Aspen Gold (29 page)

"No explanation, no apologies. That's the way you've always been," she remarked idly, thinking out loud.

"What else can anybody do?"

"Nothing, I suppose." She shrugged. "But I imagine it makes it hard for people to understand you sometimes."

"You never had any trouble figuring me out,"

Bannon recalled.

"Ah, but I have a special gift that way.

I know you through and through," she declared, silently laughing with him, influenced by that undercurrent that had always buoyed them when they were together.

Shifting position, she stretched fully out on the ground and pillowed her head with her hands, staring at the star-flung sky. "Nothing ever changes, Bannon. Not the mountains or the moonlight. Not the things I want, or you want."

"What do you want?" He eyed her curiously.

She turned her head, so close to him that he could see the blue flakes of color in her eyes

--and the dance of laughter in them. "Bannon," she said with mock reproval. "Never ask a woman's age, and never ask her what she wants."

Grinning, he looked up at the sky. "I know what I want. A slice of apple pie with a big chunk of cheddar cheese melted on top of it."

She sat up and caught back a laugh.

"Bannon, do you remember that night we drove to Basalt in the rain? We stopped at that bar and ate pizza and played poker until the place closed and the owner threw us out. Lord, it was dark in the mountains that night."

"What ever happened to that blue dress?"

"You still remember it?" she murmured in a wondering tone, then wrapped her arms around her upraised knees and lowered her chin onto them.

"It's packed away somewhere along with all the other things I outgrew and put away to forget--and never quite forgot." Turning her head slightly, she glanced at him. "Would you want to go back to those times, Bannon?"

He picked up a rock and idly rolled it in his hands. "No," he said. "I guess not."

She thought about that a moment, then sighed. "I guess I wouldn't either. We'd do the same things, make the same mistakes. Nothing changes."

With a touch of humor, Kit turned to smile at him, but the look on his face and in his eyes sent the smile away. There wasn't any haunting sadness in his eyes, no lurking shadows of regret; they were clear and dark-shining with wanting, just as they once had been when he looked at her.

Held by that look, she suddenly knew they were remembering the same things. She felt touched by those memories, dangerously stirred by them. The old closeness came back, the old, reckless, wild feelings came back to shake her. For one long, heady moment of time, she was shocked alive by the things his nearness did to her.

As the past rushed up, Bannon saw Kit as he had once seen her--a girl pushing him back with a pert and saucy reproach even as her eyes pulled him to her. He saw the dusting of freckles across her nose, the curve of her eyebrows, the smooth texture of her skin, faintly golden from the sun--and the reflection of himself in her pupils.

Rising swiftly, she stepped away from him, then turned back and lifted her chin. As her expression tightened against that flare of excitement, she pushed her hands behind her back--just as she had done in the old days when she'd been afraid of what was to come. An action he remembered so well.

"I think," she said, a little shakily, "it's time to go, Bannon."

"Right." He rolled to his feet and went to the horses, retightening the cinches.

He held the reins of the chestnut while Kit mounted. Once astride the buckskin, Bannon reined it toward the trail over the ridge. They set out on it again, single file with Bannon in the lead.

The porch light was burning, throwing its bright track past the steps when they rode out of the aspen grove. "Somebody's still leaving a light on for you," Bannon observed.

"Paula." Kit smiled. "I asked her to."

They rode past the house straight to the corral. Kit didn't object when Bannon stepped up to unsaddle the gelding. Somehow she couldn't seem to break the old routines, the old patterns. A sigh slipped from her. She wasn't sure where it came from, or even what it meant. She unbuckled the bridle and slid it off the chestnut as Bannon dragged the saddle from the horse's back.

She handed the bridle to him and waited in the corral while he carried the tack into the barn.

Absently she stroked the buckskin's nose and lifted her gaze to the sparkle of stars in the sky.

One fell, a brief white scratch in the indigo sky.

She heard Bannon's soft footsteps in the dirt, signaling his return. "It's a beautiful night. Hear the coyote?" She caught its faraway bark.

Bannon paused beside her. "He smells winter. So do I." He slanted a brief smile in her direction, then took up the buckskin's reins and started toward the house.

Kit fell in step beside him. "Of course, winter doesn't mean the same thing to him as it does to me."

"No. To a rancher in the high country, winter means hauling hay, chopping ice, half-frozen feet, and numb legs," Kit recalled, then remembered something else that she thought she'd forgotten. "The only four seasons a rancher knows is before haying, during haying, after haying, and winter."

"You've got it." They had reached the house and Bannon stopped. He fiddled with the reins for an instant, his glance bouncing off of her. "I'll be going now." He moved to the buckskin's side and stepped a boot into the stirrup.

Kit watched him swing aboard, conscious of the awkwardness, the tension that had sprung between them.

She lifted her chin a little higher and smiled.

"Tell Old Tom I made it home safely again."

"I will." He touched a finger to his hat brim and touched a heel to the buckskin.

She stayed there a minute, watching him ride off into the trees, then turned and climbed the steps to the front door.

In the living room, Paula lazed on the sofa, plump pillows supporting her back, an open book propped on her knees. She looked up when Kit walked in, a flicker of surprise crossing her face.

"You are back. I thought I heard you ride out again."

"That was Bannon." Kit killed the porch light, then started pulling off her gloves.

Paula gave her one of her wise, faintly amused looks. "Oh," she said, managing to put a wealth of meaning in that single sound.

"Oh?" Kit replied with deliberate lightness as she tucked her gloves in the pockets of her fringed jacket and wandered into the living room. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means"--Paula closed the book and swung her legs off the sofa to sit up--"I saw the way you two looked at each other when you were dancing the other night. You'll never convince me that at some time he wasn't more than just a neighbor and an old friend."

"He was," Kit admitted easily. "In fact, I always believed we'd get married after he finished law school and I graduated from college. We were never actually engaged," she added in quick qualification. "It was just something that was understood." Or so she thought.

"Then you broke up," Paula guessed.

"Not really." With her jacket half unbuttoned, Kit sank down on the ottoman in front of her father's chair, folding her legs beneath her to sit Indian-style. She looked down and idly toyed with the fringe on her sleeve. It had been years since she'd talked about Bannon. Suddenly she felt the need to.

"If we had, maybe it wouldn't have hurt so much when he married someone else."

"You mean he married someone else and you didn't find out about it until afterward?" The redhead frowned in surprise. "Was she someone he met in college, or what?"

Kit shook her head. "No. He met Diana here in Aspen during the winter carnival.

I wasn't here. I'd flown to California to spend my winter break with my mother. We'd argued about that. Bannon wanted me to come home and be with him for part of it, but--I hadn't been with Mother for Christmas in five years and it didn't seem right to go all the way out there for only a few days.

It wasn't a serious quarrel. He wasn't angry. Neither was I. It was just a disagreement.

A silly, meaningless disagreement." She breathed in deeply and let it out in a sigh. "After I got back, I had a couple letters from him.

Short ones that didn't say much. But I knew the class load he was carrying plus holding down a full-time job at the same time. Then Dad wrote me the first of March to tell me Bannon was married."

"Did he have to? Was she pregnant?"

"No. Bannon's daughter wasn't born until ten months later," she said. "She could have been mine. And that hurt, too." She paused and smiled ruefully, sadly. "If I could have found someone--anyone--that I really liked back then, I would have married him to hurt Bannon as much as he hurt me. That's how bad it was, how bad I felt." Her mouth curved in a sober, knowing line as she met Paula's gaze. "Bannon knows how much he hurt me. That's one of the things you see in his eyes when he looks at me."

"I suppose it is," Paula murmured thoughtfully.

Uncurling her legs, Kit rose from the ottoman, impelled into movement by a strange restlessness, a vague feeling of confusion and melancholy. She paused in front of the fireplace and buried her hands in the pockets of her jacket, fingers curling around the gloves.

"It's funny"--she stared at the blackened hearth--"but all I ever wanted was to marry Bannon and have babies, do some acting in the local theater here, then--later on--teach drama after the kids were in school." She glanced back at Paula. "I never thought about an acting career, or Hollywood. That wasn't part of my dreams for the future. Now look at me."

Paula nodded. "Life takes

funny turns sometimes."

"You can say that again." Kit smiled and tried to shake off this crazy mood. "Anyway, all that with Bannon is in the past. I've finally gotten over him."

"Oh, Kit, don't you know about first love?"

Paula chided. "You may grow out of it, but you never get over it."

The words struck true, leaving Kit without a response.

Bannon and his buckskin cruised through the stand of pines that grew on Silverwood property.

Bannon could almost feel the alien qualities of the soil come up through the legs of his horse--and knew the moment they crossed onto Stone Creek Ranch even though there was no fence to mark the boundary. The quality of home soil was that real to him. He'd been born on it and raised on it.

No matter the distance he traveled from it, the primitive pull of Stone Creek land was there.

He crested the ridge and sent his mount down the trail on the other side. Where it widened before the rocky defile, he reined the buckskin in briefly and glanced at the ground at the base of the tree, replaying the scene with Kit in his mind.

One powerful flash, like heat, had touched them both, disturbing them in a manner they had both recognized. He relived it--as he had relived so many others like it with Kit.

Swinging away from the sight, he heeled the buckskin into the rocks and remembered those days when he and Kit had been young, headstrong, and totally absorbed in each other. Yet, in the space of two months, he'd married Diana and changed the course of his life.

Looking back, from the distance of ten years, he couldn't say what had been in his head or his heart then. He couldn't be sure anymore of the reasons for his sudden act. It could have been rooted in his quarrel with Kit, or in the magical torch parade and fireworks of the winter carnival, or in the eyes and lips of Diana when she'd looked at him.

Sometimes there was no explanation for the things a young man did. He'd left his youth behind that night, and he'd left Kit behind. Whatever his feelings for her had been, he'd thrown them away. He'd never spoken of that time to her, and he'd never seen an emotion in her eyes that told him how she felt.

All this was the past that bound him with its eternal regret for having failed. The marriage had been a mistake, as Diana had soon told him.

Even though he recognized it as a mistake, he couldn't stop thinking that if he'd made a greater effort or had possessed a better insight into Diana's heart, he might have been able to make her feel differently. In his moments of deep loneliness and restless need, the old reproach of her eyes came back to make him feel that it was his fault.

John Travis sipped the Pinot Noir the wine steward at the Caribou Club had recommended. Kit sat across from him, a classic silk jersey sheath draping her upper body and discreetly hinting at the slender ripeness of her breasts. The fabric's forest green color brought out the blond of her hair and the deep blue of her eyes. Lowering his glass, he watched as she took a bite of her entr@ee and held the morsel of garlic-roasted chicken in her mouth, closing her eyes for a savoring, decadent moment, then chewing slowly and appreciatively.

"Delicious," she pronounced.

"Every time I watch you eat, I start envying the food." He set the wine down and reached for his own knife and fork.

"What on earth for?" she asked, sending him a bemused and curious look.

"Because you obviously enjoy the taste of it. Would you enjoy the taste of me as much?"

She picked up her wine goblet and provocatively met his glance over the rim of it. "That would all depend on how you taste."

"Why don't you take a bite sometime and find out?" he challenged.

"I just might do that." The corners of her mouth deepened in a smile of teasing promise.

Looking at her, he felt a hunger that had nothing to do with food, a hunger that was just as gnawing, but this was neither the time nor the place to satisfy it.

"I'll hold you to that," he vowed.

"Somehow I knew you'd say that." Her smile grew more pronounced as Kit admitted to herself that she liked to play these man-woman word games with him. In their own innocent way, they could be very stimulating.

"You did, eh?" He sliced into his medium-rare steak.

"I did." She sipped at her wine, then let her glance drift over the

mahogany-paneled room. "This is nice."

"I'm glad you approve," he said, then turned a cynical eye on the dining room of the exclusive, members-only club that attracted a mix of locals, superrich and supersocial, to its door. Since joining, John had discovered that anyone who frequented Spago's or Le Cirque would recognize half the people in the room. "The Caribou Club has been touted as Aspen's answer to Annabel's in London and Castel's in Paris. At least here, we can enjoy a quiet evening away from the tourists."