Aspen Gold Read Free Page A

for an entire month," she declared, fairly gloating. "No more early-morning calls, no more long days, no more endless pages of dialogue to learn, no more working six days a week. You can't possibly know how ecstatic I was when the writers decided it was time to kill off Rachel--"
    "--andthe producers had to buy out your contract,"
    John Travis inserted.
    "That, too," Paula admitted in a purr.
    "But after seven years on Winds of Destiny, I think I've earned a long and highly paid vacation. Don't you?"
    "Pay no attention to John T.," Kit said. "He's spent the last two hours with Chip thinking like a producer instead of an actor."
    "It shows." Paula turned back to the window. Something caught her eye and she edged closer to the pane. "That mountain," she murmured.
    "It looks like it's made of solid gold."
    "Considering the price of real estate in Aspen, it might as well be," John Travis observed dryly.
    Paula gave an absent nod. "I've heard the cost of even a small place is sinfully high."
    Privately Kit hoped they were right, then immediately banished the thought and its overtones of greed.
    "That's Aspen coming up, isn't it?" Paula asked.
    Through the window, Kit watched the town take shape, spilling across the narrow valley of the Roaring Fork River and onto the shoulders of the walling Rocky Mountains.
    Ski runs snaked down the slopes of Aspen Mountain where one hundred years ago black-faced miners trudged wearily home from their shifts in the silver mines. Ultraluxe, ultramodern mansions littered the mountainsides where once mining equipment stood guard over the entrances to the richest silver mines in the nation.
    Fashionable shops and trendy boutiques lined Durant Street, the former locale of Aspen's red-light district prior to the turn of the century. Here the rich and celebrated came to play where silver kings, railroad barons, and European royalty once visited.
    Its tree-lined streets had known the rattle of horse-drawn streetcars, the rumble of freight wagons, the glitter of fancy carriages, the bleating of flocks of sheep, the tramp of ski-combat troops during the Second World War, the swish of skis, and the purr of Mercedes Benzes.
    Kit smiled when she considered the uniqueness of her hometown--from rough mining camp to silver boomtown to near ghost town to world-class resort
    --a story Hollywood would have called Cinderella Meets King Midas. For once, they would have been accurate.

    A bell chimed twice. John Travis picked up the receiver to the wall-mounted phone and pushed the lighted button, opening the direct line to the cockpit. He listened for a minute, then passed on the message.
    "We've been cleared to land. The pilot wants us to buckle up."
    Turning from the window, Kit uncurled her legs and searched for her shoes. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Chip Freeman at the bar, bolting down the remaining juice in his glass. A smile ghosted across her mouth as she silently wondered if Chip had found a new source of Dutch courage.
    She located her Bally flats and slipped them on while Chip made his way to the leather chair next to Paula's, his face pinched and white, his gaze fixed on his destination, looking neither to the left nor the right and missing the commiserating smile Kit sent him.
    "Poor Chip," she murmured to John Travis as she felt along the back of the sofa cushion for the other half of her seat belt. "He looks like he needs a tranquilizer. You should have kept him talking about the film until we had landed."
    "We'll be on the ground soon." He cast an amused, but not unkind, glance Chip's way.
    "He'll make it. He's a big boy."
    A particularly apt description, Kit thought. Charles "Chip" Freeman looked like an overgrown boy with his cowlicks and thin, gangly frame--something of a cross between the class genius and the class nerd with a little ninety-pound weakling thrown in. But in her estimation, he was more genius than anything else, both creative and intense.
    Like her, after years of struggle,