Her gaze collided with a stormy, deep green one across the room.
She felt heat along her cheekbones as the man’s brooding expression changed to amusement tinged with satire. A faint anger stirred inside her, along with an odd recurrence of fear.
Callum said, ‘I was only teasing—’
‘I know.’ She turned back to him. ‘It’s okay.’ Callum was sensitive to her moods. It was one reason why she loved him.
Coffee was served and the chairwoman of the committee got up to introduce the guest speaker with a long spiel about his adventurous career climbing mountains, working in the Antarctic, helping to build a hospital in Nepal, and exploring the world’s highest, wildest regions. She stepped down and led a round of introductory applause for Zachary Ballantine.
The lights dimmed except for the spotlight illuminating the dais. And with a curious lack of surprise Katrien watched the man who got up to walk forward with an unhurried, confident stride to take his place behind the microphone. Without the beard she hadn’t recognised him earlier.
He looked around the room, and she thought his seacoloured eyes flickered as they met hers; then he glanced at a card in his hand and began to speak.
Katrien stared at the cup of coffee before her, watched the steam rising from it, and picked up a spoon, then quietly replaced it in the saucer. She took her coffee black, no sugar.
He had a resonant voice like dark, slightly gritty honey. At the first syllable Katrien felt a profound sense of recognition, a reverberating bell note deep in her soul.
For a long time she just listened to the sound, not the words, fixing her gaze on the white tablecloth before her. But in the end her eyes lifted and found him where he stood on the raised dais, commanding the room. And as if he knew, his head tilted and he paused, his gaze momentarily homing in on her. He looked away and consulted the card in his hand again before shoving it into his pocket and continuing his speech.
She tried to curb the hurried rhythm of her heart, telling herself he could scarcely see anyone in the partially lit room.
Beside her Callum stirred, his fingers still resting lightly on her bare shoulder, and she fought an extraordinary urge to shrug away from his touch.
‘There’s no feeling quite like being literally on top of the world,’ Zachary Ballantine was saying. ‘Standing on the summit of Everest, looking down across those mountains, a view that goes on for ever—it puts all the pain, the effort, the danger into perspective. You know then that whatever you went through to get there, it was all worth it. Every climber wants to do Everest. Ben and I did it for the first time together—five years ago. It was something neither of us would ever forget.’
He paused again, staring at the floor as if searching it for inspiration. Someone clinked a coffee cup into its saucer. Someone else shuffled a chair.
Zachary Ballantine looked up slowly. ‘After that, all you can do is search for harder climbs, untried routes, more challenges, mountains that are still unconquered.’
‘Why?’ Callum muttered humorously in Katrien’s ear.
Katrien shook her head slightly. She didn’t understand either, but suddenly, passionately, she wanted to. She was concentrating now, intently, afraid to miss a word.
‘There’s always another mountain.’ The man in the circle of light placed a hand on the gleaming chrome of the microphone stand and gripped it. ‘Always another challenge, another risk, another Circe luring men to lay down their lives for her…’
His voice had lowered and he was staring at his hand clasped about the cold metal rod before him. This time when he stopped speaking no whisper of sound touched the silence.
Katrien was sure that for a second or two he had forgotten his audience and departed from his prepared script. He released his hold and thrust his hand into his pocket.
‘Men,’ he said slowly, his gaze seemingly fixed on some distant point outside the room, ‘and women, make mistakes. And the mountains are unforgiving. Last year they took the closest friend I’ve ever had—or ever will have. Ben Storey was the best.’ His head turned slightly and his eyes shifted and refocused to meet Katrien’s. She felt her own head lift infinitesimally, her gaze caught by the naked pain in his. ‘The best friend, the best mountain man, the greatest person I’ve ever known. I miss him.’
He stepped back then one pace, out of the brightness of the light. His pain crashed around her, and she closed her eyes against it, her body trembling, her throat aching with the effort not to cry.
When she opened her eyes he was gone, taking his seat again amidst a wave of applause. Callum had removed his clasp from her shoulder to join in the clapping, and she wrenched apart the hands locked damply in her lap and did the same.
A woman across the table picked up her napkin and wiped away a tear.
I’m not the only one, Katrien told herself. He probably had the same effect on every woman in the room.
The purpose of the evening was to raise funds for the dead mountaineer’s family. Zachary Ballantine’s speech had been calculated to arouse sympathy. And no doubt he had been genuinely fond of his friend. It was very sad but she knew neither of them, and when the news had first broken of the disastrous expedition her chief emotions had been pity for the woman who had lost her husband and the father of her two children, and a sort of distant anger with the man who had deliberately put his life in danger despite their dependence on him.
She had never understood what drove anyone to take insane risks in order to experience some adrenalin high that apparently came with the knowledge that death was breathing down one’s neck. It seemed to her a bizarre, aberrant way of living.
Watching Zachary Ballantine rise to shake hands with a pretty young woman who had rushed to his table and now gazed at him with something approaching adoration, Katrien was unexpectedly angry all over again. How could they—men like him, with grace and attraction and the glamour that clung to them as known adventurers—make women love them, and then carelessly throw away their lives in pursuit of some Boys’ Own dream? It was unfair, and downright cruel.
The young woman smiled and touched his arm, her white, ringless hand resting on the sleeve of his jacket, her lovely face earnest as she spoke to him, no doubt artlessly telling of her admiration, leaving herself open to being hurt by him.
‘You fool.’ Katrien’s lips shaped the words.
‘What?’ Callum leaned closer.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. Can we go now?’ She didn’t think she could bear watching this any longer. Her emotions seemed to have turned into some ill-tempered steed, bucking and swerving all over the place. Maybe Callum was right; she hadn’t fully recovered from the bout of flu that had recently attacked her.
‘You don’t want to speak to the guest of honour first?’ Callum enquired.
There was a bevy of people around him now. The girl was standing on the outskirts, looking slightly crestfallen. ‘No,’ Katrien said. ‘He has plenty of admirers. And I’m…tired.’
Callum gave a surprised grin at the unintended waspishness in her tone. He stood up to pull out her chair. ‘Come on, then. I’ll get us a cab.’ He never drove his car if he was going to be drinking. Callum’s strict sense of responsibility was another of the things she liked about him. He would never worry her by going off on some wild, hazardous adventure.
He left her standing in the carpeted foyer, a light woollen wrap draped about her shoulders, while he ventured into the street to find a taxi.
She shouldn’t have drunk so much. Her head felt weightless and a bit swimmy. Shifting from foot to foot, she looked around for a chair. The only two—gilt affairs flanking a tiny marble-topped table—were occupied by a couple having a low-voiced but apparently passionate conversation.
Closing