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‘Hello, Katrien.’ He pulled her woollen hat from a back pocket and dropped it on the table. ‘I thought you might be missing this.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, staring at it.
‘May I?’ he asked politely, including the two Americans in his enquiring glance.
‘Oh, sure!’ One of them moved her chair over to make room for him to take the empty fourth at the table.
Katrien introduced him, and watched him charm the girls with his smile and stories of the mountains. But when she had finished her brandy and made to go he put down his glass and stood up. ‘Nice meeting you,’ he told the American girls, and followed Katrien from the room.
In the foyer he said, ‘I hoped to talk to you.’
‘What for?’
Taking her arm, he drew her over to where a couple of armchairs were placed at either side of a low table.
Reluctantly she sat down, and he took the other chair, leaning forward with his hands clasped between his knees. ‘To apologise,’ he said, ‘for imagining you were deliberately putting yourself in my way. And for the kiss…though it’s hard to say I’m sorry about that. I enjoyed it too much.’
He wasn’t the only one, she thought guiltily. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Apology accepted. I guess…you couldn’t be blamed for wondering if I was pursuing you. I suppose women do.’
His mouth twitched in a half smile. ‘Not often enough. I was going to buy you a drink, but—’
They couldn’t return to the bar now. ‘I’ll take a rain-check on that,’ she offered.
‘Right. I’ll hold you to it.’ He leaned back, smiling at her in a relaxed fashion. ‘You’re a model, aren’t you? That’ll be why I thought I recognised you at the dinner when…we met.’
Was that why he’d stared at her, as she’d stared at him? She was used to people knowing who she was, or not knowing but being aware they’d seen her face somewhere. And yet she’d thought there was something different, some special awareness about the way he’d kept looking at her. Maybe she had simply imagined it because of her own sense of recognition, her conviction that he was the man who haunted her sleep.
‘You’ve probably seen some of my magazine work,’ she suggested. ‘Or maybe a TV ad.’
‘I think I’d remember if I’d seen you on TV. I don’t watch much, and the last few years I’ve been out of the country most of the time.’
‘Climbing.’
‘Yes. In India, South America…wherever there are mountains.’ Perhaps he saw something in her face. ‘You don’t approve?’
Katrien shrugged. ‘I don’t understand the compulsion. When you talked about it that night I could see you were in love with the mountains. But it seems so…’
‘Pointless?’ Zachary laughed. ‘Only those who do it truly understand. It’s a matter of pitting yourself against the elements, experiencing the worst that nature can throw at you, and coming out on top. Of proving yourself to yourself.’
‘Over and over? Until you die? Like your friend Ben?’
His face went smooth and expressionless, and she said swiftly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you.’
Zachary shook his head. ‘It’s okay.’ He was silent for a moment, gazing down at his brown leather boots. ‘I’m used to losing my friends to the mountains. Not many of us live to a ripe old age.’
Inexplicably angry, she said, ‘So it’s acceptable? You can just shrug your shoulders and say, “Poor old Ben”—or poor old Dick or Tom or Harry?’
‘It’s not like that. But on the mountains you realise how little one human life really matters in the scale of things. And Ben died doing—’
‘What he wanted to do. I know.’ Her voice was decidedly tart. ‘And he left a wife and family behind while he went off to do it.’
‘Wendy knew what she was taking on when she married him. They used to climb together before the children came along.’
‘And then she gave it up, but he didn’t?’
Zachary spread his hands. ‘Climbing was his life.’
‘And yours?’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘I’m not married.’
He would be about thirty, Katrien guessed, a few years older than herself. ‘Have you ever been married?’ she asked.
He was looking at her, his eyes dark. ‘A couple of near-misses. They wanted me to give up climbing.’ He gave her a crooked smile.
‘I rest my case.’ She stood up and he followed. ‘I’ll see you around, Mr Ballantine.’
She made to pass him on the way to the stairs, but he reached out and caught at her arm. ‘Tomorrow?’ he urged. ‘On the top ski field? I wouldn’t like to think you were staying away from the upper level because of me.’
There was no need for her to stay away. He’d apologised, they both understood the situation, and nothing more was likely to happen. What could happen on a popular ski slope with dozens of people about?
Temptation warred with common sense. She temporised, knowing it was weak and stupid. ‘Maybe.’
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Katrien arrived next day at the upper field Zachary was coming out of the café. As she saw him pick up his skis she told herself it was coincidence, that he hadn’t been sitting and watching the chairlift, waiting for her.
He smiled at her lazily and, without speaking at all, tramped to her side at the top of the slope, let her push off before him, and followed, swooping past her in a series of sashaying curves, wide sweeps leaving parabolic lines in the snow.
She began to copy him, watching how he used his body, feeling her own muscles respond as she mimicked his movements.
She finished the run faultlessly and came to a swerving halt beside Zachary, flushed and proud of herself and meeting his eyes unafraid, responding to their laughing approval.
‘I never thought I was that good!’ she said involuntarily.
‘We none of us know what we can do until we try.’ He smiled at her, and suggested, ‘I’ll buy you a drink before we do it again.’
She let him, but the next time she bought the drinks and he just raised a dark eyebrow at her and allowed her to pay.
They skied together every day, and had coffee or drinks afterwards. One afternoon he asked her if it had always been her ambition to become a model, and she laughed and told him the only career she’d seriously considered was librarianship, which made him laugh in turn. ‘I was in my last year at school,’ she said, ‘and a friend asked me to model a dress she’d designed for a sewing contest. We came third, and one of the judges approached me and asked if I was interested in modelling professionally. My friend was terribly excited and talked me into going to see the agency the woman suggested. And…well, things just sort of developed from there. What about you? How does one become a mountaineer?’
‘I’ve been skiing since I was ten, more interested in cross-country than downhill. When I was fifteen I started climbing. At university I met Ben and we climbed together during the holidays.’
‘What did you take at university?’
‘A science degree.’
‘Is that how you got a job in Antarctica?’
‘Uh-huh. I studied ice movement, and did a fair bit of climbing there. Later Ben and I did Everest together, and then turned professional.’
‘You make a living climbing mountains?’
‘As mountain guides, nursemaiding recreational climbers to the best climbs around the world. In between, we tackled the real stuff, the places and routes no one had successfully climbed before.’
‘Surely it’s very expensive fitting out an expedition.’
‘I’ve had grants from various institutions to carry out scientific studies on the mountains—the qualities of ice and snow, geological information, environmental studies. And several clothing and equipment firms helped finance our climbs. Ben was good at rustling up sponsors, and he was very photogenic.’ Zachary grinned, half sadly. ‘He even did a bit of modelling work. I teased him about that. You never bumped into him?’
Katrien shook her head. ‘Your family must worry about you.’
‘My mother was killed in a car accident when I was fourteen, and my father died a few years ago of a brain tumour. I have a brother who lives in England with his wife and family. We keep in touch, but his life is too busy to spend it worrying about me.’
‘That was awfully young to lose your mother.’ She still felt grief for her father’s death over a year ago. How much worse it must have been for a fourteen-year-old.
‘Death is the inevitable consequence of life.’ He paused. ‘I learned that a bit earlier than most people, I guess.’
Too early, surely. ‘Is that why you took up climbing?’ she asked, wondering if having his mother taken from him at a vulnerable age was what drove him to risk his life over and over—a need to defy the cruel fate that had taken her from him, to shake his fist in the face of death.
‘It took my mind off things, certainly. When you’re climbing you need to concentrate on your next step all the time. If you don’t, it could be your last.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
He looked surprised, then searching. ‘What you meant?’
She shouldn’t have started this, but he was waiting for her to explain. ‘I just thought…maybe you wanted to show that you could…beat death at his own game, because of your mother.’
Perhaps she had offended him. He seemed disconcerted. ‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘you could be right. I’ve never thought of it in those terms.’
She smiled apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean to psychoanalyse you.’
‘That’s okay.’ He was staring at her as if seeing her in an entirely new light. She looked down and fiddled with her coffee cup, until he pushed back his chair and said, ‘Right, shall we go back to the run?’
On her fifth day when she arrived at the café he wasn’t there. She unstrapped her skis and drank two cups of coffee she didn’t want before she saw a figure in the distinctive ski suit riding up on the chairlift.
When she came to the door he smiled at her and said, ‘I’m glad you waited.’
She didn’t deny it. Of course she’d waited. The thought intruded that she’d waited a long time for him. Years.
Nonsense. He was just a man, met casually and probably never to be seen again. A very attractive man, but not the first one she’d found sexually appealing. She was bound to meet attractive men even after her marriage to Callum, and she would have to deal with that.
Her dreams had been empty lately; no dark, mysterious figure held her close and murmured in her ear, carried her against his heart.
She was too tired to dream. But it was the kind of healthful tiredness that left her looking forward to the next day and the white, beckoning snow. And each day her skiing had improved, her skills growing as she exerted herself, pushing herself to the limit of her ability in an effort to match Zachary.
The run was clear for once of other skiers, except near the bottom.
They took off side by side, and then Zachary swooped off to the left.
Katrien swerved right, glancing at Zachary to see when he changed direction, and in the same instant she followed, gliding back to meet him.
She saw him laugh, and knew he’d read her mind. They passed in the middle of the run, missed each other narrowly and started new opposing curves.
With any other partner this would have been crazy—she wasn’t nearly good enough to successfully negotiate the hairsbreadth manoeuvres—but she knew he would compensate for her, that she could trust him to get them safely down.
When they made it, to a spattering of applause from a group of people waiting to be transported to the top, she laughed up at him and they slapped gloved hands together in triumph.
She looked back up the slope at the almost perfect series of figure eights in the snow, some cut across by following skiers, and gasped. ‘I don’t believe we did that.’
As an experience it was unrepeatable. Almost superstitiously she knew that trying again would be an anti-climax.
As if he knew it too, Zachary said, ‘Nothing beats the first time.’
Katrien supposed that was why he kept looking for more mountains to climb, peaks that hadn’t been scaled before. She said, ‘Tomorrow’s my last day.’
He looked up the mountain, past the skiers zooming down the slopes, to the high, untouched snow beyond them. Then he looked back at her and said almost urgently, ‘Come climbing with me.’
‘Climbing?’
‘You’ve never tried it, have you?’
Dumbly, Katrien shook her head.
‘Nothing difficult. An easy, beginners’ climb. Today I can teach you some of the basic techniques, and what to do in a fall so you don’t just go on sliding out of control. We’ll find a nice gentle slope to practise on. But we’ll need to get you kitted up before starting an actual climb.’
‘You’ll be bored.’
A strange expression flitted across his face. He looked back up again at the mountain, his profile grim and shuttered. ‘I promise you I won’t be bored.’
He had some gear in the back of his four-wheel-drive, and he found an easy slope not far from the ski run and showed her how to hold an ice axe when climbing, and use it as a brake, as an aid to help herself up a slope, and to probe the snow and discover if it was really firm or just a crust on top of loose powder. He taught her techniques for controlling a fall, and how to work with a partner on a rope.
He asked for her boot size, and next morning called for her at the hotel when it was barely dawn, bringing climbing gear, including boots and crampons and a helmet for her. ‘Borrowed them,’ he told her briefly.
He made her go over what she’d learned, and demonstrated how to remove snow from the spikes of her crampons with an ice axe. ‘You have to keep them free because if your crampons are balled up they can’t grip the slope.’
They had something to eat first, then signed a book for the park rangers stating their intended route and estimated return time, and set out to climb the mountain.
He roped her to him, even though the first part was an easy walk over a gentle incline where their boots left deep indents in the snow. ‘Don’t let the rope go slack,’ he reminded her.
When the going got steeper she was glad of the rope and of Zachary’s tutelage. He led on the upward slopes but made her go ahead on the downward side of a ridge so if she got into trouble he could help her. She was panting and her temples and upper lip were dampened with sweat when he hauled her onto a rugged bluff and declared, ‘Okay, we can rest here for a while.’
There was sweat on his forehead too, although he wasn’t flushed with exertion like her. The cold air seemed to have bleached the outdoor tan from his cheeks. He wiped his face with a gloved hand, staring out at the surrounding countryside—bleak and brown near the mountain, mistily green further away.
Katrien subsided on the snow. ‘And you do this for fun?’
He glanced down at her and laughed shortly. ‘You’re not enjoying it?’
She gazed about them and admitted, ‘The view is pretty spectacular.’
