Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,76

and a guide he met up with once a year, and she frowned when he reminded her. He was planning to leave the day after Thanksgiving, and would be gone a week.

“Why then?” she asked, disappointed that he wouldn’t stay through the Thanksgiving weekend.

“It works best for everyone, and our guide.”

“Where in Canada?” He hadn’t invited her to go with him, and had said that the trip was all men, all expert skiers. It was an arduous trip and they loved it. Two of them had climbed Everest with him, which was how he had met them.

“British Columbia. Revelstoke. We’ll take the plane up to Kelowna near Vancouver, and from there we take a helicopter to our ski drop-offs at the Selkirk and Monashee Mountains.” The only way into the area was by helicopter. “The lodge is at the base of the mountains. They drop us off on the mountains by helicopter every day, and we ski out. It’s rugged terrain but fantastic skiing. The best there is.” She was silent for a moment, thinking about it, and looked at him.

“And the most dangerous skiing there is, if I remember correctly.”

“It doesn’t have to be. We’re all good skiers. Our lead guide is a member of the International Federation of Mountain Guides, and we have a tail guide this time too. We carry radios and avalanche equipment. We each wear a transceiver, and carry a shovel and probe. We’ve got everything we need. Our lead guide knows the area, and the pilot has been doing this for years. This is our tenth year going.” She wanted to ask him not to do it, but didn’t see how. She couldn’t ask him to change all the things he loved about his life, so she said nothing. He saw in her eyes that she was frightened. He held her for a moment and she was stiff in his arms. “It’ll be fine, Maggie. I promise.”

“You terrify me,” she whispered to him. “Why does everything you love have to be dangerous?” It was who he was, and she had known it since he was eighteen, but it didn’t make it easier to live with. The more she loved him, the harder it got. Other people died in freak accidents, or on the freeway, in plane crashes like Brad, or had heart attacks when they went jogging, which no one could foresee, but Paul had to put his life on the line at every opportunity, whether playing or racing. He had to steal his life back from the angel of death every time. And what if he lost? She had known it was a possibility since the beginning.

They didn’t talk about it again that night, or the next morning, when she took a commercial flight from London to Chicago. There was no point bringing up the ski trip again. It was just something she had to live with, like his racing. His recent win had made him cockier than ever. He needed danger like other people needed air. She thought about it on the flight back to Chicago and tried to make her peace with his helicopter skiing trip with his friends. She felt as though she would be nagging if she brought it up again. He had survived it nine times before this, so presumably he would again. He was a man’s man, and she told herself that this was what they did.

She was busy once she got home to Lake Forest. As it always did now, her house felt tired and deserted to her when she saw it again. For the past year she had been commuting to the luxurious spaces in Paul’s life, the Lady Luck, with its fabulous crew that waited on her hand and foot, the Ritz in Paris and his suite there in the opulence and glamour of the venerable hotel, his penthouse apartment before he lost it to British taxes, the new one he had just bought in a lovely building in one of the best neighborhoods. Coming home to Lake Forest, and their modest home there, was a reminder of the realities of her life, and how she had lived with Brad for nearly twenty years. They had a very comfortable home and she loved it, but she realized now that she had gotten spoiled, and she wondered how it would look to Paul when he saw it.

She tried to spruce it up as best she could, threw away some tired old decorative cushions