Fire in the Wind

by Alexandra Sellers

  She gasped, the tears drying instantly. "How dare you!" she snapped, fiery outrage blazing at him from her eyes. "Get out of here before I call the police and charge you with breaking and entering!"

  "I didn't break anything," replied Jake. "I own this building. I came in with a key."

  "Well, it's my home!" Vanessa shrilled. "I doubt very much if the laws of the land allow you to walk in at any time!" She turned and marched down the stairs to fling the door open. "Now get out!" she commanded him. "Get out of my house!"

  Barney thought she might be talking to him, but he had no intention of going anywhere. He sat down firmly at the top of the stairs and began to wash a paw.

  Jake stepped over him to walk down the stairs toward her. His eyes were blazing, but she was too angry to be frightened. He reached past her and his hand closed over hers on the knob as he pulled the door shut. Then he put both hands on her shoulders and pulled her to face him.

  "You goad me beyond endurance," he said roughly. "But this is the last time. There's nothing I want from you any more—except for you to keep away from me. Do you hear what I'm saying? I don't want to see you in future. Do you understand that?"

  His hands burned her shoulders with a melting fire. In spite of all her anger his touch softened her. Vanessa bit her lip.

  "That's fine with me!" she blazed, wishing that he would either take his hands away or—she put a brake on her thoughts. "Do I take it this is goodbye?"

  "This is goodbye," repeated Jake grimly. She wondered if she should talk to Lou Standish in the morning, and stared up into his eyes for a long silent moment. She knew suddenly that she would have no heart to continue the company; if Jake wanted to put her into bankruptcy, she would let it happen and go home.

  "Then kiss me goodbye, Jake," she begged involuntarily in a voice suddenly grown hoarse, and behind his eyes she saw the empty future that would be hers. "Kiss me one last time for goodbye."

  He went white to the lips. "My God," he exclaimed hoarsely. "You never stop, do you?"

  He brushed by her and was through the door in a moment. Vanessa stood motionless on the staircase, listening to him go, and the sound of each step was a knife in her heart.

  It was over. Vanessa sank down on the steps, her face white, her eyes wide and unblinking. She gave a small incredulous laugh. All his machinations had been unnecessary after all. If he had only known it, Jake Conrad had got his revenge in one tiny moment.

  She didn't care if Number 24 was blown into sawdust in the night, she saw with wonder. That had been nothing but a blind. It was Jake she wanted, nothing else. And Jake did not want her.

  Chapter 18

  During the next few days Vanessa worked as though Death were watching her again, making decisions, giving orders and executing designs with a speed and precision that seemed to be beyond her conscious control. She did not know where her energy came from.

  In the evenings, it left her. When Vanessa walked out of the door of Number 24 at night she walked straight into an emotional and intellectual no-man's-land. To think or to feel would be to remember that Jake Conrad did not love her, that from now on she walked in darkness.

  It was a blessing that she had her work to keep her going, she knew; otherwise she might have crawled into bed and stayed there. She seemed suddenly to have a dozen different things to do with her time, a dozen irons in the fire—all keeping her from the occupation of thinking.

  Her summer designs were well in hand, and the round of fabric salesmen was just beginning. This time, she noticed, she felt calmer, more confident about her choices, more decided about what she wanted.

  She fought long and hard with Robert over the designs for the signature fabric and emblem that Colin had sent her. In the end they both compromised—Vanessa agreeing to give up on using the fabric for the summer line and Robert agreeing that they would launch the new appliqué on several items and commission another company to manufacture a T-shirt under the Number 24 label.

  She had seen David Latham socially a few times, but now she stopped. He was very intelligent, a nice man, and she enjoyed his company, but he was starting to wonder why she would not go to bed with him. She would have liked to be able to go to bed with him and forget Jake, but she remembered her years in Larry's bed while she was trying to forget Jace, and she knew it would be no good.

  There might never be another man for her. The fact that she had destroyed his love for her didn't mean she could also destroy her own love for him, no matter how much she wished to.

  In spite of her resolve to bankrupt Number 24 if Jake called the debenture, she hadn't, in the end, been able to face the possibility. So she had called Lou Standish. She had told him she wanted to buy up the debenture so she could own the company outright, nothing more; and she had asked him if the family would lend her the money. He had agreed to it instantly, without consulting them, and the Standishes were using this as an excuse to keep in touch with her: Lou phoned her with family news and messages while he was working out the details with David Latham. She wondered, not for the first time, how much of the family's fondness for her was guilt.

  One night, about ten days after Jake's visit, Vanessa got home after a late dinner with friends she had met through Robert and Maria to find a large bulky envelope lying on the mat—bearing the distinctive navy-and-gold Concorp logo. She caught her breath, unable to do more than stare down at it for a long moment while Barney blinked at her curiously from his station by her door.

  She carried the envelope upstairs, her chest contracting in pain as though she had been stabbed. I can't face it, she thought. I can't face actually seeing it. She couldn't bear to open the envelope here by herself, alone. She needed a friend by her, someone who would understand, someone whose presence would prevent her from crying herself sick. She would take it to the office tomorrow, open it with Ilona in the room, she decided. Ilona didn't know anything about what was going on, but she would certainly understand what it meant when Jake called the debenture to bankrupt Number 24....or better still, she would take it to David Latham and ask him, as her lawyer, to open it for her.

  The envelope lay on the coffee table all evening while she pottered and fed Barney and washed and dried her hair. When she went to bed it was still there, radiating its cruel energy into the room. Vanessa tossed and turned until three, unable to sleep. Finally she got up, put on the light and her robe and went back to the sitting room. She sat on the sofa and stared at her doom.

  This is the worst possible time to open it, she realized. I should have opened it earlier. Three o'clock in the morning is when most suicides occur, and I know why. It's because this is the time when there's no hope in the world.

  She slit open the envelope and shook the contents out onto the table. She wrinkled her forehead. She had expected one enormous document, somehow, but what appeared was a whole host of smaller documents and contracts and single pieces of paper.

  On the very top was a tiny slip of paper from a memo pad. "From the desk of Howard Spiegel," it read across the top, and scrawled across it, in writing she had seen many times since she had joined Concorp, she read, "Vanessa—please sign and return one copy of each to me." It was signed, "Howie."

  Underneath, the first paper was a document entitled "Addendum." Vanessa skimmed the first few lines in growing disbelief: it seemed to be an addendum to her management contract. God in Heaven, what was this? "Clause seventeen... agree that the restraint of trade... shall be reduced from a period of five years... to a period of three months...." And at the bottom, Jake's black full-looped signature.

  Her hand shook as she picked up the next document, also labelled "Addendum"—to the debenture agreement: "That... except in the case of the insolvency of the said company... there shall be no demand made... for a period of five years from the date of the original agreement."

  She rooted wildly through the remaining papers. There was a new lease on the premises at Number 24, backdated, which altered clause thirteen and deleted clause fourte
en altogether; a backdated letter guaranteeing Robert Dawe's job at Concorp for a period of one year....

  Jake Conrad had painstakingly dismantled every single trap he had laid for her. Vanessa sat stunned amid the bits of paper, half still unread, and tried to assimilate it. He was giving up all his power over her. Even, at the bottom of the envelope, she found four tiny cassette tapes, one labelled "Wan Chu" and the others the three names she recognized from the typed transcripts she had read.

  Why had he done all this? What was the point? The traps that he had set for her could only have been sprung by Jake himself. If he had changed his mind about revenge, he didn't have to do anything. She had been in danger only from him.

  There could be only two reasons for what he had done, she thought finally: to give her peace of mind, and to protect her from his whim if in the future he should change his mind. But peace of mind was exactly what he did not want her to have. "Maybe I'll never pull the plug," Jake had said. "Maybe it'll be enough seeing you constantly insecure...."

  Vanessa sat still for a long time, lost in thought. For the first time in weeks thinking was not an agony.

  * * *

  "Who are you bringing to our masquerade party?" Robert asked idly a day or two later. "Or are you and Jake coming together?"

  Vanessa was working out some figures with him; her pencil stopped on the page. "Is Jake coming to the party?" she asked casually.

  "Far as I know," said Robert, looking back to his figures. "I make that fifteen-eighteen with a three percent—"

  "Does he know I've been invited?" Vanessa interrupted.

  Robert shook his head, whether in answer or because the numbers weren't working out she couldn't tell. He dropped his hand back on the keys for a rapid calculation, then looked up. "Well, he might assume it. You've been to most of our parties since you got here." It was true; Vanessa had been adopted by Robert's and Maria's crowd since the night of that first dinner party.

  "Yes, but Jake hasn't," Vanessa reminded him. "He was there the first time you invited me, but not since."

  "No?" asked Robert abstractedly, keying in more figures. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Well, then, I guess he doesn't know. Damnation, have I put that three percent in or not? Anyway, do I take it you're bringing someone else? Maria needs to know."

  "No, I'll be alone," Vanessa decided suddenly, though up to now she had been toying with the idea of asking David. "What are you using three percent here for, anyway, Robert? It doesn't look right to me."

  She could do that, she had discovered—force her mind onto the work at hand when all she really wanted to do was think about her personal life. If she hadn't been able to do that, she wouldn't have survived.

  Robert was swearing mildly, looking through the papers on his desk for validation of the three percent. "Robert," she said abruptly, unaware of having come to any decision. The tone of her voice made him look up more sharply than she had intended. "Robert, if Jake asks, please don't tell him I'm coming to your party."

  Robert made a calculation, nodding. "Sure," he said absently. "You're right about that three percent—it's wrong."

  * * *

  Vanessa liked costume. She had always liked to design clothes for herself that, without being of any discernible period, had the flavour of costume. The chance to design a full-fledged period costume for the masquerade party had delighted her, and the finished outfit—in black velvet and antique gold—was beautiful.

  But on the night of the party she stood at her open closet door for a long moment with the black velvet suit in her hand, then hung it up again and took out her green silk-taffeta dress.

  She had mended it; under Jake's hands the material had ripped along the ruffle seam to the hem, and it had been a simple matter to repair it and move the ruffle slightly to hide the evidence. When she put it on, it looked as good as new.

  She swept her hair tight against one side of her head to fall in a cloud against the other eye, cheek and shoulder, and fastened on dangling diamanté earrings and a bracelet. With a huge crinoline under the skirt, a glittering net stole, bright lipstick and nail polish and, under the ruffled black eye mask, a dramatic make-up that made her eyes even darker, she looked vaguely Hollywood Fifties. People at the party might consider her a little unimaginative, but she wasn't dressing for the people at the party.

  "Rita Hayworth," she introduced herself to Maria and Robert at the door, and Robert announced her in a formal voice, "Miss Rita Hayworth."

  The room was filled with a collection of the famous and the infamous through the millennia, from Confucius and Cleopatra down to Queen Victoria and Captain Kirk. It seemed a very large party, especially as Vanessa was used to the Dawes' more intimate dinner parties, and many of the masqueraders were completely unrecognisable. If Jake was in the room Vanessa couldn't see him. She moved through the main room slowly, talking to a few people she knew, and was directed through to the adjoining room, where a bearded prophet was serving drinks behind a long makeshift bar.

  "Rita!" he greeted her enthusiastically.

  She replied, "Moish!"

  "What are you drinking?" asked Moses, otherwise known as Howard Spiegel, the Concorp lawyer.

  She wanted to be just light-headed enough to do what she had to do but not in any danger of losing control. A vodka martini, though she wanted one, would be too potent.

  "Dry sherry, please," she said. She fell into conversation with a hard-drinking white-haired man in a Victorian suit and a blond Yasser Arafat and watched the room for Jake. She was on her second sherry and was wishing she had asked for a vodka martini after all when Robert's stentorian voice announced, "Madame du Barry," and then, "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his dog, King!"

  There were shouts of laughter in the other room as Jake came through the door, masked and wearing a red jacket and a fur hat, and after a moment Vanessa saw why. Behind him, on wheels, he was pulling along the most disreputable, moth-eaten, bedraggled stuffed toy dog Vanessa had ever seen. From several holes in its nearly hairless pelt it trailed sawdust and straw stuffing, and one sorry ear hung over its only surviving glass eye.

  Everyone was shrieking with laughter. Howie, behind her, asked Vanessa, "Who the hell is that?"

  "It's Jake," Vanessa told him, hiccupping on a giggle.

  As though he heard his name through all the noise Jake looked toward her through the doorway. Then he froze, his jaw clenching, and behind the black eye mask his eyes burned into hers.

  It could have lasted only a second, but to Vanessa the look seemed to go on for an age before Jake turned back to the very sexy Madame du Barry, all in spangled turquoise and gold and pale blond hair, who was hurrying up to take possession of his arm.

  People were still laughing as Jake's progress through the room brought the mangy dog to their better view, so Vanessa's delighted laugh of discovery was lost in the room to all ears, perhaps, but Jake's.

  His look had proved the one thing she wanted to know—whatever he had said, whatever he thought, Jake Conrad was not indifferent to her.

  Madame du Barry didn't realize what she was doing when, a few minutes later, she insisted on moving over to the bar for a drink, but Jake could hardly protest, and so he ended up there beside Vanessa, where he poured himself a whiskey.

  "Good God, Jake, is that you?" asked Howard, laughing loudly. "You look like a cocktail waiter with a head cold!"

  Jake laughed and looked down at his red jacket. "Could be because I borrowed this from one of the hotel bartenders, I suppose."

  Pretty Madame du Barry gushed, "Isn't that just typical? I go to all kinds of trouble to try to look authentic and plan my costume for weeks in advance, and Jake forgets all about it till this afternoon—and he's the one who gets all the compliments!"

  "Not all of them, I assure you," said a man dressed as Julius Caesar from her other side, gazing appreciatively at her invitingly low neckline. Caesar was a little drunk. "You are due for quite a few yourself, madame, and to prove I'm right I'll start.
..."

  "Where'd you round up King?" Vanessa asked Jake in an undertone while Caesar carried on over the Rubicon. She made her voice light and friendly. "He looks a little the worse for wear."

  "In a friend's garage," Jake answered shortly, but he was looking at her dress and she knew he remembered.

  "He looks sort of an indeterminate breed," she commented with a smile. "Not to say mongrel. Didn't you tell me King was a husky?"

  "Did I?" Jake asked briefly.

  "Sure you did," Vanessa said. "You remember—that night we went walking in Stanley Park and you nearly made love to me beside Lost Lagoon."

  He sucked in his breath as though he had been stung, and Vanessa smiled at him in blatant seduction. Dancing had started in the other room, and at that moment the white-haired man in the Victorian suit asked Vanessa to dance. As she moved off on his arm she felt rather than saw Jake's instinctive movement to detain her, instantly controlled.

  "Who are you?" she asked the man as they moved onto the dance floor.

  "You mean you don't recognize the red nose?" he asked. "I'm Sir John A., my dear."

  Vanessa laughed. "Sir John Eh?" She'd never danced with a title before. "How do you do? But who exactly is he?"

  He stopped dancing and looked at her. "Good God, what is education in this country coming to? Don't tell me they didn't teach you about Sir John A. MacDonald at school?"

  "No, but I'm an American," Vanessa confessed as he guided her into dance again. "I've only been in Canada a few months."

  "Ah, that explains it!" exclaimed the man, who really seemed quite gentlemanly and dignified enough for an earlier century. "I shouldn't think you'd ever heard the name of Canada's first prime minister."

  "No," agreed Vanessa. "Is that who you are?" He nodded. "What did you mean about the red nose?"

  "Our beloved Sir John A., as he is affectionately known, had a marked propensity toward the imbibing of spirituous liquors," he said with a twinkle. "I do not myself have a disinclination for the bottle, as you may have noticed. Nevertheless, a spot of my wife's rouge, judiciously applied, was required to provide the necessary roseate hue."