Aspen Gold Read Free

seeing the confident and self-assured tilt of her head.
    Kit laughed at her friend's remark and immediately adopted a thick drawl. "Well, Paula honey, I'm plumb sorry you can't see me punching cows, but I did it just the same." She abandoned the accent. "Daddy had me on a horse before I learned to coo--to my mother's horror, I might add. By the time I was two years old, I had a pony of my own. At three, he gave me a miniature lariat and I drove the dogs and chickens crazy trying to rope them. When I was six, I was riding a full-sized
    horse." Her smile widened. "Of course, my mother countered all that by enrolling me in ballet class, making sure I took piano
    lessons, and dragging me off to concerts in the Music Tent and performances at the Wheeler Opera House. If I was going to be a cowgirl, she was determined to make me an urbane one."
    "Very urbane," John Travis agreed, taking in the drops of chunky gold that dangled from her earlobes and mixed with strands of long blond hair that ran faintly lawless back from her face. A trio of heavy gold bracelets circled her wrist and clashed with the bright coral jacket she wore over a grape-colored cashmere tunic and slacks. A gold flyaway coat, carelessly thrown over the arm of the sofa, completed the bold and thoroughly modern ensemble--
    an ensemble that few women had the flair to carry off with any degree of sophistication. Kit was one of them.
    "Paula, John T. Look." She pressed closer to the window, her expression showing an excitement that made her appear much younger than thirty-two. "There's Silverwood. My home."
    Picking up on the warmth in her voice, John Travis glanced out the window. Attachment to a place was something he'd never known growing up as he had on a succession of military bases scattered over half the globe. At seventeen, he'd run away to California rather than face another move to another base and another strange school. He'd taken up acting on a dare, trading one transient life for another.
    With idle curiosity he studied the buildings nestled at the apex of a triangularly shaped valley, walled by two sprawling, snowcapped ridges of the Rocky Mountains. A picturesque barn, weathered gray by the elements, sat in the center with wood fences stretching to make square designs across the valley. In a grove of aspen trees stood a rambling, clapboard house with three gables and a porch that wrapped all four sides of the building.
    "It looks positively rustic and quaint, Kit," Paula said on a note of rare approval.
    "It does, doesn't it?" Kit murmured, caught up in the memories of the good times she'd had there--and the sad ones.
    "It's the setting that does it," Paula stated. "The mountains rising behind it. The fabulous fall colors. I thought nothing could rival autumn in New England, but this"--she lifted a ringed hand to indicate the view from the jet's window
    --"this is incredible."
    Kit's gaze wandered from her childhood home to the mountains that autumn had painted with distilled sunshine. Drifts of canary yellow gleamed between solid ranks of spruce marching up a granite slope. Farther on, still more masses of slender white trunks rose from the forest floor, waving their crowns of saffron, lemon, amber, and topaz.
    "I told you how glorious it would be at this time of year, Paula, but you wouldn't believe me,"
    Kit said with a light trace of smugness. "You're such a cynic. You should have been born in Missouri instead of Vermont."
    "Cynicism is necessary for survival in this business," Paula replied. "When you've been in it as long as I have, you'll find that out for yourself."
    "So you've said. But you know me--I'm an incurable optimist." Kit shrugged in unconcern.
    "It's a pity you aren't shooting your movie now instead of waiting for winter, John," Paula Grant remarked. "This scenery is spectacular."

    "Careful, Paula," John Travis mocked. "You're starting to sound like a tourist."
    "After the charity benefit tonight, that's exactly what I'm going to be