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All her life her sister had taken off to places where Chelsea couldn’t possibly follow.
The street opened out onto a small square dominated by a Buddhist temple. Prayer flags flapped overhead in a breeze perfumed with food and incense, and brown hands turned prayer wheels as they passed by. Did those wheels and flags work, or were they just another pretty superstition to ward away evil?
Chelsea wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they were as redundant as her own prayers. She’d said some for Maddie after her sister’s letter arrived. Maddie had been a friend since childhood, a woman who would never have intentionally hurt a soul. She hadn’t deserved to die. Chelsea had called the detective in charge of the case, but had gained no helpful information. Didn’t a woman’s death matter anymore?
Spinning a prayer wheel was probably as useless as the entreaties she had sent upward that Atlanta was really safe. All her hopes of them coming together again, her chance to correct past mistakes, had died on the mountain.
But no prayers would be as profound if she couldn’t find her sister and that key. Too many huge American firms had toppled recently, brought down by creative accounting, and this could be another instance. If only she could be sure what was in the safety deposit box.
Last quarter’s financials had been down again, but if Maddie was correct, she needed to find the proof.
That was the only way to stop cousin Arlon.
Kurt squinted at the figures written in his small accounts book. Not that he thought scrunching his eyes would change the fact that if he didn’t score some work soon, his business would be in the red. It had cost him $65,000 to use the fixed lines and aluminum bridges put out by the Sherpas’ association at the beginning of the season. If he didn’t get more work soon…
The up-front payment he’d received from the Chaplins had been eaten up and then some. And he wasn’t such a boor that he would claim from the estate of a couple of friends who’d been killed on his watch.
“Aargh.” He cleared his throat as if that would get rid of the rumors that had been circulating since he’d come back down the mountain without Bill and Atlanta.
The local magistrate had more or less cleared him. That is to say, nothing could be proved one way or another. All they had was his word. But in a close-knit society, once a rumor took hold it was hard to contradict it.
Bad news always traveled faster than good.
If he could get his hands on the bastard who had started them, he’d kick him to hell and gone. His family knew only too well how rumor and innuendo could ruin a life. But when his father had died it had been Kurt and his brothers and sister who’d been left to deal with the mess. Were still dealing with it.
He looked up from the lined page and realized he should blame the poor light for the problem with his eyes. At five-thirty in the evening his attic room always flooded with gray watery light as the sun dropped behind the Himalayas. He shut the book with a snap. The sound was like a thunderclap in the quiet room.
Though he had taken lodgings on the top floor of a tavern, the old stone walls were two feet thick and swallowed up the noise from the barroom, keeping it to a low murmur he barely noticed.
Kurt scrubbed his hands over his face and combed his untidy hair with his fingers. He needed a shave. His stubble was four days old and as black as his hair. What was the point? He had no one to impress. Clients were staying away in droves.
He pushed up from his cross-legged position on the floor. The wooden boards were ten times more comfortable than any flat spot on Everest. He stretched, his fingers brushing a large beam. The slope of the roof made it necessary to stoop at the far side of the room by his bed, and he had to take care not to knock his head for the first couple of steps after he emerged from the attic.
Running his hands over his pockets, he felt for his matches. Time to light the lamps before he started falling over the furniture and his bags.
A wooden stair cracked outside. The sound of it ricocheted through the silence like a bullet bouncing off the walls. He recognized the sound. That particular step was five from the top.
His hand slid to the knife on his belt. He unsheathed it as he crossed to the door in his sock-cushioned feet and listened for the creak of the step one down from the landing outside his door.
He’d been robbed twice in the short time he’d lived here. The door didn’t have a lock, but then anything of true value he carried on him.
Whoever was climbing the stairs must have been taking them two at a time. The next noise he’d been waiting for didn’t arrive before a gentle tap on the door started it swinging open. Not only did the heavy wooden slab not have a lock, its catch didn’t work worth a damn, losing its grip at the slightest pressure.
There was no announcement. No “Hello, is anyone there?” Only the door moving closer to his shoulder as it was pushed wide. The footsteps were light, as was to be expected in a country where most of the inhabitants were head and shoulders shorter than him.
He let the intruder take no more than two steps into the room, then, knife poised in one hand ready to strike, he wrapped his other arm around the thief from behind. “Don’t move. I have a knife and it’s pointed at your throat.”
The intruder let out a squawk that nearly deafened him. He almost dropped the knife as a padded elbow dug into his ribs. If the aim of the elbow hadn’t warned him his target was taller than he’d imagined, the handful of fluid feminine breast told him he was definitely below the mark by eight inches or more.
It had been so long since he’d touched a woman, touched anything that filled his hand with such soft fullness, that his palm burned through the contact, even through several layers of clothing. Stunned by the unexpected rush to his groin, he grabbed a breath and smelled a floral perfume that clouded his reason and made him squeeze, just once.
As the heel of her boot stomped down painfully on the bony arch of his foot hard enough to make him wince, a second mistake leaped to mind. Her struggles had brought her dangerously close to the blade of his knife. Kurt flung it from him before its sharp edge could slice something a lot more fragile than nylon rope. Before the clatter of metal on wood reached his ears he’d bundled the squirming mass of female body tightly in both arms. “Take it easy, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“All right for you to say now I’ve knocked your knife out of your hand,” she boasted.
Well, at least he now knew she was an American.
She wriggled some more, her butt rubbing against his groin. It reacted accordingly.
“I threw it away,” he growled, unable to stifle his indignation that the woman had laid claim to his act of chivalry.
“So you say now.”
He felt the muscles in her butt tighten against him as she lifted a knee, but he was too busy spreading his legs to avoid her heel to enjoy the sensation. As her foot jarred against the floor its echo went straight from her to him. It was about then she appeared to recognize what was happening behind her, and she squawked once more. “Let me go, you…you lecher.”
The bands of his arms tightened, quelling her renewed struggles. This was getting out of hand. Didn’t she realize this situation was as painful to his ego as it was to her sensibilities? Only one thing for it, he decided.
Letting his arms slip lower without losing their hold, he picked her up. The softest landing place in the room was the bed. No sooner thought than done—he hefted her up and released her onto the mattress.
He could hear her pushing herself backward to the head of the bed, her heels catching on the covers. “Keep away from me. I know karate. No way I’m going to let you rape me.”
“Pity you never got past lesson one, where they taught you to stamp on your opponent’s feet. And while we’re on the subject, who snuck into whose room? Believe me, you couldn’t be safer. I’ve no urge to have sex with a shrew.”
“You should be so lucky.”
“Hold it! Hold it right there. Not another word. If I’m going to be accused of sexual assault, and believe me, I’ve been accused of a lot worse recently, then for a change I want to look my accuser in the eye.” This time the matches sprang to his hold in the first pocket he searched. He lit one, but it didn’t pierce far into the gloom, and the shape on the bed could have been man or woman. But having touched her, he knew better.
“Actually, no one mentioned sexual assault, only…”
He froze, still as a statue, the match flaring in his fingers, as faint and tiny as the light at the end of the tunnel called his future. “Only what?”
“Whatever they say about men like you.”
“Men like me don’t go in for rape either.”
He could tell she’d heard the rumors, but he hadn’t expected her to back down. That made her either a coward or a woman who desperately wanted something he had. And she’d already let him know it wasn’t his body. He blew out the match, then took his ire out on the full backpack he’d left on the floor, kicking it in front of the door to make her escape harder.
The annoyance didn’t go away. Striking another match, he murmured under his breath, “The woman wriggles around against a guy as if she’s giving him a lap dance and she wonders why he gets a hard-on.”
Kurt had done a lot of talking to himself lately. Especially since people he’d once counted as friends had appeared to be avoiding his company. As if they would become guilty by association.
So she’d been asking around, had heard the stories that got worse as they went from mouth to mouth. He could have told her about rumors—that if they won’t go away, you have to learn to live with them.
Without turning his back to her, he lit the first couple of yak-butter oil lamps. Their glow was enough to illuminate long jean-clad legs. The third brought out the curve of her hips. He knew, to his cost, they were softly rounded where his were lean. The lilac anorak was a fashion statement no mountaineer worth his or her salt would wear. Its quilted folds hid the full breasts his palm had lighted on by mistake. He smiled softly as he picked up the next tiny copper bowl filled with oil.
Her hair was black, short, spiky, a match for the dark clumps of eyelashes framing her huge gray eyes. Eyes wide and staring at him as if he were the devil incarnate. As if she too thought him responsible for Bill’s and Atlanta’s deaths.
Sometimes he wondered if maybe he was.
While her expression nagged at his conscience, something in him acknowledged that contempt wasn’t the emotion he wanted to draw from the woman sprawled across his bed. But he wasn’t willing to go deeper into his motives.
With the final lamp lit, a gas cartridge one, the last of the gloom receded to the edges of the attic. Kurt walked up to the bed and looked down at his unexpected guest. Her eyes flashed a warning and her hands bunched up fists of the top cover as if it were the only thing preventing her from leaping at his throat.
“Hi, I’m Kurt Jellic. And you’d be…?”
“One moment you’re threatening to slice my neck, and the next you’re making an introduction as if we’d just met at a garden party,” Chelsea sniped, taking advantage of what seemed to be a truce to push herself into a more dignified sitting position.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m all out of cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea, but I can offer you a whiskey. They do say it’s good for shock. Perhaps it would make you remember your name.”
Taking a good look at him in the lamplight, she was left in no doubt that this guy could have killed her if necessary. She’d watched him move from lamp to lamp with lethal grace. Gradually each small increment of light had revealed the man Atlanta and Bill had trusted to get them safely to the summit of Everest and back again.
Why hadn’t that happened?
Oh, yeah, they had fallen. And she’d heard the word accident flung around with abandon. Kurt Jellic had been with them, and like a few other people she wondered how he had survived.
He threw her a grin, quirking his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?” His teeth were a slash of white in a face brushed with the kind of dark stubble film stars affected, as if it made them unrecognizable. His slightly gaunt features were dominated by dark unreadable eyes under black eyebrows, both sitting above an uncompromising straight slide of a nose.
“I’ve no trouble recalling my name. It’s Chelsea Tedman.”
She waited for a reaction, but wasn’t overwhelmed with surprise when she didn’t get one. Why would Atlanta have mentioned an estranged sister she hadn’t seen since before Chelsea entered high school?
He stepped around a heap of red and yellow ropes on the floor in front of a huge old-fashioned chest, then lifted a bottle. The reflection from a butter-oil lamp glimmered through the amber liquid sloshing near the bottom. The bottle had been well and truly broached. Hell, she hoped he wasn’t an alcoholic.
That was all she needed.
“Okay, now the formalities have been taken care of, how do you take your whiskey—straight or straight?”
“I take it in a glass.”
The bottle made a hollow clunk as he set it back down and picked up the glass sitting next to it. He peered into its depths and didn’t look particularly happy with what he saw.
Chelsea almost choked on a breath as he pulled out the tail of his tan-and-brown-checked shirt and proceeded to wipe the glass with it. His glance caught Chelsea’s horrified expression. Kurt’s embarrassed smile was almost boyish, if anyone with bristles could be likened to a boy. “What did you expect? This isn’t the Ritz. No room service. It’s either use what you have to hand or put up with a layer of dust floating on your whiskey.”
Apparently satisfied with his efforts, he poured some liquid into the glass, then opened the top drawer of the chest. He withdrew a blue plastic mug and emptied the rest of the bottle’s contents into it.
Chelsea’s innate fastidiousness made her hesitate to take the tumbler, even considering that alcohol was an antiseptic.
“Will it help if I tell you I put this shirt on clean not more than two hours ago?” He lifted the blue mug as if toasting her. “And you were the one who insisted on a glass.”
She took the tumbler, lifting it by the rim, wary of touching any part of this man whose sexual heat had burned through her as if he hadn’t held a knife against the tender skin of her throat.
He hadn’t actually said she was acting like a wimp, but she certainly felt like one. How had it come to this? Atlanta had been the delicate flowerlike child, while she had been the tomboy. Her sister had gone the ballet-and-piano-lessons route, while she had ridden horses and played basketball. Even at thirteen she’d been two inches taller than her elder sister and had made an ungainly, sulky bridesmaid at Atlanta’s wedding, letting everyone know she was doing it under protest.
When had their roles reversed? Atlanta roughing it on a mountain in boots and anorak, while Chelsea swanned off to watch the ballet in Paris dressed in the latest fashion as if she were a changeling.
And she was. She fluttered around Paris like a dilettante, playing at being a translator at the American embassy. Well, she was a translator for real. Though in truth, she worked in a basement office of the embassy, translating secrets that terrorists would give their lives to get their hands on. That’s if they even knew IBIS, the Intelligence Bureau for International Security, existed. Jason Hart, the bureau chief and initiator of the bureau, had taken extreme measures to insure its anonymity.
Kurt knocked his mug against her glass. “Sláinte.”
“Cheers.” The sip she took burned all the way down, and her face flamed as Kurt Jellic settled his massive frame on the edge of the bed, making the mattress dip. She was honest enough not to blame the blush on the whiskey. It had been a long time since she’d let down her guard enough to get this close to a man on a bed, even fully clothed.
“So what brings you to this neck of the woods, Chelsea Tedman?”
“I want to go up Mount Everest.”
A spark lightened his eyes, but not the intensity of his gaze on her. “And?”
“I was told you were the one to take me.”
He frowned, his black eyebrows coming together, shading his eyes as well as hardening his expression. “So no one but Aoraki Expeditions could fit you into their group?”
“Not where I wanted to go. But they all said you were definitely available.”
He took a slug of whiskey out of the incongruous plastic mug, but if he’d done it to hide his reactions it hadn’t worked. There was nothing enigmatic about the twist of his mouth, or the way his nose flared as he breathed in hard. “Did they tell you why?”
“They didn’t have to. I’m Atlanta Chaplin’s sister. And I already knew you were the one who took her and Bill up Everest.”
Something between a growl and a moan ripped from Kurt’s lips as he sprang to his feet, turning his shoulder to her for a second. She would almost have preferred he’d stayed that way. She wasn’t prepared for his ominous glance.
It was a relief when he tipped back his head and drained the whiskey from the blue mug, a relief to no longer feel like a slug he’d almost stepped on. Finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You took your damn good time before mentioning that. So what’s it to be—pistols at dawn, pushing me down a crevasse when I’m not looking, or are you going to get your lawyer to sue me? I warn you, you won’t get much. Everything I own is tied up in a half-built lodge in Aoraki, New Zealand. And as it stands it’s not worth much.”
“I’ve no intention of suing you. Do you think I’m so stupid I didn’t check out the circumstances of the accident with the local magistrate? I’m not as green as a cabbage.”
“Huh, looks like I passed, or you wouldn’t be here. But anyone less like a cabbage I’ve yet to meet.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, but at the moment I couldn’t give a hoot if you thought I had buck teeth and a squint. All I want from you is your help in recovering my sister’s body.”
“I’m not sure that it can be done. Even if we could reach them and get their bodies out of there, transporting them down the mountain is almost impossible. Anything of any size is transported either up or down on the backs of Sherpas. Climbing takes two hands. Apart from that, a lot of Sherpas believe the bodies of fallen climbers should remain with the mountain goddess.”
Chelsea felt safe to scoot to the edge of the bed. Holding the glass made her efforts awkward but didn’t deter her, not now that she thought her goal was in sight.
“Here, give me that.” Kurt took the tumbler from her and she rose from the bed.
She stood in front of him and found she had to look up. “You don’t look like a superstitious guy.”
“I’m not, but I am cautious. You don’t succeed at mountain climbing by rushing into stuff hell-for-leather.”
“Good. I haven’t got a superstitious bone in my body.” Kurt ran his glance over her as if checking out her bones—or rather what covered them, she decided, as the flame in his eyes took her straight back to that moment when his hand had covered her breast. Fear for her life hadn’t been enough to stifle the arousing quality of his touch, or the discovery that her breast had fit perfectly into his palm.
He took a sip from her glass, but she felt no inclination to mention it, nor do anything to stifle the persuasive power of the whiskey. For all his faults, her father hadn’t raised a fool.
“It won’t be cheap. If we can recover the bodies, we’ll need a large team of Sherpas on the way down to carry them in relays.”
“Money is no object. Getting my sister home is all that matters.” Her statement suddenly felt like a boast, a clunker dropped into this attic where money was obviously scarce.
She kept her eye on Kurt in case he appeared to see it that way, too. He ran his tongue around his teeth as if pondering the situation. Then, as if realizing he was still holding her glass, he thrust it toward her.
“No, you keep it,” she said coolly. “I prefer mine with soda.”
