Aspen Gold (49 page)

"It's Bannon."

Fractionally, she tightened her grip on the receiver. "Your father?"

"He passed away ten minutes ago." The flat, emotionless tone of his voice made her pause.

"Did he--was he able to say anything at all to you?"

"No, nothing."

She closed her eyes briefly in relief.

"I'm sorry, Bannon."

"How's Laura?"

"She's in bed asleep right now. Do you want me to--"

"Don't wake her. Let her sleep.

I'll tell her in the morning."

"That's probably best."

"I'll see you in the morning, then."

"Aren't you coming over? I can make some fresh coffee and--"

"No, I ... not tonight. Thanks for looking after Laura for me, Sondra. It helps knowing she's with you."

"If there's anything you need, anything I can do, call."

"Thanks."

Sondra hung up, the tiniest glint of satisfaction in her eyes. From behind her, Emily Boggs asked, "The elder Mr. Bannon, is he--"

"He's dead." Dead, and out of the way at last.

The stillness of the house hit him the minute Bannon walked in. It stopped him and held him motionless for a long second. Slowly, he reached up and slid his hat off, lowering it to his side.

"I'll hang that up for you," Kit said quietly as she slipped the hat from the grip of his unresisting fingers.

He peeled off the ski jacket as if it might lighten the weight pressing down on him.

She took that from him as well and hung it on a wall peg while he walked slowly to the table where his father had been found. He looked at the floor, then lifted his gaze to the timbered balcony and the bedroom doors leading off from it.

It hurt to breathe. Bannon caught himself listening for sounds--any sound that would indicate there was life in this house, not merely the hollow echoes of it. Its silence seemed to say more emphatically than the doctor's words that his father would never again clump down those stairs, never rear back his head and expound at length about the land, the mountains. He combed a hand through his hair, trying to rake out the knowledge that clawed at his throat and his mind.

Without saying a word, Kit moved past him to the fireplace. Kneeling on the stone hearth, she gathered kindling from the box and set about building a fire. Soon the crackle of flames curling over split logs broke the crushing silence.

Bannon gravitated toward the light and the heat.

Kit watched him, his expression closed in and hard, only the stark despair in his eyes revealing any hint of the awful tension inside. She wanted to absorb some of it, draw it from him into herself. But she knew he wasn't ready to be comforted yet. He was still trying to reject the truth, still trying to deal with the helpless anger, still trying to accept this sudden hole he found in his life.

She remembered that feeling of unreality she'd gone through when she learned of her father's death. So she waited.

Slowly, Bannon lowered himself into a chair in front of the fireplace and stared into the flames.

A faint noise, part of the creakings and groanings of an old house, broke his absorption. He lifted his head, listening for a taut second, then closing his eyes as a sigh broke from him. "I keep expecting him to walk in,

grumping about something," he admitted, meeting her gaze, finally acknowledging her presence.

"I know." She shifted to sit on her knees by his chair, smoothing a hand over the top of his and covering it.

"He's dead." He rubbed a hand across his mouth. "I keep telling myself that, but I look at his chair and think to myself that he's only left the room, that he'll be back. His presence is that strong."

"It always will be."

His hand reached out to touch her cheek. "I can't believe he's gone, Kit."

"He isn't gone, Bannon. He's here."

She leaned closer and placed a hand over his heart. "He's right here where he'll always be--in your heart. Can't you feel his big hands squeezing it to tell you it's so?"

In the next second, Bannon gathered her up and pulled her over the arm of the chair, crushing her hard against him. He buried his face in her hair, the sweet, clean smell of it striking deeply into him. The shadow of death seemed all around him, but here was life. He held on to it tightly.

"Kiss me," he demanded in a voice that was both desperate and fierce. "Make me feel alive, Kit."

His mouth roughly covered hers, pain, urgency, and the need for life all tangled up in the harshness of it. He felt the giving in her, the driving return of his kiss. But it wasn't enough. He needed to feel flesh against flesh, to taste the heat of bare skin, to feel the violent pound of blood through veins, to mix pain with pleasure. Nothing else would do.

Long after the need was satisfied, Kit held him in her arms, tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. His were dry. He was Old Tom Bannon's son; he cried his tears on the inside.

The glare of the morning sun bounced off the polarized lenses of the sunglasses John Travis wore. He ran up the steps to Kit's house and crossed to the front door.

He knocked twice and waited, listening for footsteps inside. He tried again, this time pounding hard enough to rattle the glass panes in the door.

Still there was no sound of anyone stirring.

Impatiently, he swept his glance over the ranch yard, his unease growing. Damn it, her Jeep was here. Where the hell was she?

He hadn't realized how far the ranch house sat back from the highway, how isolated it was.

Kit was so damned trusting she'd open her door to a total stranger. She probably didn't even lock her damned doors.

On that thought, he tried the front door. It swung open with a turn of the knob and a push. He walked in, half expecting to see the place ransacked. It wasn't.

"Kit!" He shouted her name and crossed to the stairs.

Five minutes later he was back in the living room. He'd checked every room in the house. There was no sign of her, and no sign of a struggle.

Yet her clothes were in the closet and her makeup was strewn over the bathroom counter.

He checked the phone to make sure it was working.

When he got a dial tone, he called the production number. Nolan answered.

"Nolan, it's John. I'm at Kit's.

Call me back. I want to make sure the phone rings in."

"Right away."

He hung up and waited. The phone rang and he picked it up. "It works."

"No sign of Kit?" Nolan asked.

"The Jeep's here, her clothes, her makeup.

Nothing seems to be disturbed. Maybe she's outside somewhere." Kit lying somewhere hurt was the thought he kept to himself. "I'm going out and take a look around."

"Maybe we should call the police."

"Not yet."

As he hung up again, John heard a vehicle pull into the yard. He crossed to the door, catching a glimpse of a high-riding black pickup that belonged to the neighboring rancher. He opened the door and stopped when he saw Kit on the passenger side, relief sighing through his every muscle. They tensed up again as she leaned over and kissed the driver. Not a quick, friendly peck, but a slow and

reluctant-to-let-go, morning-after kiss that followed a very satisfactory night before. John had done enough love scenes--both on camera and off

--to recognize the meaning of that one.

He backed up and let the door

close, then turned into the room, fighting down the shock, the anger, the hurt. He heard the muted slam of the truck door and jerkily lit a cigarette, blowing out a quick, thin stream of smoke.

Kit walked in, saw him, hesitated, then smiled a little guardedly. "I'll bet you're looking for me." She wore a ski suit and no makeup."

"I've been calling you since ten o'clock yesterday morning. Believe it or not, by midnight I started to get a little worried when there still wasn't any answer. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me where the hell you've been," he challenged in a tightly level voice.

"With Bannon." She pulled off her ski jacket and tossed it on a chair. "His father died last night. A heart attack."

"And you spent the night with him--doing your bit to comfort and console him. Is that right?" He coated his rawness with sarcasm.

She was slow to meet his eyes, but when she did, her gaze was level and direct. "Maybe I deserved that, John T., but it was still a cruel thing to say."

He dropped his gaze and took a quick, deep drag on the cigarette. "You always have brought out the best, and worst, in me. It's funny, isn't it?" His twisted smile was anything but amused.

"Paula told me I had competition, but I didn't believe her. How could a cowboy compete with John Travis? The old ego showing, I guess."

"I'm sorry," she said.

He glanced at the ash building up on the tip of his cigarette. "What's next, Kit? What are your plans with this Bannon?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "We haven't really talked about anything yet. And this isn't the right time, not with his father and the funeral the day after tomorrow." She knew she wouldn't see much of Bannon these next two days, not alone anyway, not with Laura, the funeral arrangements to be made, and all the friends who would be calling and dropping by. "I know where I want it to lead, but

..." She shrugged to indicate nothing had been settled.

"That's plain enough." John stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. "Since I'm here, I might as well tell you that one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was to apologize for the other night. Not for the things I said. They were true. But for the way I said them--in anger. I've been under a lot of pressure lately, my own and others'. I took it out on you."

"You need this movie. I don't. I can afford to be idealistic about the script. You can't." She understood that now. "It's really that simple."

"You can't afford to be idealistic either. You just haven't discovered that yet."

"Maybe. Either way, it's forgotten."

John eyed her for several seconds, then shook his head, amazed and amused. "Do you know what makes you so unusual, Kit? You actually mean that."

"Don't tell Bannon. I don't think he'd like it coming from you." Her smile was back.

"A man with a jealous streak, eh? In that case, I'd better make a note to bar him from the set when we do our love scenes. I'm giving you fair warning right now that I intend to enjoy the hell out of them, and he might not like the number of takes we're doing to get it right."

Kit laughed and pointed to the door. "G. I have a shower to take, calls to make, and work to do."

He moved to the door, then stopped, and sent her one of his crooked and potent smiles that could still tug. "Nobody has had a better parting line than Bogie," he said and Kit knew immediately he was referring to Casablanca. "But he could afford to be magnanimous. He had Bacall."

He gave her a two-fingered salute in farewell and murmured, "Here's looking at you, Kit."

He walked out, leaving Kit shaking her head, convinced anew that John Travis would have been extremely easy to fall in love with. If not for Bannon, that is.

Her smile faded when she thought of him at Sondra's now, going through the pain of telling his daughter about her grandfather. This wasn't Hollywood; no one would have the lines written out for him. He'd be on his own, never sure if he was saying the right thing or the wrong.

Dull gray clouds hung like a pall over the mountains on the day of the funeral. The canopy over the gravesite flapped noisily in the cold and bitter wind blowing off the peaks. Bannon sat with the collar of his topcoat turned up against it and his black dress hat pulled low on his head.

When Laura huddled closer to him, he glanced down and saw the simple weariness in her blank expression. She was cold and tired, wanting only to go home. He put an arm around her and hugged her to his side, recognizing she was too young to need this long ritual of saying good-bye, this attempt to reassure the living that even in death life had meaning.

Bannon glanced at the bronze-handled casket draped with a blanket of red roses, the delicate petals already showing the bruising of the cold wind. His father would have been content with a pine box and a prayer. On a bleak day like this, he would have been savoring the wind's keen edge, lifting his gaze to the far blue shadowing on the horizon and listening to the great silence of the mountains. And he would have been glad, too, to be lying next to his wife again.

His glance strayed from his father's casket to the other gravestones in the family plot--his mother's, Diana's. Over in the next section, Clint Masters was buried, too; some he had known well, others only in passing. Yet all of them had left an empty place in his life, great or small. Now his father. And with him, so many parts of the past.

Kit slid her gloved hand under his, twining fingers. He tightened on it briefly, then tried again to pay attention to the minister with no more success than before, and unaware of Sondra's cold eyes watching his every move, intercepting every glance he exchanged with Kit, observing every touch.

How could he treat her like this? She was all too hotly aware that it was obvious to everyone Kit occupied the favored spot at his side, not her.

She knew they were gloating over the fact.

Briefly, Sondra glared at Kit. She had John Travis, but he wasn't enough. She had to go after Bannon, too. The bitch was just like Diana, greedy and selfish, wanting everything for herself.

The clouds lingered for two days after the funeral.

Finally, on the afternoon of the second, snowflakes began to float lazily down, adding that breath of whiteness to the gray air, and lifting spirits.

Humming a Christmas carol, Kit

ran lightly up the steps of the old Victorian house that Bannon used for his law practice.

When she entered the parlor-turned-reception area, she noticed that the door to his private office was closed.

"Hi, Agnes," she greeted the woman behind the desk. "Is Bannon busy? I was hoping I might be able to steal him away for a late lunch."

"How about a rain check?" Bannon's voice came from her right. Turning, she found him shrugging into his parka. She didn't even try to conceal her disappointment. "You're going somewhere."