Zack decided to keep his mouth shut and focus on global climate change and ways to fix it. At least that he had a chance of understanding.
Chapter 7
If Anne had needed proof that she was in love, she found it on the ski slopes of Courmayeur. Because only a woman in love would be crazy enough to learn this ridiculous sport. Boots, bindings, skis, poles, thermal underwear, thermal waterproof pants, hats, goggles, inner gloves and outer mittens…she’d have needed less equipment to visit the International Space Station. She’d refused to give up her bulky parka and denied that ten degrees Celsius below freezing was merely nippy.
“Next time I lead an expedition, we’re going to Tahiti. At least it has the right number of syllables.”
“It what?” Zack slid to a neat stop and helped her once again rise from where she’d landed in a heap.
“Never mind.”
“Though you in a bikini I think is an excellent idea.”
“Not a chance, Mr. Vice President. I’m never taking off my parka, ever again. I’m going to be permanently chilled to the bone by this. And no, don’t even think about making any jokes about helping me into a hot shower.”
She could see by the smile showing below his sunglasses that was precisely what he’d been thinking.
After her fourth face plant into the snow, she’d was ready to jab Zack with a ski pole. She must not have been serious about it though or Harvey would have noticed and moved in closer to protect him. Secret Service agents swarmed the hill—some on skis, others on snowmobiles. And there was a large, treaded snow beast of a machine that rumbled suspiciously close by.
“Okay, it’s beautiful. I’ll admit that.” They were high in the Italian Alps. The gondola ride from Courmayeur up the mountain had been spectacular, the town nestled in the heart of the valley below. The ski area was over the ridge and filled a bowl in the mountains. It felt as if the world was suddenly very far away. The air was biting, but it was also crystal clear in a way that Tennessee was on a cool autumn morning when the cut hay fields were still thick on the air and the first geese from the north passed by the farm’s lake honking in dark Vs against the blue sky.
And it was her first fall in almost an hour. She’d graduated from the insultingly designated bunny slopes up to facile—even if “easy” was trying to kill her. Zack was proving to be a very tolerant teacher. Though she was sure that he’d be much happier zipping down those impossible cliff-like trails she’d caught glimpses of from the gondola, he hadn’t given even the least hint of it.
A gondola ride into the Italian Alps with the best lover she’d ever imagined did make it difficult to complain. But she made the effort on his behalf.
“So this is what you do for fun?” They were quite close together, but because he was on the downhill side they were nearly eye to eye in height.
“Absolutely.”
“Do you ride horses?”
“About as comfortably as you ski. I’m guessing you’re good?”
“Remind me to show you my collection of blue ribbons. They cover a whole wall.”
“Of your bedroom, Ms. Darlington? Is that an invitation?”
She couldn’t let him have the victory that easily. “If you make a formal application for an entry visa, I’ll take it under consideration.” Then, before he could reply, she pushed off with her poles, aimed her ski tips downhill, and managed a turn without turning into a human snowball—a definite victory.
As she worked her way down the trail, down the piste, the mountains changed and shifted in every direction, except to the northwest. There, the Mont Blanc Massif soared above all the others, its many-fingered white peaks as distinctive as a fist raised against the sky.
Genny had said to look at the Massif and the country around it…she couldn’t stop. The Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee were soft, rolling hills worn with age. These mountains were tall, vibrant, filled with life. A tourist brochure that Anne had found on the villa’s desk had pointed out that Mont Blanc was the third most heavily touristed natural wonder in the world, after the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. The tallest mountain in Europe, it dominated the skyline.
“That was amazing!”
“What was?”
Zack shoved against her shoulder and she tumbled into a snow bank…a snow bank at the foot of the lift. She turned and looked back up the slope, she’d skied the whole way down without another fall. She hooked a pole behind the Vice President’s knees and yanked sharply forcing him to land beside her with a grunt.
“I am amazing!” She told him as she leaned in to kiss him.
“And don’t you forget it.” His admonishment made her hesitate.
She wasn’t amazing. She was just Anne the-Vice-President’s-girlfriend Darlington. Anne didn’t turn aside from the kiss, but neither did it feel as incredible as it usually did.
She was rapidly becoming an adjunct to a spectacular man and that was a good thing, but it was far from being sufficient.
Zack pulled back to look at her, “Tell me what’s wrong. How can I help?”
He couldn’t. That was the real problem. No one could; it was something inside of her that was lacking. There was a desire, a focus, an ambition that others had but she’d never found. And that thought made her head hurt.
He’d risen to his knees—the Secret Service was moving in from the protective circle they’d formed to help him the rest of the way up. Anne grabbed the front of his ski jacket and yanked him back down into the snow, then kissed him hard.
Not thinking had worked well for her original plan. For now, she was going to stick with that.
Chapter 8
The conference wiped out Zack’s days and the dinner meetings took most of Zack’s evenings. Other than that first afternoon on the slopes, his only time for Anne had been when she accompanied him to the dinners with other countries’ representatives or when he curled up against her in utter exhaustion. Not exactly an opportune moment for pursuing his plan of discovering more about her.
Instead, she had listened while he raged against changes proposed and rejected—sometimes by his own “advisors” staunchly guarding their hidebound American thinking. She had made quiet suggestions that often worked to convince Japan or Iran to shift on one key point and Indonesia on another. And most of all she’d become an anchor that he couldn’t imagine not finding in his bed every night. There were times when all he wanted to do was to lie quiet for even a minute with her curled up against him and her head on his shoulder.
She had known he needed a distraction and had told him of her own explorations while he’d been locked away discussing carbon credits and “clean” coal. Along with Detra, they had hiked some of the lower slopes of the massif.
“The wildlife here is incredible. We saw a mountain goat and a whole family of chamois—they’re sort of half goat and half antelope. And we hiked up into whole fields of rhododendron that must be incredible when they’re in bloom. There’s a stark beauty here. I tracked down the local botanist and she said there are twenty-five hundred species and sub-species of flora, and that’s just above the tree line. It’s an incredibly rich environment. I was hoping to see a marmot, but they hibernate for up to ten months of the year, just as any sensible creature would in this frigid snowy place you have led me to.”
The tease sounded and felt normal, but there was a sliver of reserve there since that kiss in the snowbank. Not that she gave less, but that she’d taken to deflecting even the subtlest of his inquiries about herself more than usual.
“Now’s not the time,” she’d whisper softly and sometimes they’d make love. Other times they would simply sleep still clinging to each other.
Well, for better or worse, the meetings were on hiatus for the day.
“A whole day together,” he teased her in the shower. “Think that you can put up with me for that long?”
“It will b
e a burden, Mr. Vice President, but,” she’d been scrubbing his back with a soapy washcloth, then she slid it down and forward between his legs, stealing his breath away. “Somehow I’ll manage.”
He turned on her and they both managed just fine.
A day off, he thought as he made a study of lathering her breasts, they could ski again. No, she worked down his chest and stomach until once more her hands were on the verge of killing him with pleasure, he wanted something different.
Ice skating? He pushed her back against the dark tile wall. No, still in the cold category.
Going into Milan or Turin for the day? His mind still worked as she wrapped her legs about his hips and her arms about his neck and he pressed her back against the shower’s wall. Without warning the Secret Service ahead of time, that could cause problems.
If it was just him, what would he do? Anne clung to him as if she’d never let him go and Zack knew what the old saying “two bodies as one” truly felt like. He knew exactly what he’d do.
But first he had something to do here, and now he concentrated on it with all of his ability to give pleasure to another.
# # #
“Mr. Vice President, have I mentioned how stupid I think this is?”
“Several times,” he replied from his sailplane seat close behind her. They both wore headsets so that she didn’t even have to raise her voice to speak.
“Well, I’m saying it again. They dragged us up here, they can drag us right back down.” At least she wasn’t cold. She’d been freezing, until they closed the Plexiglas canopy and the tiny cockpit had warmed in the bright sun.
“See the red handle on the floor between your knees? Give it a good sharp yank.”
Anne took one last look at the world she knew and wished it goodbye. The sky was Italian azure. The very tops of Mont Blanc’s snowy peaks ranged at eye-level along the northern horizon. Far below, deep in the shadowed valley, lay the picture postcard town of Courmayeur.
Straight ahead flew a tiny tow plane attached to a long cable that once again bucked and jerked them about the sky. She heard that plane’s engine grinding along ahead of them, and also felt the engine vibration transmitted to them down the cable. All about them the wind roared as if in a foul temper.
“We could be walking the Viale Monte Bianco. Green garlands over the street with wooden chicken ornaments dangling from them.”
“Chickens? Really?”
“Really. And I discovered a charming little trattoria, just as Genny said I would, on the Via Roma. We could go in for a caffe. Because you’re from Colorado, you can get a gelato even though it’s the middle of winter. By evening, the every tree and bush will be lit with tiny white lights. And the crèche here is not a simple little tableau of statues; it has real people, donkeys, a manger, everything.”
“Sounds wonderful. Let’s go.”
Anne waved her hand at the sky. “We can’t because you have us ten thousand feet up in the air.”
“Closer to fifteen thousand. Though Courmayeur is at four thousand, so we’re close enough to ten thousand feet above the ground.”
“Well get us down!” If she dared, she’d unbuckle, turn around, and throttle the man.
“So pull the red handle.”
“But we don’t have an engine.”
“Soaring team captain my last two years at the Academy. We placed first nationally both years. Pull the release.”
“Couldn’t you have been a jet pilot instead like a normal Air Force captain?” Before she could think again, she gave the handle a yank.
The world changed as if they’d stumbled, or rather come off a stumble to find themselves at last walking gracefully. The cable dropped away in slow motion. The tow plane rocked its wings as if it was waving goodbye before it rolled on its side and plummeted down and away. With the cable detached, the flight of their sailplane smoothed out and she felt as if she was floating. The only sound now was the roar of the wind—which didn’t seem nearly as malevolent as a moment ago—and the pounding of her heart.
Zack flew them along as smoothly as if they were on a rail, a rail across the sky.
Her feet were in the fiberglass nosecone, perhaps a quarter of an inch from the sky. There were four instruments: speed, compass, a miniature airplane floating along a horizon, and the last one ominously pointed at zero with the numbers one through five both above the zero and below it.
From the waist up she was surrounded by glass and sky. If she didn’t turn enough to see the impossibly long and slender wings, she could be sitting alone in a chair ten thousand feet into the sky.
“Ready?”
“For this? No way. This is incredible.”
“No, for this,” the tone in his voice should have warned her as the nose tipped forward. That last traitorous instrument stopped pointing at zero and was soon pointing down at two, then three, then she was looking straight down at Courmayeur and the Dora Baltea River that flowed at the bottom of the Aosta Valley.
The moment before she could scream, the joystick between her knees—that must be attached to Zack’s control—pulled right back into her lap. The sailplane’s nose swung upward in a graceful effortless arc until she was looking straight up into the sky. They kept going, tipping on their back until she hung upside down and she now understood the reason for the four-point harness attaching her so solidly to her seat. And still she floated off it. Then with a lazy roll, the earth went from being over her head, to off the left side, and finally back to sensibly lying flat far below.
The rush of blood to her head eased back into her body, the floating freedom of it forced out a cry of delight that echoed in the tiny cabin. “That’s better than sex, Zack.”
“You’re right, this was a bad idea. The first time you actually use my name, and it’s to tell me that there’s something better than sex with me.”
She wanted to giggle as he swooped the plane downward in a lazy spiral. “It’s the risk you take, Mr. Vice President.”
“My ego is very bruised,” he said lightly. As they spiraled, she could see the Secret Service’s escort helicopter hovering to the south.
Harvey had thrown a fit, but Zack had convinced him that there was no mad saboteur lurking at the sailplane rental counter. Though they’d left an agent posted there to make sure that the clerk told no one about just who had taken one of their sailplanes aloft until they were safely returned.
Zack came out of the spiral into a wing-over-wing that rolled them all the way over sideways until they were right side up again with the same gentleness as them trading positions in bed.
“Your ego shouldn’t be bruised. What’s between us, that isn’t sex.”
“It isn’t? Then what is it?”
“If I have to explain it, Mr. Vice President, it rather defeats the point.”
# # #
Zack nosed the sailplane down again, just so that he could watch Anne’s hair float up in the negative gravity. He kept pushing it over to do an outside loop, an entire loop in the sky, but with the cockpit turned to the outside instead of the inside of the circle. It was a tricky maneuver but he could still feel the proper control changes drilled deep into his muscle memory. The Schleicher ASK 21 sailplane was a solid performer and took them under effortlessly: nose aimed down, upside down at the bottom of the loop with the g-force dragging hard against them, finally nose straight up. Rather than going over the top and back to level flight to close the loop, he continued to drive the plane upward, bleeding off the speed until they hung suspended for a moment pointing straight up but going nowhere.
Then they began falling backward and he kicked the rudder pedal to twist them back into a nose-down dive. The thermal air currents coming up off the deep valley were sufficient that by the time he once again leveled out he had lost only five-hundred feet since releasing the tow; it was going to be a magnificent flight.
&nb
sp; Flying was better than sex.
But it wasn’t sex between them?
Then it was making love. And she was right, there was no need to explain.
Love is what passed between them. Love is what dug down warm and safe beneath the covers with them. It was the rich taste of that one special, private dinner they’d shared last night of Tagliatelle with Chestnut Flour in a Venison Sauce and a Controfiletto of Piedmontese Beef at the Pierre Alexis 1877 with the G-8 ministers. The massive brickwork arches, the winter flavors, and having Anne at his side all combined to make it one of the best meals of his life.
“This is slow food, Mr. Vice President,” she had said. “That is why it is so good. It is never hurried along, and it is all locally sourced.”
He couldn’t agree more as he flew them high above the mountaintops of the Italian Alps. A sailplane was not about speed, it was about the joy of flight. A joy the woman seated before him provided at every moment in its purest form.
“I love you, Anne.”
“I love you too, Mr. Vice President.”
“And still she calls me by my title,” he sliced a sharp bank toward the Massif, placing Mont Blanc itself dead center in the windscreen; a blinding snowfield glaring in the morning sunlight.
“Yes, sir.”
“And what will you say when I ask you to marry me?”
“I will say no, Mr. Vice President.”
The joystick slipped out of his fingers and he slammed against his harness as the sailplane stalled and twisted into a dive.
# # #
Anne barely had time to catch her breath before he recovered, but even she knew that the plane wasn’t supposed to do what it had done.
“I’m sorry, Zack. Really I am. There could be no better man than you. But the answer will be no.”
When he didn’t respond, she wished she could turn to see him, but the harness made that impossible in little more than peripheral vision. Besides, she didn’t know if she could stand to look at him.
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