TV station and newspaper in New Zealand must have wanted his story, but he had shunned the news media, refusing to give interviews. Yet someone had persuaded him to speak tonight.
The man she found so unsettling was seated at a table near the shallow dais on which a microphone stood ready. Katrien looked at him once and then dragged her gaze away. She hardly tasted the food that was put before her, mechanically emptying the plates until she found herself staring at a mound of chocolate cake and cream, and her stomach revolted. She pushed away the dish and grabbed her wine glass. It was empty—again. She’d already drunk far more than usual, but when Callum refilled the glass she gave him a distracted smile and raised the glass to her lips.
His arm came around her, a hand squeezing her shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’ he whispered, glancing at her untouched dessert.
‘Of course. You know I don’t usually eat sweets, and anyway I’m full.’
He smiled and nuzzled her temple with his cheek. ‘It’ll do you good.’ He drew back slightly and his gaze lingered on her bare shoulders and the low neckline of her dress. ‘You can do with a bit more weight. Not that you aren’t gorgeous.’ His fingers tightened. ‘I can’t wait to get you alone.’ Turning aside briefly, he took a spoon and scooped up some of the untouched dessert, presenting it to her with a teasing grin. ‘Open up.’
Katrien laughed and shook her head, but he insisted, and she parted her lips and let him slide the spoonful between them. It tasted sickly, and when he repeated the gesture she put a staying hand on his wrist, smiling so that he wouldn’t think she was angry. ‘No, really. I can’t eat any more.’
Callum was smiling too. ‘You have a bit of cream…’ He ducked his head and licked it from the corner of her mouth.
Someone across the table laughed, and Katrien drew back, turning away.
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
