Lover in the Rough (11 page)

“Are you going to?”

His lips curved beneath his moustache. “Some bloody fool has to drive.”

“If you’re a bloody fool, I’m a candy-striped snake,” she said tartly. “I’ll ride, thanks. I’m in no hurry to break in the shoes you bought for me.”

She looked down at the boots Chance had given her. At his urging, she had changed into her camping outfit when they stopped for lunch. Privately, she thought the boots looked dreadful. Clunky, graceless and dirt brown. They were supple, however, and they gripped the ground securely. The jeans he had bought her weren’t of the designer variety but they fit very well. The blouse followed the line of her body as though made exclusively for her. It was a soft cotton knit, the same dark blue as her jeans, with countless tiny buttons and loops fastening in a line down her left breast to her waist. The label of a very expensive house was sewn discreetly into the high collar.

When she had come back to the table wearing her camp clothes, Chance had given her a look of approval that made her feel very female. She had mentioned that, while gorgeous, her blouse could hardly be classified as rough clothing. He had simply smiled and pointed out that the blouse was dark enough not to show dirt and washable in the bargain. What more could anyone ask of rough clothes? Besides, he added, she could always hide the blouse under the windbreaker he had bought for her.

The Toyota lurched and swung to the side. Reba looked up from her boots, jolted out of her reverie. When she saw where the vehicle was—and where Chance was going to take it—she clenched her teeth against a scream. There was no road, nothing but a chaos of dirt and rock spilling down the steep mountainside to the black ravine far below.

Bucking, roaring, wheels spinning and spewing loose dirt before biting down to bedrock, the Toyota clawed its way over the landslide. The vehicle hung perilously onto the shifting surface of the land. At times they slanted so steeply on the downhill side that Reba was sure they were only seconds away from flipping over. Each time the Toyota seemed to be losing its battle against going end over end, Reba’s nails dug deeper into her palms. Each fishtailing skid and swooping recovery made her teeth clench until the tendons in her neck ached.

At some point she realized that while the Toyota’s movements were unpredictable and frightening to her, they weren’t to Chance. He knew where the wheels were likely to skid on loose rock. He knew just how steep an angle the vehicle could hold without turning turtle. He knew how to keep the power steady and how to ease back smoothly, when to coax and when to command. He reminded Reba of a diamond cutter she had seen in Holland; each movement quick, clean, no hesitations, no jerky motions, total concentration and incredible skill combined.

Even so, Reba was glad to get to the other side. She sighed and sensed Chance looking at her.

“Want to get out next time?” he asked.

“Are there many more like that?”

“One or two.”

She grimaced. “It will almost be worth it.”

“Worth what?”

“Being scared to death just so I can appreciate you. You’re one hell of a good driver, Mr. Walker.”

“You’re one hell of a good passenger. Frankly, I was expecting you to scream.”

“I was afraid it would distract you,” she admitted.

“Smart as well as beautiful,” Chance said approvingly. He took her hands and kissed the red marks her nails had left on her palms. “I should have made you wear the gloves I got for you.”

“Gloves? It’s not cold.”

“Leather is tougher than fingernails,” he said, turning his attention back to the road. “So is rock. You’ll need gloves in the China Queen, unless you want hands as ugly as mine.”

“Your hands aren’t ugly,” protested Reba, remembering how gentle his hands were when they touched her. “They’re like all of you, strong and sensitive and hard. But not ugly. Never that.”

The Toyota stopped suddenly. Chance unfastened his seatbelt, leaned over and kissed Reba until she was breathless. Before she could recover he had fastened himself back in and was concentrating again on the brutal road. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for the “one or two” rough patches ahead.

Chance helped to distract her by talking about the geology of the area. He told her about continental plates sliding past one another with ponderous grace and world-shaking results, the crust wrinkling, magma welling up and hardening into granite masses beneath the land, earthquakes and mountains rising, molten rock shifting beneath the surface of the earth like an immense dragon stirring in its sleep.

It was still happening today, tiny adjustments of the earth’s crust that could only be felt by man’s most sensitive machines. Hundreds of temblors animated the land, subliminal twitches of the incandescent dragon sleeping deep beneath the surface. And every so often the dragon rolled over, shaking the land with casual strength and devastating results.

Chance drove the Toyota over a patch of decomposed granite, rock whose chemical “glue” had come unstuck through exposure to sun and wind and rain. The rock was pale orange and crumbled easily, making it as slippery as mud to drive over.

“I could learn to hate granite,” said Reba as Chance took the Toyota through a downhill curve in a controlled skid.

“What about pegmatite?”

“What’s that?”

He gave her a sideways smile. “Oh, it’s kind of like granite. It comes in dikes and intrusions—veins, to the prospector. There’s another thing about pegmatite,” he added. “Without it, there’s no tourmaline.”

“I’m beginning to love pegmatite.”

“Thought you would.”

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“The pegmatite.”

“We’re probably driving over masses of the stuff right now.”

Reba looked out the window at the countryside dropping away steeply. “Looks like dirt to me.”

“Underneath the dirt.”

“But where?”

Chance laughed. “If I knew that, I’d stake out a claim myself. All I know is that the Pala area of San Diego County”—he waved a hand to indicate the surrounding land—“is riddled with pegmatite, and that in some of those crumbling dikes and sills are crystals of rubellite—tourmaline to you—that have an absolutely unique color. There is nothing like Pala’s pink tourmaline anywhere else on earth.”

“You know a lot about it,” she said, remembering his accurate assessment of the Chinese tear bottle. “Its history, geology, value. Everything.”

For an instant Chance looked as hard as the land. Then he said casually, “Pala’s tourmaline is world famous. Any gem gouger worth the name knows about it.”

Before Reba could say anything else, the Toyota came around the shoulder of a hill. Ahead of them lay the rough turnaround someone had bulldozed out at the road’s end just in front of the mine. The China Queen’s entrance was little more than a ragged hole at the base of a steep ridge. But it wasn’t the mine that caught Reba’s attention, it was the battered pickup truck parked in the turnaround.

Someone was already inside the China Queen.

C
hance sent the Toyota into a skidding turn that didn’t end until they were facing back the way they had come. He set the brake but kept the engine on. With one hand he yanked free the cargo net that had kept everything in place while the vehicle jolted over the rough terrain. He opened a large, heavy tool chest and pulled out a pump shotgun. The barrel was long enough to be legal but too short for hunting game. Chance handled the weapon as easily as he had handled the Toyota. He flipped off the shotgun’s safety and pumped a shell into the firing chamber. The sound was metallic, chilling.

“You know how to use this, don’t you?” he asked calmly, holding out the shotgun to her.

Reba shook her head, drawing back. “No.”

“
Damn
. City wise and country innocent.” He checked the China Queen’s entrance quickly in the rearview mirror. There was no one in sight around the mine. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes—or if you see something coming out of the mine that you don’t like—drive as far as you can and then hike out to the highway. There’s a small ranch about a mile east of the mine turnoff. You can call Tim from there.”

“Can’t we just call the sheriff?”

“The sheriff doesn’t own the China Queen.”

Chance was out of the Toyota before Reba could argue. He took the shotgun with him. The pickup was only a few steps from the Toyota’s rear bumper, and the mine entrance only a few feet beyond the truck. Chance reached through the truck’s open window, pulled out the keys that had been left in the ignition and stuffed them in his pocket. If Reba had to drive out, no one would be able to follow her but Chance.

She checked her watch, then checked it again. It hadn’t stopped, it just was keeping time in slow motion while her heart raced.

She looked in the rearview mirror. Chance had vanished into the black mouth of the China Queen. The Toyota vibrated slightly beneath her feet, idling easily. She unfastened her seatbelt and moved over to the driver’s seat. She glanced at her watch again. One minute and thirty-seven seconds. With a small sound of impatience and protest, she watched the second hand creep around toward the two-minute mark. She could have sworn that the hand was moving backwards. At this rate she’d be toothless and grey before fifteen minutes were up.

She didn’t think of what might be happening in the mine. If she thought about it, she’d come unstuck and that wouldn’t do any good at all. It was rather like being on the balance beam. If you thought about the worst that could happen, it did. So you thought about it
before
you got on the beam. Once on the beam you thought only about the instant you were balanced in and the next instant to come. To think any further than that was an invitation to disaster.

A series of long, deep breaths helped slow her pulse to a more reasonable rate. Her body responded by falling into the poised readiness that immediately preceded her workouts. There were no uneven bars waiting to test her this time, no “horse,” no balance beam, but the ingrained discipline of gymnastics asserted itself, calming her.

Five minutes.

Reba watched the mine entrance in the rearview mirror, forcing herself not to think of anything but the seconds ticking away in her head, time sliced into small, unmoving segments.

Eight minutes.

Nothing moved at the China Queen’s entrance. The hole looked very black against the jumble of granite boulders that were strewn halfway across the steep ridge. The thought occurred to her that it might be interesting to climb the boulders, jumping from one to the other like a child playing hopscotch. . . .

Where was Chance? Was he hurt?

Reba refused to follow that line of thought. She took another slow breath and looked at her watch. Ten minutes, fifty-three seconds.

Eleven.

As she looked up from her watch she saw a dusty four-wheel-drive van with oversized off-road tires crawl around the shoulder of the mountain, coming right for her. The van skidded to a stop just a few feet from the Toyota’s front bumper, blocking off the narrow road. She slammed her fist on the Toyota’s horn three times, hard and fast, hoping Chance would hear and understand that the odds had just changed. Then she yanked the key out of the ignition and ran for the boulder pile, ignoring the two men piling out of the van, yelling at her to stop.

The first boulder was nearly four feet high. She gained the top of it in a single clean leap, as though mounting a balance beam. There was an instant’s pause while her trained eye assessed distances and angles, then she leaped again, changing direction as she moved, as quick and sure as a cat. Before the men following her reached the bottom of the boulders, she was thirty yards up the hill and increasing her lead with every clean movement of her body.

A few instants after she dropped out of sight into a hole between boulders, she heard the alien thunder of a shotgun, the chilling sound of another shell being pumped into place and Chance’s voice.

“That’s the only warning you get,” he said, his tone flat, final. “You two in the rocks. Get over here.
Now
.”

Reba eased closer to the ring of huge rocks that concealed her from the men below. By peering through a narrow opening between two boulders, she had a clear view down to the mine entrance below. She expected to see Chance and the two men who had chased her. What she saw was Chance and five men. The three closest to Chance had their hands behind their necks, fingers interlaced. One of the men was bleeding from a cut lip. Another looked as though he had been shoved head first into a gravel pile. The third one limped.

The two men who had run after Reba were slowly covering the fifteen feet that separated them from their friends, forcing Chance to divide his attention among the five men. The men from the mine looked at each other and silently shifted their positions, spreading out. Suddenly the man who was limping turned and dove to the ground, flailing wildly with his arms and legs, trying to knock Chance’s feet out from under him. At the same instant, the other two men from the mine jumped Chance.

Chance kicked the man on the ground with stunning force, taking him out of the fight between one second and the next. The shotgun barrel flashed in the sun as Chance slammed the weapon into the second attacker. The man folded over and fell limply, all fight gone. Chance pivoted and lashed out in a high karate kick that sent the third attacker flying backwards into the dirt, unconscious before he hit the ground. Instantly Chance spun to face the remaining two men, shotgun poised, ready.