Aspen Gold (14 page)

"There were mines up there?"

So sensitive to her, Bannon could almost see her eyes searching the face of the mountain for some trace of them. "Quite a few--the Aspen Mine, the Emma, the Durant, the Homestake," he said, naming off the major producers. "Before the ski lifts, there were tramways to carry silver ore down the mountain. The one to the Aspen Mine was a mile long."

"Really?" she murmured in a marveling voice.

"Really." He paused, then said, "Of course, Aspen's most famous mine--some claim the richest, outproducing even the famous Comstock

--was the Mollie Gibson over on Smuggler Mountain. But it was in the Smuggler Mine that they found a nugget weighing close to a ton in a cavern encrusted with silver. The nugget had to be cut in three pieces just to haul it out of the mine."

"A one-ton nugget." She shook her head at the incredulity of it. "It doesn't sound real."

"It was."

"What happened to all the mines?"

"When the United States adopted the gold standard, the bottom dropped out of the silver market. One by one, the mines shut down.

Over the years, they've all been abandoned, the entrances to their shafts filled in or boarded shut, like the one on our ranch. But the whole area is still honeycombed with tunnels--the surrounding mountains, the town. ... In fact, we could be standing over one right now."

She turned her startled gaze on him.

"You're not serious, are you?"

Beyond her, he had a glimpse of the first of the skiers sweeping toward the bottom of the run, cutting a black silhouette against the white of the snow. But it was all blocked out by the sight of her upturned face and the glistening invitation of her lips. The last vestiges of his restraint broke.

His mouth came down, hot and heavy, and she turned into his arms. There'd been no hope for it, no stopping it. Their attraction was mutual and strong, and progressed rapidly, passionately, into something deeper and more intense. Overhead, fireworks exploded in dazzling bursts of reds and golds and whites to light up the sky, but it had been nothing next to the impact Diana made on him.

That night had been the start of it. From then on, he'd spent every free moment, every free hour, every free night with her, showing her Aspen--the slopes, the intimate restaurants, the crowded après-ski spots, the shops, even the quiet of a moonlight sleigh ride.

Then the week had ended. Bannon had gone back to Boulder to resume his studies at the university and Diana had gone back to Denver.

But he hadn't been able to stop thinking about her, wanting her.

Within a matter of days, he'd started burning up the road between Boulder and Denver three and four times a week, and every weekend. He'd known it was madness, but he'd been powerless against the attraction this stormy girl held for him, always so tempestuously happy to see him and so terribly forlorn when he left.

Four weeks after they'd met, she had clung to him. "Don't go. I can't stand it when you leave.

Don't you love me, Bannon?"

He hadn't left, and the next day they had eloped--to his father's dismay and her father's delight, elated to have another daughter off his hands.

A month later Diana was pregnant.

Unable to cope with his studies and the morning sickness that left her wretched and weak, Bannon did the only thing he could--he took her home to the ranch and placed her in the care of his father and the housekeeper, Sadie Rawlins. Three months later, he joined her--with degree in hand.

By then, the bouts of morning sickness were over and she found herself stuck on a ranch a long way from town, from parties and friends and excitement. It was a kind of suffocation against which she fought.

Then one summer afternoon, David Thornton stopped by the ranch. Bannon was in the hay field near the house and saw him drive in. When he reached the house, he heard the sound of Diana's laughter mingling with that of Thornton's. It hit him how long it had been since he'd heard Diana laugh.

The laughter stopped the instant he stepped onto the porch.

Turning, Thornton jeered, "How come you're sticking so close to the house, Bannon? Don't you trust your wife?"

He laughed again and Bannon hit him.

Diana screamed a protest, but he didn't listen and went at Thornton again.

The fight was brief, ending when Diana rushed to the fallen Thornton and turned her black and accusing eyes on Bannon, the loathing in them stopping him cold. He looked at Thornton's bloodied lip and bruised jaw. He'd won, yet he'd lost.

Bannon tried to change that during the months that followed, but shortly after the cesarean birth of their daughter, Diana looked up at him from her hospital bed, white and weak, her love gone.

"I was wrong to marry you. I should have married David." Her voice was barely more than a whisper. "You and I aren't alike at all."

She paused, her eyes black with bitterness.

"God, I hate you for this."

Those were her last words to him. A few hours later she died. The cause of death, never known.

Some said he was to blame. Maybe he was.

"She was very beautiful, wasn't she?" Laura murmured, her fingers lightly caressing the woman in the picture.

With an effort Bannon pulled himself out of the past and turned to the present--their daughter. Looping the ribbon tie around his neck, he walked over and sat next to her, curving an arm around her small shoulders.

He didn't have to see inside her head to know she held a wonderful image of her mother, an image created out of a child's need. And, as in a fairy tale, that image always had to be bright and fair.

"She was beautiful, Laura. She was very beautiful--with long black hair that gleamed in the sunlight just like yours. She had your dark eyes, too. She loved you very much. She loved both of us very much," he lied.

Laura remained silent, drinking in his words and storing the description in her memory. With a soft, satisfied smile, she let him take the photograph and set it back on the night table.

He knew he'd made her happy. Nothing else mattered.

"Why don't you get your things and take them out to the truck? I'll be down in a minute." He stood up and slipped the black silk ribbon under the white collar of his shirt.

"Okay." She moved toward the door, still wearing that pleased look, still warmed by the dream he had given her.

Bannon turned to the mirror and tied the black silk into a bow, then reached for the formal jacket to his trousers. He remembered with sharp, stinging regret the kind of young man he had been, the endless zest he'd had for life, the hopes and tempers and formless dreams that had lifted him. He'd had faith then. Faith and enthusiasm.

The stretch limousine glided in and out of the pools of light cast by the street lamps.

Fallen leaves from the towering cottonwood trees planted a century ago whirled giddily in the long car's wake.

Kit sat tensely in the rear passenger seat, her face turned to the window, the high, ruffled collar of her evening cape flaring in a circle around her neck. On the curved seat across from her, Paula languidly crossed a leg and asked in idle curiosity, "How many will be at this dinner tonight?"

"Probably around two hundred,"

John guessed.

"That many," Kit said with a hint of a groan.

John angled his head toward her, his mouth quirking in amusement. "I thought you liked parties."

"Parties, yes," she replied. "These lavish, high-style affairs where people stand around being rich together--no. I always feel like I should post guards around my tongue."

"Don't we all," Paula murmured, looking more exotic than ever in an ethnic-inspired gown by Armani. Beside her Chip arched his neck and tugged at the tight collar and snug bow tie.

"Yes, but unlike you, Paula," Kit threw her friend a smile, "I've never been able to acquire the knack of lying well."

"You will," she replied with a certainty that made Kit uneasy.

She shrugged off the feeling and the subject with an indifferent "Maybe," and glanced out the window.

The limousine left the tree-shadowed area and passed into the more brightly lit business district of downtown Aspen. Almost immediately Kit spotted the three-story-tall brick hotel that was their destination.

"There's the Jerome," she said, then mused absently, "It's hard to believe it was built when Chicago's first lowly skyscraper was still being engineered."

"Have you been in it since it's been completely renovated?" John snubbed his cigarette out in the armrest's ashtray.

"Only once. Dad and I had dinner in the Silver Queen about a year after it reopened," she said, then glanced at him. "Did you know Gary Cooper used to sit on the bench out front with the spit-and-whittle boys and watch the girls go by?"

"Gary Cooper?" Paula repeated skeptically.

Kit nodded. "Back in the forties and fifties, a lot of the big Hollywood stars used to come here. There are endless tales about Hedy Lamar holding down a barstool for days at the Jerome Bar--and the Duke buying up old silver claims and getting into brawls. Norma Shearer stayed at the Jerome," she recalled. "And I saw a photo of Lana Turner with her then-husband Lex Barker dining at the Jerome." She paused a beat to grin a little impishly. "Naturally she was wearing a sweater."

The smile stayed as she remembered something else.

"According to Dad, after the swimming pool was built, they used to have pool parties there, and the guests would jump in--with or without clothes--long before the Kennedys made it the fashionable thing to do."

"Did you?" John asked, his sidelong glance bold and naughtily wicked.

"Sorry." She grinned. "Those parties were before my time."

"What was the Jerome like when you were growing up?"

Chip leaned forward, his writer's curiosity aroused.

"Nothing like it is now. Sometime after World War II, they painted all the brick white and trimmed the stone arches above the windows in blue.

We used to call it the building with the blue eyebrows," she recalled with a smile. "It always looked dingy and a little run-down. Off and on they made stabs at restoring it. Through it all, the Jerome Bar was always one of the most popular après-ski spots in Aspen, the place to be seen. Preferably in the front room where the bar is. Lord help you if you ended up at a table in the Ladies' Ordinary. Still it was better than not being there at all."

"The Ladies' Ordinary? What's that?"

Chip frowned, wrinkling his nose as he pushed his glasses higher up on the bridge of it.

"It's the side room off the bar. When the hotel was built back in the 1890's, the Ladies' Ordinary was where an unescorted lady could sit in public and have tea--or something stronger."

"How liberated," Paula drawled.

"It was then," Kit reminded her and looked out the window again at the old and elegant hotel.

"There was always talk about tearing it down when I was growing up. I'm glad they didn't."

The layers of paint were gone, removed in the major restoration process. The building's original facade of terra-cotta brick and Peach-glow sandstone was again exposed. And once again, the Hotel Jerome stood in stately dignity, reigning tall and proud over the corner of Mill and Main, no more merely a symbol of Aspen's rich past but a vital part of its present.

A steady succession of limousines, Mercedes, and the ubiquitous Range Rovers pulled up in front of the hotel's porticoed entrance, bringing guests to the exclusive charity dinner and attracting the curious. As their limousine pulled into line to await its turn, Kit imagined the scene at the start of the Mauve Decade when the Jerome had been modern and new, when its Eastlake decor had been the height of fashion, when its elevator, its electric lights, its hot and cold running water, its indoor plumbing, and its French chef were the talk of the town.

Guests, drawn from the ranks of Eastern capitalists, railroad barons, and silver kings with an occasional European marquis thrown in for color, would have arrived in brass- and patent-leather-trimmed carriages, snappy broughams, and smart runabouts pulled by matched teams of high-stepping horses. Sidewalk gawkers would have stared at the gentlemen in their cutaway coats and top hats, and the ladies, laced breathless in tight corsets beneath gowns of silk and satin, their hands gloved and their shoulders bare.

The outward trappings had changed, but little else.

A liveried doorman stood by to hand Kit out of the gleaming black limousine. She took John's arm as the bodyguards closed in to hustle them inside.

"Hey John!" someone shouted.

Kit glanced to her left and a flashbulb went off, the explosion of light burning its imprint onto her retina. She blinked trying to get rid of the bright spot. The paparazzi definitely added a new twist to the scene, she decided as one of the bodyguards intervened.

"Come on, John. Just one more of you and Miss Masters," the bearded photographer protested, still snapping away despite the bodyguard in front of him.

John ignored both the request and the photographer as he guided Kit into the hotel, the head of his security team running interference.

Inside, she paused and pressed a hand to her eyes. "I'm still seeing spots. The paparazzi are everywhere, aren't they? Even in Aspen."

He nodded. "Like litter on a sidewalk."

The corners of her mouth deepened in amusement.

"That's rather a profound analogy."

"And apt, too." He flashed her one of his smiles as Chip and Paula joined them.

The ballroom, with its polished floors and gilt-papered walls, was already filled with people and music. All around was the gleam of damask-covered tables, the glint of champagne in crystal, the shimmer of gems, and the scents of perfume and flowers.

Pausing, John scanned the gathered throng.

Black-coated waiters, bronze gods who could have come straight from central casting, circulated among the guests, dispensing glasses of Haut Brion from their trays or ice-cold Stolichnaya for those who preferred the more traditional accompaniment to the miniature, beluga-topped potato pancakes on the hors d'oeuvre trays.

Wryness edged one corner of his mouth as he noted the number of other private bodyguards in attendance supplementing the hotel's security staff. Some were burly and obvious, some nondescript and not. Their presence was accepted, virtually taken for granted and ignored by the guests as if they were nothing more than an ordinary accessory ... like cuff links. Necessary for some, status symbols for others, but definitely a sign of the times.