The Invitation Read online

  Mentally she shook herself, forcing herself to stop fantasizing. The man inside was just a boy, and he was her business partner and nothing more. Quietly, so as not to alert him, she closed the car door and entered the house. It was redolent of cooking, alive with warmth and light. Never had the pretty house felt more welcoming.

  He was standing in the kitchen, facing the sink, his back to her. His sleeves were rolled up, his strong brown forearms damp with soapy water as he washed a sink full of dirty dishes. For a moment she stood silently in the doorway watching him. She knew that he was a banker, a student of numbers, a man who had spent most of his life with his nose pointed toward a book, but he had the body of an athlete. Having grown up in Chandler, she knew that the Montgomerys loved any form of exercise; they rowed and swam, rode horses, climbed up rock faces to the tops of mountains, walked when they could have ridden.

  William’s body was evidence of all that exercise. Under his thin cotton shirt, his brown back was one hillock of muscle after another, hills and valleys of a landscape of great beauty. Strong thighs strained against his trousers, tight buttocks curved against the fabric. Jackie had to put her hands to her sides, her fingers curled into a taut ball, to try to still the ache she felt at wanting to touch him. She wanted to slip her arms about his waist, press her face against his back, then feel him turn to kiss her upturned face.

  “Would you like some coffee?” he asked softly, his back still turned toward her. His words made her jump. How long had he known she was there? Had he been watching her face in the reflection of the dark kitchen window in front of him?

  “No,” she managed to whisper as she turned to leave the room. She should, of course, have accepted his offer of coffee, then sat down with him and had a bit of conversation. She had sat with hundreds of men in the evenings, talking of planes or of people they both knew, of politics, of anything that came to her mind. Rarely had she been attracted to any of them. And certainly she’d never felt like this before. What caused attraction anyway? she wondered. What made you able to sit and talk comfortably with one man and not with another? Often she’d seen women fall hard for some guy or another, men who didn’t seem in any way special to her. Now she was the one who was falling, the one whose palms got sweaty whenever a certain man was near. She was the one who was unable to talk or even to think coherently when he was close to her.

  But whatever she felt for him, she reminded herself, this man was taboo.

  Her head came up, and she gave her best adult smile to William. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  She meant to insult him, to put him in his place, which was in the nursery, but he didn’t look insulted. Instead, he gave her a slow smile that made her feel quite warm. “I wouldn’t mind going to bed. How about you?”

  To her consternation, Jackie felt herself blushing like an eighteen-year-old virgin. Worse than her confusion was the fact that she could think of no lighthearted put-down that would let him know that he was a boy while she was a mature, sophisticated woman.

  Looking at her confusion, he gave a little laugh, then said, “Come outside. I want to show you something.”

  Companionably he slipped her hand through his strong bent arm and led her outside. “I missed you tonight,” he said softly, holding on to her hand when she tried to pull away. “All right,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll behave. I have been thinking about expansion.”

  That got her attention. “Expansion? How can we expand something that hasn’t even been born yet? When you’re as young as you are, you think that everything is possible, but when you get older, you learn that there are limits to what a person can do.” There, she thought, that should do it. That should put him in his place. Her body might lust after him, but her mind was a great deal wiser than his.

  William didn’t even seem to notice the little bit of wisdom she was offering him. “When you’re as rich as I am, a great many things are possible.”

  So much for wisdom, she thought. When it came to a toss-up between wisdom and money, unfortunately money usually won. She told herself that she should be offended by his blatant reference to his wealth, but on the other hand, she rather liked it. She’d always had contempt for people who pretended that they had a difficult life in spite of the fact that they had servants lounging about, waiting for the opportunity to serve.

  However, like what he said or not, she wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to remind him of the age difference. “I think that as you grow older, you’ll find that there are some things in this world that carry more weight than money.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Intelligence. Wisdom. Happiness. Ah…ah…” She thought for a moment, then looked up into his smiling eyes, the moonlight on his hair. He was firmly holding on to her hand. With a sigh of defeat, she said, “What’s your idea?” She was a woman who liked to do, and this talk of philosophical ideals was wearing on her.

  William laughed—that patronizing little laugh that was beginning to annoy her—kissed her on the forehead as though she were a child, and pointed to the empty fields that lay to the south of Eternity. “We could build another airstrip there, a place where a couple of big planes could take off. A Bellanca maybe. Is that the right name?”

  “Yes,” she said softly, “that’s the right name.”

  “We could start a carrier service from Denver to Los Angeles.”

  “This is Chandler, not Denver.”

  “We open an airstrip outside Denver, but we run the business from here, carrying goods from my family to Denver, delivering there, picking up people and cargo in Denver, then flying to Los Angeles.”

  He didn’t seem to notice how quiet Jackie had become. “Who’s going to fly these planes?”

  “You can train people. I have a few cousins who’d love to learn how to fly. And if you become the first woman to win the Taggie, you’ll attract many women who want to learn to fly. Maybe you could have all women pilots. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She was sure he was trying to be nice to her, saying he’d fund a company of all women pilots, and in other circumstances she’d have been grateful, but now all she heard was the word “Taggie.” Instantly she pulled away from him. “Win the Taggie? Are you out of your mind? I have no intention of entering that race, much less trying to win it.”

  “Why?” he asked simply. “You’re the best pilot in the world, better than any man, certainly better than any other woman. You can fly rings around anyone. Last year the man who won the Taggie didn’t have half your experience or skill. He was nothing compared to you.”

  Heaven, but it felt nice to be confronted with such blatant hero worship. Especially since she knew that what he’d said was true. She’d once flown with the winner of last year’s Taggie, and at the time she’d thought he shouldn’t have a license to fly a child’s string toy, much less his own plane. He’d won on luck, not skill.

  “I’m not going to enter that race or any other,” she said, turning on her heel and starting to walk away.

  He caught her arm. “But why, Jackie? You’re the best pilot in America, maybe in the world, but you never enter any of the big races. You used to set records for endurance and speed, but a few years ago you stopped entering races. It was as though everyone else kept moving forward but you stopped. I used to think you’d lost your nerve, but that’s not true; I’ve seen that you haven’t lost your nerve. So why won’t you enter the race and win it?”

  “Because I’m too old,” she said quickly, wanting to say anything to make him stop talking about this. “My reflexes aren’t as fast as those of these youngsters flying today. I’ve been in this business a long, long time and—”

  William said a very vulgar word that perfectly and quite correctly described what she was trying to make him believe. “You are lying to me. Why?”

  She hated it when people didn’t believe what they were told. Why couldn’t people just accept what others told them? Why couldn’t William accept that she was too old to fly in t