Aspen Gold (13 page)

"It's beautiful," she murmured, turning her wrist and watching the way the stones caught the light.

"A gift from me to you," he said. She started to shake her head as if in refusal. "Please.

Rare and beautiful things should be worn by a rare and beautiful woman."

She smiled and curved a hand to his cheek.

"I don't care if you've said that to every woman you've ever known. I love it. And I love the present."

Rising up, she kissed him, her lips moving warmly against his. He caught her close and deepened it, not caring if he crushed her gown or mussed her makeup. He needed to hold her, to taste her, to feel her, to explore these emotions that flowed from her so unconditionally, a heady wine that he wanted to get drunk on.

A voice in the hallway outside her bedroom restored a degree of reason. He drew back to hold her loosely, watching her eyes slowly open to look at him.

"Do you have any idea how much I want to skip that damned dinner tonight?" he murmured, fully aware he had to attend. Lassiter had commanded it.

"It's tempting, isn't it?" she murmured back, her gaze lifting no higher than his mouth.

"Very tempting." She studied the peach-colored smudge from her lipstick and recalled the power of his kiss, the way it had whipped through her, flaring with instant intimacy. It would be so easy to throw away caution and love him as fully and completely as she wanted to--so very easy. "But you're right." Kit sighed her regret. "We should be joining the others."

When she moved out of his arms, he made no attempt to stop her. "You'd better freshen your lipstick first."

She walked over to the vanity and plucked a tissue from the box. Turning, she offered it to him with laughing eyes. "And you'd better wipe yours off."

He touched his fingers to his lips, then looked at the smear of peach with a hint of drollness. The expression lingered as he crossed to her and took the tissue. He watched Kit apply a fresh coat of peach gloss to her lips while he scrubbed his away.

Something about this simple scene appealed to him--

Kit sitting at the vanity, dressed for an evening out with him, repairing the damage to her makeup that he'd caused. Simply looking at her, he found himself relaxing, a crazy contentment running through him. At the same time, he could see himself going over to her, running his hands over her bare shoulders, and bending down to nibble at her neck. Nothing more than that. He must be losing his mind.

"There," she said, satisfied with the results the mirror showed her. Rising, she slipped the tube of gloss into a gold-mesh evening bag and crossed the room to gather her cape from the bed. "I hope they serve champagne at the dinner tonight. I'm in the mood for champagne. Champagne and moonlight."

"Moonlight is for adolescents," he said.

"You and I are flesh-and-blood people, Kit. It's time we moved on to something more real than that."

She swung around at his words, paused, then released a long, slow breath, accompanying it with a faintly dazed shake of her head. "You do have a way with women, John T."

"Why are you always throwing that up at me?" he demanded, his mouth coming together in a grim line.

"To protect myself, I suppose." She saw the desire in his eyes and knew that he wanted her, that he needed her.

In this last month, she'd sensed the tension in him, the pressure he was under on this film. A man like him needed love; he needed the ease, the inner security, the laughter, that love could bring him. And she wanted very much to give it to him. But he wasn't ready to accept yet. Maybe he never would be. And she was afraid of having her love rejected again.

"Protect yourself from whom? Me?" He raised an eyebrow in challenge.

Kit picked up her cape and draped it over a gloved arm as she smiled at him in mock reproach. "Really, John T., are you trying to suggest that I would be the first woman to lose her head over you?"

"Maybe I'm suggesting that you're the first woman I could lose my head over." He resented that; she could see it.

"Life is full of risks, John T.,"

she said gently and slipped her arm under his.

"That's what makes the rewards so wonderful. Shall we go?"

He saw the light of humor in her eyes and wanted to curse her. But that was impossible when the urge to kiss her again was much stronger. Sighing, he escorted her from the room.

Bannon stood in front of the dresser mirror in the log-walled bedroom and absently buttoned his white dress shirt. A patchwork quilt filled with goose down covered the double bed behind him, its once-bright colors faded with time, like the braided rug on the planked floor. A spindle-backed chair sat in the corner, angled toward the blackened maw of a much-used fireplace, at one time the only source of heat. It was a room of simple comforts, yet homey and solid.

"Hi." Laura wandered into the room and stopped next to the dresser, propping her elbows on it and resting her chin in her hands, her hair falling loose about her shoulders in a gleaming black curtain.

"Hi." Bannon smiled down at her, catching the lemony fragrance of her shampoo.

"Are you all packed?"

"Yep. My toothbrush, too." She watched him fit a gold cuff link through its opening while she swayed on one foot, waggling the other behind her. "Are you almost ready?"

"Almost." He fastened it in place and reached for the other.

"Gramps is all dressed. I saw him admiring himself in the mirror when I went past his room," she said with an I-told-you-so look, then pushed off the dresser and strolled over to the bed.

"Did you fix yourself a sandwich?" Bannon watched her in the mirror, smiling at her bored, faintly impatient look.

"No." She plopped on his bed. "Buffy and I are going to fix pizza as soon as I get there."

Bannon tucked the shirttails inside the waistband of his trousers, listening to the protesting squeak of the bedsprings as Laura lightly bounced on it. Then the sound stopped and there was silence.

Bannon glanced in the mirror and saw her sitting on the edge of the bed, gazing at the walnut-framed wedding picture next to the lamp on his night table. He paused in the act of reaching for the black tie, for a moment unable to move as she picked up the photograph to study it.

"Do you think I look like her, Daddy?"

"When you're nineteen, you'll look exactly like her." Dropping his glance from the mirror, Bannon bypassed the bow tie in favor of a wide ribbon tie of black silk, the one his father always called his Sunday-go-to-meeting tie.

"That's how old she was when that picture was taken."

Laura sighed, a soft and wistful sound. "It would be nice to have a mother."

Her words hit him hard, filled as they were with her loneliness and longing for a mother. They sent his thoughts racing back to that long-ago night when he'd met Diana, when she'd smiled at him across the width of the table at the Jerome Bar, putting everything into her sparkling eyes. He'd been twenty-four and she'd been the kind of wild dark-eyed beauty men dreamed about.

He hadn't cared about the man beside her, the one who was supposed to be her boyfriend.

The bar was packed when Bannon walked in, filled with the usual raucous and rowdy crowd of ski bums, party seekers, ski groupies, and assorted hangers-on. Not his scene at all.

One drink and he'd leave, he decided.

He followed Sondra to a table occupied by a noisy group. His glance fell on a dark-haired girl as she looked up, her lips red and full, provocation in every soft curve of her cheeks, and her eyes dark and alive to him. He felt like he'd come in contact with a bare electrical wire, that's how sharply the sight of her had jolted him.

He pulled up a chair, unable to take his eyes off her, and ignored the attempts by the males in her group--frat brothers all--

to make him feel unwelcome. He recognized the type, sons of Denver's upper crust dressed in turtlenecks and cashmere sweaters, more interested in scoring and getting high than in getting high scores.

Bannon sat with his chair rocked back, indifferent to the brags about runs made and slopes conquered, his gaze seldom straying from Diana's face. Beside him, Sondra Hudson asked,

"How long have you lived in Aspen, Bannon?"

"I was born here."

"A native," Diana observed, a provocative pair of dimples appearing near the corners of her mouth. "How unusual." She shook her hair back with a toss of her head and continued to eye him. "Did I hear my sister say your family owns a ranch here?"

"Stone Creek. East of here, toward the Divide." There were a hundred things he wanted to tell her about it, but not here, not in this room full of people, some of them half drunk, some of them half stoned, all of them loud.

"A ranch by whose standards?" her boyfriend, David Thornton, challenged, his lip curling in a faint sneer, an arm draped around Diana in an assertion of ownership. "I've seen some of the so-called ranches around Aspen. A measly five and ten acres. My uncle owns a two-thousand-acre spread along the Wyoming border. I spent my summers there when I was a kid."

Bannon smiled slowly into his pilsner glass before lifting his glance. "Stone Creek encompasses a measly four thousand acres."

His softly spoken comment earned him a glare from David Thornton and a laugh from Diana.

"Shut up, Di," Thornton snarled.

"Why?" she taunted. "You walked right into that one."

One of their group sauntered back to the table after a trip to the john. "What's so funny? Did I miss something?" He looked around the table, his eyes unnaturally brilliant.

"Just you, Eddie," Thornton snapped.

"Yeah, I am a funny fellow," Eddie agreed with a ridiculous grin, then proceeded to pick up the pitcher of beer and down half of it to slake his coke-dry mouth.

"Jeezus, Eddie, why didn't you just spit in it?" one of the others complained.

"Hey, there's Andy Holmes," Thornton said and placed two fingers in his mouth to whistle at the skier, considered by many to have been America's best hope for a gold in the giant slalom at the last winter games, until an injury had eliminated him. "Andy!" he called, waving him over and rising to welcome him. "It's good to see you again. We met last year at the Halston party and shared a few lines together. David Thornton," he said to jog the skier's memory.

"David, right. How've you been?"

"Great. Sit down. Have a beer."

"Sorry, I'll have to take a rain check.

I've--" He paused in mid-sentence, catching sight of Bannon. "Hey, man. Where've you been? I haven't seen you on the slopes this year."

"Been too busy."

"Let's get together and make a couple runs down Bell before you head back to crack the law books again."

"Okay." Bannon felt Diana's eyes on him, the sensation a magnet that drew his glance back to her. Again he felt a tightness in his chest, in his loins, when he met the dark glow of her gaze. She seemed immensely pleased about something.

The sound of Thornton's voice floated to him, but Bannon missed his words. Then Andy Holmes spoke, obviously in

response to Thornton. "They're probably heading outside to catch the torchlight parade down the mountain."

"I want to see it, too." Diana was out of her chair before she'd finished the sentence.

"What the hell for? It's nothing but a bunch of skiers coming down the mountain with torches,"

Thornton scoffed. "It's strictly tourist stuff. Not worth losing our table over."

"Then you stay and keep it," she said, coming around the table. "Bannon will watch it with me."

Laughing at Thornton's surly look, she took Bannon's hand and drew him away. He followed her to the door, fully aware it wasn't the warmth of her hand he wanted to feel but the heat of her body.

"Thornton didn't look too happy about you coming out here with me," Bannon observed as they stepped outside.

"I don't care," she said with a blithe shrug of unconcern.

Bannon knew he should care, that he should feel some twinge of conscience for moving in on another man's girl. He hadn't been raised that way.

He steered her away from the crowd that had gathered outside, responding to the greetings that came his way with a nod or a wave, but never veering from the course he'd set. When he found a shadowy spot, empty of people, he stopped. "We should have a good view from here."

"Great. I love parades, any kind of parade." She tilted her head at a beguiling angle, the velvety darkness of her hair blending into the shadows and making a cameo of her face.

"Don't you?"

Bannon found himself agreeing, and feeling bewitched by the dark and tantalizing beauty of her.

She was like an evening breeze, filled with all its mystery and elusiveness, the very essence of a man's dreams, vibrant and alluring, seductive as the night.

With an effort, he lifted his gaze to the snow-covered mountain before them, looming pale and tall against the black of the sky. Far up the slope, he spotted a gleam of light.

"They're starting down," he said.

"Where?"

"There." He pointed to the light, but she shook her head, not seeing it, and moved directly in front of him to follow the angle of his upraised arm.

A second later, she whispered, "I see them."

He lowered his arm, his hands automatically settling onto her shoulders, drawing her back to lean against him, the perfumed scent of her hair stimulating his already-aroused senses.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she murmured.

He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, but he forced his eyes to look at the winding ribbon of flickering light making its serpentine course down the mountain, and forced his mind to dwell on something other than her nearness.

"One hundred years ago, back when all the silver mines on Aspen Mountain were in full operation, you would have seen a sight like this every night,"

he told her.

"Every night? Why?"

"Every night at eleven o'clock the mines changed shifts and hundreds of miners crisscrossed that slope, carrying lanterns to light their way. The glow from them probably didn't look much different than the light from the torches of the skiers."