Love's Golden Spell. William Maltese
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“What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one?” he countered.
“So what makes you think I want to see a gold mine with you?” she amended. What was he trying to pull? She preferred him less friendly, less pleasantly playful, less the Christopher she remembered. She was vulnerable, and he was clever enough to see that.
“What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one with me?” he said. “So what do you say? You’re not crazy, are you?”
“I’d be crazy if I did go with you,” she said, determined not to be persuaded. He was up to no good.
“You make it damned hard for a man to apologize, Janet,” he said, shaking his head.
Surely, he understood why this was so impossible. “That’s what you’re doing, is it?” she asked. “Apologizing?”
“I behaved abominably last night,” he said. “I was hoping the flowers and tapes would say that for me, but I’m willing to eat more humble pie.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “That’s what I want to know.”
“Why?” he echoed. “Because I finally remembered who you remind me of.” She didn’t ask. She couldn’t. He answered anyway. “A girl I once knew,” he said. His bright smile dimmed. “A funny thing: her name was Janet, too.” Janet was charged with emotions. There were memories of her alive within him. “But enough of that Janet!” he said, erasing the warm sensuousness of her discovery. “She was a child. You’re a woman. She was unable to reason as an adult. Your job demands adult objectivity. You wouldn’t peddle distortion just because it raises your television ratings, would you?”
Christopher’s images of Janet Kelley were anything but pleasant, tainted by all that came after. Even if she had been a child at the time, he hadn’t forgiven her for thinking and reasoning as a child.
“You’re telling me your family hasn’t exploited the land and the wildlife?” Janet demanded, drawing her robe more tightly around her. There was something about this man that physically affected her, something far more noticeable now that she was a woman.
“It’s the nature of things to change,” he said “You told me that at the house. Nothing is static. Not Africa. Not its wildlife. Not its people. Many have prospered from Van Hoon mines. I guarantee fair wages and decent working conditions. And why condemn me for animals slaughtered in my grandfather’s and father’s times? Their generations lived the grand illusion of unending natural resources.”
“That doesn’t excuse their excesses!” she said, vehemently. His rationalizations of innocence wouldn’t defuse her outrage.
“I shouldn’t be expected to make excuses for people over whom I had no control,” Christopher said. Janet wasn’t responsible for circumstances over which she had no control, either. Her father had forced her to leave Africa, Lionspride, and Christopher. A thirteen-year-old girl doesn’t disobey a father loved for a lifetime. It was only now, sixteen years later, that she could say she had loved Christopher, maybe as much as she had loved her father. “I’m asking you to take the time to get to know me a 1ittle better,” Christopher said. “Is that too much to ask a woman who can bad-mouth me to a few million people at one shot?”
“And by getting to know you, I’ll come to love you, I suppose?” Janet asked with sarcasm in her voice. She hurried on. Joking about her feelings for Christopher made her uneasy. “In one afternoon, you’ll convince me that a line of despots ended when your father died, you springing on the scene as pure as newly fallen snow.”
“I’m Christopher Van Hoon, remember—not a saint,” he said, a wry smile playing at the corners of his sensuous mouth. “I’m not faultless. It would be wrong, though, to paint my picture blacker than it is. If a man isn’t patted on the back a few times in his life, encouraged for his attempts to make amends—no matter how feeble those attempts might appear—he’ll think further effort hardly worth the effort.”
“I can’t believe you’re concerned about what I might or might not say about the Van Hoon family on television,” Janet said. He had shown his contempt for her and her position by engineering that embarrassing scene at Lionspride.
“I’m not concerned,” he admitted, and Janet flushed with anger. Suspecting her ineffectiveness was one thing. Having it confirmed was another. “Actually you’re a surrogate,” he said.
“For whom? For what?”
“For that other Janet who never gave me the chance to defend myself,” he said, filling her with the guilt she had tried to deny.
“You seem extremely confident of your powers of persuasion” Janet said, stung by the accusation in his voice. He was condemning a virtual child for not allowing herself to be persuaded by letters still unopened and ribbon-tied. A young girl’s grief allowed no separation of grain from chaff, of son from father. By the time she could forgive the boy for being a Van Hoon, he was a boy no longer. He was head of Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the only Van Hoon she had left to hate; a hate she had struggled to overcome, to no avail.
Besides, the real villain was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals, a corporate profiteer. The hiring of her father all those years ago and the commissioning of his feasibility study for the Lackland Animal Preserve had been a cover for company machinations. Because of the attention drawn to the study, gold exploration could be conducted without arousing the suspicion of the competition or her father. When gold was found, Jack Kelley and the Lackland Animal Preserve project were dumped by the wayside, having served their purposes.
Her father hadn’t survived that betrayal. He had been deeply committed to the preservation of African wildlife. His study had shown a locale excellently suited to that purpose. Sixteen years after he had submitted his paperwork to that effect, there were no animals in the area he had mapped out for Lackland. There were three deep holes in the ground, their openings surrounded by smoke-belching buildings that converted tons of crushed rock into ounces of shiny gold. Trains chugged where antelope once roamed. Winders, trucks, conveyer belts, drills and explosives bled sounds to a veldt that once knew only the sounds of animals, the wind, the rain.
The impetus behind that perverted metamorphosis of the African landscape hadn’t died with Vincent Van Hoon, any more than it had died with Petre Van Hoon. Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals remained a nefarious entity, guiding human actions from behind the scenes. Christopher Van Hoon, as sole heir to his father and grandfather, was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the personification of that evil, and Janet could fight it only through him. If she was his surrogate, he was hers.
“I’ll give you fifteen minutes to decide whether you’re here to do a hatchet job or to do things fairly,” he said, tossing the unclaimed bouquet onto a nearby chair. The discarded roses bruised their golden petals on the chafing upholstery. “I’ll wait in the lobby.”
The door closed behind him. She glanced at the travel clock on the bedside table. She needed to know how long she had. She picked up the roses, cradling their long stems in her arms, smelling their sweet fragrance. Bob had never bought her flowers. Bob was practical. Why spend money on something so transitory? Better a toaster or a tape deck. Now Bob was dead, his life as transitory as cut roses.
Time was passing, seconds turning into minutes. She needed more time.
There was no vase for the flowers. If she left them, they would wilt before the maid found them. The roses seemed important. Concern for them kept her from thinking about Christopher waiting in the lobby.
She went into the bathroom and filled the sink, propping the ends of the stems in the water. Too many things died in Africa. Flowers. Animals. Dreams. Expectations. Love.
“Damn!” she said, bracing herself against the edge of the sink. She was as conscious of the ticking in the other room as tourists were of Big Ben’s chimes at noontime.
Less than fifteen minutes—that was what sixteen years of memories came down to. She could let the clock tick away the final ending, or