Fire in the Wind (26 page)

"I'm not surprised," Vanessa laughed. "No wonder I lost the argument about those wretched slacks."

"What?"

Vanessa explained, to shouted laughter from Maria. But after a moment Maria's black eyes sobered and she asked, "Vanessa, is Jake Conrad in love with you?"

Vanessa was caught very much off guard. "I—uh, in love with me? I—no. I don't know, Maria. Why do you ask?"

"Robert will kill me if I tell you, but it's so fascinating. And a little bit worrying. Robert says Jake's gone crazy with this company of yours. He's doing all kinds of things he'd never normally do."

A kind of panic clutched at Vanessa's heart for a moment, then she shook herself to calm. "Such as?" she asked.

"Well, such as—you know Gilles Dufour?"

"Yes, he's our—"

"He's your Montreal salesman. I know. Did you also know that he's what Robert calls 'Jake's tame salesman'?"

"What?" Vanessa whispered.

"The company whose line Gilles dropped to pick up yours was Designwear. Designwear is—"

"It's Jake's." Vanessa's heart was beating with a combination of fear and excitement. Fear because it was so strange, excitement because... because surely it was a sign that he loved her?

"Well, and Robert says Gilles is an excellent, hard-working salesman, but the kind of pull that got you the Fairway contract he doesn't have."

"What? But then how...?"

Maria waved her finger admonishingly. "Jake, that's how. Robert says Jake plays tennis with the guy who's the western-district manager of Fairway's, and if anyone used pull, it's Jake, not Gilles."

"Well—"

"And then there's the business of Robert. Not that Robert didn't want to work with you, Vanessa, it's just that...." She trailed off.

Just that Robert's talents were far above what he was doing for her. But Maria diplomatically didn't say so.

"Jake's not like that," she said instead. "He never calls a favour like that, Vanessa. But he's calling them now, you better believe it. If Jake's in love with you, honey, you've got it made. If he's not in love with you, why is he doing it?"

* * *

Vanessa was at leisure to consider that question on Sunday while she pottered in her apartment alone, straightening, polishing, hanging and rearranging.

The furniture had arrived Saturday night at eight, and it was midnight before all the unpacking and arranging was finished and she and Maria had made a last cup of coffee.

"Is it home?" Maria demanded as they sank exhausted into chairs and waited for the water to boil. "Does it feel like home?"

Of course it did. It had been home right from the beginning. Vanessa nodded. "Home," she said.

"Good. If that water ever boils, I'm going to drink a cup of coffee and go home to my husband."

"Maria, thank you so—"

"You're welcome," Maria had interrupted. "Please don't thank me, you're welcome. I like you, Vanessa. I wanted to see you properly settled in."

Vanessa smiled now, thinking of it. It had cost her to leave all her friends in New York and come in search of a dream, and perhaps if she'd thought about it longer, she wouldn't have done it. Because friends were worth more than a career any day. But Jake had seen to it that she didn't think about it for longer.

Vanessa remembered Maria's electrifying conversation with the dispatcher last night and laughed aloud. She would be glad of a friend like Maria.

"Don't tell Robert what I told you about Jake, and don't think about it too much," had been her last words to Vanessa through the car window as she drove off. But thinking wasn't so easy to command.

Yes. Of course he loved her. Maybe he didn't know it or couldn't admit it to himself, and maybe he was fighting it because of Jace and Larry and because of the nameless woman she knew was in his past, but Jake Conrad loved her.

She had to tell him the truth about Larry, help him put some of those ghosts to rest, so that he could stop being afraid of love. She had to help him disentangle his distrust of
her
because of what she had done to Jace from his distrust of that other woman she knew had hurt him, and then he would recognize that what was between them was safe and sure....

Everything she placed and polished that day was placed and polished with love. The kind of love that says, I am building a nest for you and me, a place where we can be safe and protected—a home.

She thought of the impersonal hotel luxury of his penthouse suite and promised herself that this apartment would feel like home to Jake Conrad.

* * *

That week Vanessa moved office, too, from the pristine box at Concorp to the large high-ceilinged second floor of what they had begun to call "Number 24"—that being the number of the building's street address.

Here her office was more like what she had been used to—if much cleaner. All trace of the bankrupt company had been cleared away, the cutters were already at work on the production prototypes of the wool-polyester slacks, and the shipper-receiver was organizing his work space to his liking while the first fabric shipments trickled in.

Vanessa stood in the centre of the big bright room that with luck would be her working home for years to come and felt the hum of a working enterprise all around her. This was it. She had begun.

There was a knock on the door, and Robert walked in carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He held them up. "From Maria," he said. "For luck."

He popped the cork and filled their glasses and they drank to their own success.

"And to a spring line that'll knock 'em dead," Robert finished, and for the first time Vanessa felt the full strange weight of creative responsibility. There was no more Philistine, no more Tom Marx to pick through her design offerings and modify and cast out. That was
her
job now. She would be deciding—and very soon—which of the designs in her case would be turned into prototypes and become part of the new spring line and which would not.

It was at least equal parts frightening and exciting.

* * *

Vanessa had not realized what an enormous act of faith the simple placing of an order for fabric was. She had seen Tom dither over his choices time and again, working out mixes and matches in a dozen different ways, trying to find the sure-fire guaranteed seller, and she had watched often with a faint distant contempt.
Then
she had made her fabric choices unhesitatingly: "This with this for the 458 group, Tom, and that with that for the 417s."

Now she understood the difference between drawing a salary and staking your heart and your business on the line with every decision. Now it was she who dithered: if this fabric was so popular with manufacturers this season, did that mean there would be a glut on the market come April? If that one was a little less popular, was that because it was higher in price or because Canadian women wouldn't like the hand of the fabric?

"What's the
hand
?" asked Robert, who had strong ideas on cost and sat in on most of her meetings with fabric salesmen.

"It's like saying the touch or the feel," said Vanessa, and watched him make a mental note. She had to hand it to Robert: he might be here because Jake had called in a favour, but he was going to make the best of the experience. He could have stayed strictly on the accounting side and left all this to her. But Robert was learning everything he could about the "rag trade," as he now called it, including the small idiosyncratic vocabulary the industry used.

Sometimes she placed an order with her heart in her mouth, as though truly her life were on the line. "At this rate I'll have an ulcer by next week," she muttered after a particularly harrowing day, and Robert smiled.

"You'll feel better once all the decisions are made. Then it's just do or die, and you're good at that."

"Am I? "she asked.

"Yup," he said comfortably. "You've got a great capacity for hard work—and for putting the possible consequences out of your mind and just going full stretch."

She was certainly going full stretch after that, as she and Ilona, her young assistant, set to work making the sample models of the new spring line of "Number 24."

Vanessa had pondered and dithered over the name of the company and the line for days, until Robert had said, "Choose the name later. I've already incorporated you under 'Vanessa Standish Fashions, Inc.' We can register the 'style' later—if we can ever decide on one." He had laughed when he said it; he knew the name was important.

It was after they had begun referring to the factory by its street address, "Number 24," that she had been listening to a radio discussion in the design office one day. She was trying to follow the ins and outs of a political controversy that was being explained by a couple of commentators. It was complicated, and her background in Canadian history, she was deciding, was too sketchy to allow her to make sense of the debate that was raging across the nation. And then one of the voices said, "So what's going to happen, Bill, when the P.M. gets back to Number 24?"

Vanessa, on her knees beside a size-nine dummy, looked up and muttered through the pins in her mouth, "What's the P.M.?"

"The prime minister," replied Ilona on the other side of the dummy. "I don't think that's hanging right yet. Do we need a larger tuck here, do you think?"

Vanessa, feeling an interesting prickle in the back of her brain, took the pins out of her mouth. "Then what's Number 24?" she asked slowly.

Ilona was concentrating on a pucker in the pinned fabric. "It's the prime minister's official residence in Ottawa—Number 24 Sussex Drive," she said.

"
What?
" breathed Vanessa.

"Yeah. That's why this place is such a good joke. You know—'I was over at Number 24 yesterday.'" She flicked her long braid over her shoulder and turned her attention back to the dummy. Ilona Silverleaf was one-quarter native Canadian, her grandfather being of the Tlingit tribe in northern British Columbia. From him she had inherited her thick black hair, a fact she underlined by braiding it and wearing a small beaded headband.

"You're kidding!" said Vanessa, thunderstruck.

"Nope," said Ilona. "There, that's got it! If we just shave this by an eighth of an inch right along the—"

"I don't believe it! That's wonderful! That's what we'll call ourselves!"

At last she had Ilona's full attention. "What's what we'll call ourselves?" she asked, her eyes round with surprise.

"
Number 24
," said Vanessa with a smile. "It's different, it's Canadian, it's—why didn't you tell me what it meant before?"

"Thought you knew," Ilona shrugged.

So Robert registered the styles "Number 24" and "Number 24 Fashions" and "24, Inc." and Vanessa crossed her fingers and ordered her first supply of stitch-in labels to be made up to her own design.

After that it all suddenly pulled together. It became real. She was responsible for a business not by a blind stroke of fate but because she was competent to do it. Because with hard work, she had the brains and talent to make it a success.

Things gained momentum. By the third week in August the factory was working full out on the first of the slacks orders, and production prototypes for the spring line were in the works.

It seemed to Vanessa that she was busier than ever, though now she worked fewer twelve-hour days, and she was calmer in the midst of all the activity.

Calmer, and lonelier. She returned to her beautiful apartment earlier these nights, long before the sun went down. So she had time for long walks along the Seawall and through Stanley Park, and time to play tennis with Ilona at the club she had joined there, and time for entertaining Robert, Maria, Ilona and one or two other people she had begun to make friends with.

But most of all, she had time to notice the gaping hole in her life, the hole that hard work only partially disguised.

The hole in her life left by Jake Conrad. She wanted him back now with an intensity that was like a fever.

Chapter 12

He came home on the nineteenth of August, looking as dark as a sheikh and very fit. Vanessa herself was darker than when she had left New York, but she had certainly not had time to devote herself to the sun, and next to Jake she looked like a moon maiden.