The Reserve Read Free

de Moussegorsky or something like that. For years, ever since she’d been presented to society, both in New York and in Washington, she had been the subject of much gossip, local, national, and international, although the pilot was more familiar with the local than the rest, except for when Alicia from time to time called his attention to a piece in one of the glossy women’s magazines or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker or the society pages of one of the New York papers. Her celebrity was of a type that mattered more to Alicia than it did to him. The woman was nothing more than a socialite, for God’s sake. A parasite. Come the revolution, no more socialites.
    He eased himself down from the pontoon into the shallow water and strode ashore, wetting his boots and his trousers to the knees and seeming not to care. Vanessa smiled and brought her hand to her mouth to cover it. The pilot’s easy, unselfconscious directness was a sudden relief to her, and all her gloom lifted. Hewore a collarless leather jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband and under it a white dress shirt open at the throat. The pilot was a large man, in his early forties, tall and broad, with big, square hands, and moved with the grace of a man who liked the feel and appearance of his own body, although he did not seem to be vain. His black straight hair fell loosely forward over his brow and gave him a harried, slightly worried look. Because of the goggles he wore when flying and his permanently tousled hair, his fair skin was unevenly tanned. He had very dark, almost black, deep-set eyes, and a prominent, long arc of a nose, and his face was wide, with a jutting chin, slightly underslung. He was not a remarkably handsome man, but to Vanessa—because of his size, his physical grace, intense coloring, and prominent, symmetrical features—an extremely attractive one nonetheless.
    He stamped his boots on the ground and said hello to the woman, turned to the others in the distance and waved in a loosely friendly way and started walking toward them.
    “Who are you?” the woman asked. Her voice was low and husky, a smoker’s voice.
    He turned back to her and smiled. “Jordan Groves. From over in Petersburg. Who are you?”
    “I’m not sure you’re allowed to bring an airplane in here,” she said.
    “Me neither. Your father invited me over. He and I met on the train the other day coming up from the city.”
    “So you know who I am.”
    “Yeah, sorry.” He hesitated. “You’re Vanessa…”
    “Von Heidenstamm.”
    “Von Heidenstamm. Née…Cole.”
    “Right. And you’re…”
    “Jordan Groves.”
    “The famous artist.”
    “So they tell me.”
    “Né…?”
    “Groves.”
    “Well, aren’t we something, then?” she said and came forward and, smiling up at him, hooked his arm with hers and walked him toward the others, who had waited for him by the shore until Vanessa seemed to have taken possession of the visitor and then they had moved away from the nearly darkened lake and were now making their leisurely way back up the piney embankment, returning to the camp.
    As they walked, Jordan Groves glanced at her bare arms and said, “Aren’t you a little cold?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I am. Let me have your jacket until we get inside.”
    He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled gratefully and walked ahead of him, while he lagged a few steps behind and admired her long, confident strides and straight back and head held high as if she’d just done something to be proud of. A damned beautiful animal, he said to himself. But a woman to watch is all. Not to touch. Maybe to paint is all. Definitely a woman to be careful of. The way she walked reminded him of a woman he had met in Budapest many years ago, and her figure was like that of another he’d met in Toronto just last year. He hadn’t painted either woman and was glad of it, but he’d touched both, and both had left him feeling badly used—more by