The Man She Loves To Hate

He was right, they weren’t. But the fear just wouldn’t go away. Jolie closed her eyes and clung to the side rail that flanked the gondola door. She could sense Cole behind her, not touching, not quite. She wanted to step back and burrow in deep and cling to him, and not because she wanted to mess with his mind or jump his bones. She just wanted the contact.

‘Look,’ he said again, his voice a hushed and reverent murmur.

‘No, thank you.’

‘You’ll never see this again. Not from this angle.’

‘That better be a promise,’ she countered raggedly. But the gondola had steadied so Jolie looked, and caught her breath at the terrible beauty of the earth sliding below them, gathering momentum, cracking, churning.

Foaming.

Shaken, she looked back at Rees, and the fool man went and grinned at her, a crooked, beckoning thing that she didn’t want a piece of. Ever.

Time to go, only where could they go after that? The maintenance teams would be checking the mountain for days. Checking the gondola towers and the chairlift fixings and everything else, and that was only the first slide. What if there were more?

Jolie didn’t care now that she had to brush past Rees to get back to the box and the bottle of champagne. She slid to her knees and started in on the cork, all her considerable years of bar duty coming into play as she popped it, let it foam, and then set the champagne to her mouth.

‘Well, that’s one way of drinking it,’ said Rees dryly, before squatting down beside her and wrapping his big hand around the bottle the better to coax it away from her lips, which he did with ruthless efficiency. ‘There are others.’

‘This way works fine.’ At least, it had until he took the bottle away. ‘Do you mind?’ She gestured for the bottle. ‘You’re interrupting my panic.’

‘I know.’ And from the look in those stunning green eyes of his he was going to keep on interrupting it. He took his own pull from the bottle and Jolie watched mesmerised as his throat muscles went to work. He didn’t drink much, but by the time he was done Jolie was parched. ‘Alcohol and hypothermia don’t mix,’ he said with more gentleness than she would have given him credit for.

‘I’m not hypothermic,’ she muttered. ‘Yet. I’m in shock. Alcohol is good for shock.’

‘So it is.’ He held out the bottle for Jolie to take. ‘You argue like a girl. You also drink like a girl.’

Jolie stilled, caught between taking the bottle from him and confirming his suspicions, or not taking the bottle from him and confirming his suspicions. In the end she took the bottle and drank, and to hell with her disguise and his suspicions. Her priorities had changed. The prospect of imminent death did that.

‘Look, I’m not saying this is an ideal situation but we’re safe enough for now,’ he said soothingly, leaning in to take the bottle away from her again. ‘We have shelter. Food.’ He gestured with the bottle and flashed that devil’s smile at her again. ‘Champagne. And phones that’ll work just as soon as this blizzard passes. We’re not far from top station. They’ll come at us from there.’

Maybe they would. And maybe she and Cole Rees could hold out till then if they stayed calm and thought smart and shared body warmth and all those other things people were supposed to do when stranded in the cold.

‘Hey,’ he said gently.

Her goggles were fogging up, or maybe it was tears.

‘Girl,’ he said more gently still. ‘Because you are a girl, that much I have managed to figure out. Take it easy. Lose the panic. It’s going to be all right.’

Jolie appreciated the words, she really did.

And then the mountain moved again and this time the gondola moved to meet it.

Down, down, as if in slow motion, still connected to the cable. That coupling hadn’t failed them. Something else had.

Jolie’s body didn’t want to do what the gondola was doing. Her body wanted to stay up. Cole’s body wanted to stay up too. He moved forwards and his arms came around her, pressing her back against the floor, which wasn’t the floor any more as the ground rushed up to meet them, nothing slow about the ride now. They were probably going to start another avalanche, if they weren’t already riding one.

‘Hold on,’ he muttered and she did, wrapping her arms around him tight and setting her cheek to his chest. He smelled right. Even through the fear he smelled good.

Small consolation that when it came to his declaration that they were in no imminent danger he’d been dead wrong and she’d been right to panic.

Then the mountain smashed into them and the world went black and being right was no consolation at all.

Jolie woke to discomfort and pain, returning to consciousness slowly, remembering in snatches all that had gone before. The gondola ride. The avalanche. Cole Rees. Laid out on the ground beneath her, out cold but still breathing, and around them a shattered gondola shell half buried in loose snow.

Loose snow. Not avalanche snow, which would have packed in around them like concrete.

The man below her was definitely breathing and she eased off him gently both for her sake and his. Her arms worked and so did her legs, what she could feel of them. Cold, so cold, and Cole was worse. Hatless, nothing waterproof about his coat, his face almost white except for the blood that oozed sluggishly from a cut on his forehead and stained the snow beneath him. Even the blood looked cold and she shed her glove and touched his face … and found it icy to the touch.

Sluggish work to get her goggles off and then the sheepskin hat off her head and onto his, brushing away snow as she went. She put her goggles back on and set her palms to his cheeks, praying warmth reached him in time. ‘Cole, wake up.’ He stirred and he opened glazed eyes but he’d have to do better than that. ‘Cole, look at me.’

He tried, bless him, he tried.

‘Rees, concentrate.’

‘Told you we’d be okay,’ he mumbled and started to slip back into the dark.

‘No. Cole. Hey. Rees. Wake up. Time to go.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Go.’ He put his hand to his head, which had to be aching. She approved of the movement but she stopped him before he could dislodge the hat and find the blood. ‘I’ll stay here.’

‘No, you’ll die here. Cole, concentrate. And move. We’ve lost our shelter. It’s almost dark. We need to go.’

‘Go where?’

Good question. Not a question she had a ready answer for. ‘I think … okay, I think we have two choices. We either stay here and tuck into what’s left of the gondola, or … If you think you can climb we try and find our way back to top station. The cable’s still attached to something up there. Look.’

He followed her gaze to where the gondola cable did indeed stretch tautly upwards.

‘I don’t think we should stay here,’ she said anxiously. ‘Not if you can move. What do you want to do?’

‘Climb,’ he said after a lengthy pause, and she helped him sit up, and then stand up, and that was how it began, one foot after the other with the cable as their guide.

Jolie fell in behind Rees, and she held her breath every time he went down until he got up again, for she’d never be able to carry him on her own. No, if Cole Rees was to reach the top he’d have to do it under his own steam, which meant tapping into reserves of determination and strength. Or anger and rage. Whatever worked.

‘You know what I hate,’ she said finally, tapping into her own rage when it looked one time as if Cole wasn’t going to get back up. ‘People who have everything handed to them on a plate and who then just give up at the tiniest little obstacle.’

‘That so?’

‘Yep.’ The accompanying hand she offered him got him mad, but it got him up. ‘You know what else I hate?’ she said. ‘Men who think they can have it all. If I ran hell there’d be a pit especially for them and I’d lower them into it inch by inch until they came to realise that even if they could have it all, maybe they shouldn’t.’

‘You’ve got a lot of hate in you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Tell me about it. I also hate mean drunks and sleazy tippers, but who doesn’t?’

‘I hate needy conniving women.’

‘Me too,’ she said emphatically. And as an afterthought, ‘You really should try men.’

‘So should you,’ he murmured. ‘Is there any particular reason you’re dressed like a boy? You looking to be one?’

‘Nope,’ she said.

‘So … what? You have half a dozen older brothers and you borrow their clothes to go work on the mountain?’

‘Nope.’

‘So why the disguise?’

‘Habit.’ That and necessity. And that was that for conversation for a while as they concentrated on getting another fifty metres up that bloody mountain. Halfway to nowhere, with the snow still falling and the wind whipping at their clothes. Jolie was warm enough. Chances were Cole Rees wasn’t.

The cable rose above their heads now, good news if it meant they were nearing top station. Bad news in that it gave Cole no stable support. He fell again, and this time he left a dark stain in the snow where his head landed.

‘Cole.’ She scrambled to her knees beside him. His face was pale, his lips almost blue, and this time his eyes were closed. ‘Cole, wake up. C’mon, we’re almost there. Talk to me. Tell me what you hate.’

‘I saw them together once.’ His eyes were still closed. ‘Buying clothes.’

‘Who?’ She grabbed his arm and hauled him upright, tried to get her shoulder beneath his arm to help him up. ‘Who did you see?’

‘Rachel and Jolie Tanner. And my father.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ said Jolie grimly. She should know. ‘Maybe he was just passing by.’ She got him to his feet and let him lean on her while he adjusted to being upright and his blood dripped down her cheek.

‘Have you seen them?’ he said next. ‘Rachel Tanner and her daughter?’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen them.’ Why was he harping on this? Had he guessed her identity?

‘Then you know,’ he said.

‘Know what?’ Jolie slipped out from beneath his shoulder, waited until he’d steadied, and then took the lead, forging a path through knee-deep snow, trying to make it easier going. For him. ‘That they’re whores?’

‘That they’re stunning.’

Not what she’d been expecting to hear from this man, though she’d heard it all her life. She glanced back at him but his eyes were on the terrain at his feet. How much longer could he keep going? ‘That’s hardly a crime.’

‘There’s this arrogance about them.’

‘Bull,’ she whispered beneath her breath.

‘As if they know what you’re thinking and don’t give a damn.’

‘Maybe it’s a defence mechanism.’

‘It’s maddening, is what it is.’

She didn’t dignify his comment with a reply.

‘Rachel Tanner kept my father in thrall for over twelve years. She knew he had a wife and children. Responsibilities. She didn’t care.’

‘Shouldn’t he have been the one caring about all that?’

‘He did care,’ said Cole roughly.

‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Just not quite enough to stop his adultery. Paragon that he was.’

‘That’s my father you’re talking about.’

‘So it is.’ Jolie clamped her mouth shut and let her anger take her further up the slope. Anger was useful. But it left too fast, ripped out by the wind and the cold, and in its place stood a wall of snow and the first faint stirrings of defeat. ‘It can’t be much farther. It just can’t,’ she murmured.

But it was.

They kept moving, with the gondola cable as their guide.

Jolie kept the lead until she’d exhausted herself, and then Cole drew level with her and shot her a glance.

‘And then there’s the daughter,’ he said hoarsely as he trudged past her to take point.

‘What about the daughter?’ Perhaps if he fell over again she could kick him up the slope.

‘She’s exquisite,’ he muttered. ‘And cunning.

She had my father wrapped around her little finger. He got her job after job.’

‘He what?’

‘She never kept any of them.’

‘Maybe she didn’t like any of them,’ said Jolie through gritted teeth. What jobs had James Rees got her? Dishwasher at the Holiday Inn? Or the Thursday night/Saturday morning slots at the comic-book store? The front-desk job at the tattoo parlour had definitely been her own achievement—that much she did know. All of them had been temporary because they’d had to fit in around her coursework. That was what students did when working their way through university hand to mouth.

‘Apparently she fancies herself as an artist.’

‘Maybe she is an artist.’

‘It gets better. He bought her a house in Christ-church.’

‘He what?’

‘Now do you believe me?’

As a matter of fact she did not. Jolie glared at Cole’s broad back and his fancy coat and his stupid, ill-fitting hat. She didn’t care that he was hurt and grieving and soaked to the bone. He was wrong.

Jolie stood still, breathing hard, and stared past the idiot in the hat. Past his lies and his hatred as she tried to make out the shape of the slope ahead. Getting to safety was her focus for now. Getting even would have to wait. The cable still ran true and taut, still running upslope towards top station. Was that …?

‘Cole,’ she said, and when he didn’t turn round. ‘Cole, look up.’

But he hadn’t heard her. She scrambled up beside him and caught at his arm with one hand and pointed with the other. ‘Look! It’s the station roof.’

He wrenched himself away from her touch and with that motion came the memory of the last time Jolie had touched him, and talked to him. God, it had been years.

She remembered the moment as if it had been yesterday.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said hoarsely.

He’d said the same thing back then too. He’d made her feel like dirt and she hadn’t known why. Not then. Not until she’d got home from school that afternoon and Rachel had sat a distraught Jolie down and tried to explain to a twelve-year-old that she’d fallen in love with another woman’s husband had Jolie known why Cole had recoiled from her touch.

Still recoiled from her touch.

‘It’s the station roof,’ she said wearily, and pointed towards it, no touching, none at all, and no fight left in her either.

Cole stopped. He looked up to where she pointed, his eyelashes white with frost and his eyes muddy with pain. Maybe he could see the shape of the roof through the snow, maybe he couldn’t. He’d just have to take her word for it.

‘Left or right?’ she said next, for they couldn’t climb straight up because of the steepness of the slope and probably didn’t want to anyway. Angling right would take them to the control tower. Left would get them to the kiosk for which they didn’t have keys. Spare keys would be in the control tower, which Hare should be manning. Except given the silence of the two-way, Hare wasn’t in right now so chances were the control tower would be locked up too. ‘Cole, left or right? Control tower or kiosk?’

Jolie didn’t know if Cole had the energy for both.

She wasn’t sure she did.

‘Cole, which way?’

‘Kiosk,’ he said hoarsely, and they set off again through the heavy drift. It was up past her knees now and starting to settle and Jolie prayed for no more avalanches on this steep ground. Hare’s boys kept the top station free of such dangers, as free of them as they could. Shovelling and raking and occasionally detonating so that the snow would pack down stable and stay stable throughout the season.

The transverse across and up to the kiosk took time. If it wasn’t Cole falling, it was Jolie. Their co-ordination was shot. Cold and fatigue had taken hold.

‘Hot chocolate,’ she said at one point, when they were both down, and snow was melting down her neck and her fingers were too numb to get it out.

‘Something you hate?’ said Cole, struggling up right.

‘Something I want,’ she muttered. ‘And I want it thick and creamy and coating my mouth and I want my hands wrapped around the cup and I’d hold the cup to my cheek and my to lips if I’ve got any left. I can’t even feel my lips any more.’

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