was already walking out. He closed the door behind him.

  Kristin leaped up and hurried across the room. She placed her ear against the door. She could hear Justin. He had opened the door to the hallway.

  “Roxanne! What is it?”

  “Justin, I had to let you know. That’s why I came. There’s some woman hounding me about the story again.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A reporter. She called this morning. She’s trying to rehash the whole murder thing again. Justin, I wonder what she knows. I don’t know what to tell her, what to try to hide.”

  Kristin leaned against the wall. If she knows what? she wanted t
o shout. She held still, her heart thundering. What was Justin hiding?

  “Thanks for your concern, Roxanne. But there will be lots of reporters asking questions now that the show is opening again. Talk to them. See them.”

  “But Justin—”

  “Roxanne, what can I say?”

  Kristin didn’t know what he could say, because Roxanne’s next words were whispered.

  And Justin’s next words were said more softly, too.

  She heard Roxanne’s next comment. “Oh, Justin, I’d do anything for you. Anything. You know that.”

  Kristin gritted her teeth. Sure. Justin knew exactly what she’d do for him, and now Kristin knew, too. She couldn’t believe the woman—when she knew that Justin already had someone in his bedroom!

  Not that it would mean anything. Not tonight.

  Kristin didn’t hear anything else except for the door closing softly. She hurried away from the bedroom door and sat at the foot of the bed. Then she realized that she didn’t want to be there and she leaped to her feet and hurried across the room to the window.

  She was certain her hair was still flying when Justin entered the bedroom. Her heart was still pounding a hundred miles a minute.

  He glanced at her irritably. “I know damned well that you were listening at the door. Go ahead. Sit down. Gasp,” he added dryly.

  She shook her head. She hadn’t the air to speak.

  “You’re going home first thing in the morning,” he told her. “For now, get to bed.”

  “I’ll be fine on the couch.”

  She gasped with a far greater urgency when he moved impatiently across the floor again, lifted her and dropped her onto the bed. He towered over her there. “I don’t know about you, but I need some sleep. And I won’t get it with you sitting in a chair. In the morning, you go straight home.”

  He started stripping off his clothing. Kristin turned on her back, her heart pounding hard again. One minute he was pulling her to him; the next, he was pushing her away.

  He crawled into the bed beside her. “Take off that ridiculous dress,” he told her.

  “A true romantic!” Kristin said sarcastically, inching away from him. “What a way with women. No wonder they throw themselves at you, Mr. Magnasun. Or is it Mountjoy tonight? Does anyone in this house tonight go by his or her right name? If I go into the theater, is Krissy Doria my stage name?”

  He groaned, and before she knew it, he had pushed her beneath him. “Take off that ridiculous dress!” he repeated harshly. Then he added slowly and with emphasis, “The dress is not ridiculous. The fact that you’re wearing it in a bed where you’ve been with me naked at least a dozen times is totally ridiculous. I had to make up a name for you, and you know exactly why.” He was still on top of her, but now he was up on his knees, helping her off with her dress—whether she wanted it off or not. He was slipping it over her head. And he wasn’t neat with it. He just let it fall to the floor.

  “Justin, if you think—” she began furiously.

  But he tossed the covers over her, and lay down beside her.

  Kristin flushed. He didn’t think anything. She was the one assuming that they’d have sex if they lay naked together.

  “I think we’re going to sleep. And that you’re getting out of here tomorrow.”

  “Justin, damn you, I can discover things—”

  “Like what? What have you learned tonight?”

  Nothing. Except that he might be hiding something from her.

  “I learned that Roxanne Baynes would sleep with you at the drop of a pin,” she said coolly, holding the covers to her chest.

  “That doesn’t make her a murderer.”

  “It gives her a motive. She wanted to get rid of your wife.”

  “Estranged wife.”

  “Where was Myra sleeping while she was here and still…”

  “Breathing?” Justin said softly. “She had her own room—down the hall that way. See, you haven’t learned anything. Not anything at all.”

  “Yes, I have. Since the critic, Joseph Banks, didn’t seem to feel that he had to join this party, that very well might eliminate him and his wife as suspects.”

  “It might. It might not. He may just be smart enough not to return to the scene of the crime.”

  Kristin pulled the covers over her shoulders and rolled away from him. She lay as close to the edge of the bed as she could.

  “You don’t know a damned thing,” he said harshly. “And you’re not going to risk trying to find out anything, either!”

  “Oh, go to—”

  “What?”

  “I said, I already know who did it,” Kristin mumbled.

  “Who?”

  “The butler. The damned butler did it. Isn’t that always the way in a play?”

  Justin was silent for a moment. Then she heard his sigh. “It’s a damned pity I didn’t have a butler. It would have been convenient if the butler had done it.”

  He rose, padded over to the light and turned it off. Kristin felt him come back to the bed in the darkness. She felt him slip beneath the covers.

  Then she didn’t hear anything, or feel anything.

  Not until…

  His whisper just at the lobe of her ear.

  “Do you know ‘who done it’ every time the butler didn’t ‘do it’?” he asked.

  She smothered back a startled gasp as she turned toward him in the nearly total darkness.

  “The husband, Kristin. The husband. Every damn time.”

  By the time she blinked, he had moved away. She swallowed hard.

  Not this time, dear God, not this time! she thought.

  No, not this time.

  Chapter 11

  When she awoke, Kristin found she was lying at the edge of the bed with the covers pulled tightly to her chin. She lay still for a moment, then she cautiously rolled over.

  Justin was on his own side of the bed, on the edge, his naked back to her.

  For a moment she was tempted to touch him. To run her fingers over the broad expanse of bronze flesh. She really was in love with him, she thought. Deeply in love with him. But he was doing his very best to be rude and obnoxious to her. He wanted her out of his house. He planned to get rid of her this morning.

  He wasn’t going to get rid of her, no matter how horrible he chose to be. He could say anything that he wanted.

  She hadn’t originally come for a story, but now she was going to get one. And she was going to prove him innocent in the process, and then he could follow her back to Boston, crawling in the snow, to apologize.

  If he really loved her, too.

  She bit her lip. She wasn’t going to touch him now.

  She rose as quietly as she could and tiptoed into the elegant master bath. She kept her eyes from the marble whirlpool and headed straight for the shower stall. She turned the water on cold, to wake herself up, and she showered quickly. Then she wrapped herself in a towel and returned to the bedroom, gingerly, silently, picking up her clothes. He didn’t move while she dressed.

  But when she put her hand on the doorknob, he spoke to her at last. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Downstairs. I’m dying for a cup of coffee.”

  “You’re going home. Have your cup of coffee. I’ll be down in ten minutes to take you. Be ready.”

  Kristin paused. She wondered if she shouldn’t stay, curl up beside him and try to convince him that she wasn’t going home.

  No. He’d just let her get carried away and he’d enjoy every minute of it. And then he’d take her home.

  She wanted the few minutes she was going to have alone.

  She hurried downstairs. She heard voices in the kitchen, and she followed the sound, trying to form some kind of a plan. It wasn’t easy with only ten minutes stretching before her.

  Play it by ear, she thought.

  Brilliant idea. It was her only choice.

  She stepped into the kitchen. Maria was at the table with Artie, and Jack was standing by one
of the window seats, looking out on the snow. Roxanne was by the coffeepot, and Christina and Harry had apparently just arrived because they were taking off their coats in the sun room.

  “Good morning, Ms. Doria!” Christina called out to her cheerfully. “What a late group! I had thought we might want to prowl the countryside for a little village restaurant for lunch, and I find this crowd just groping around for coffee. Tell me, is my talented young client awake yet?”

  “Yes, he’s awake. He should be down in a few minutes.”

  “It’s far too early for lunch,” Maria said with a yawn. She was staring off through the living room, and she flashed Kristin a wry smile. “As for me, I’m going swimming. I’ve never been in the water in winter. It looks almost decadent.”

  “What do you think, Ms. Doria?” Roxanne asked in a soft drawl.

  Kristin shrugged, determined to appear undaunted. “The water is very nice. Warm.”

  “It must cost a bundle to heat,” Artie said.

  “But my clients make very good money,” Christina advised him sweetly.

  “I’m for a walk!” Jack announced. “Nice clean, cold country air. We don’t see much of that in the city, do we?”

  Harry sniffed. “The Big Apple is not that bad. There are days like this there.”

  “A New Yorker born and bred,” Roxanne said. “Harry’s from the Bronx,” she told Kristin, bringing her a cup of black coffee. “He lost the accent doing summer stock for years and years and years, isn’t that right; Harry? You’ll never convince him that the world outside Manhattan and the boroughs really exists at all.”

  “I am most certainly aware that the world exists beyond New York!” Harry said with dignity, then he smiled in a friendly way at Kristin. “Very aware! In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing your little library, Ms. Doria.”

  Kristin decided this was it, her grand opening to make her move. “I’m not a librarian,” she told him, taking a seat at the table and spooning sugar and cream into her coffee.

  “No?” Harry said.

  She shook her head. “I’m a reporter.”

  The room was silent. Dead silent. Kristin realized she virtually could have heard a pin drop. And she surely had center stage. They were all staring at her.