Lover in the Rough (19 page)

His hand opened. On his palm glittered shards of shocking pink crystal. Nested among them was one tiny, perfect needle of tourmaline.

R
eba made a sound of disbelief as she looked at the fuchsia glitter in Chance’s palm. He saw the pleasure and the wonder shining in her eyes. He looked at the tourmaline fragments in his hand, seeing them as she did . . . pieces of dreams condensed into molten pink, hot promises shimmering and whispering in the cold wash of a miner’s light. He smiled and plucked the shattered crystals from their white bed of crushed matrix. Tiny flakes of mica stuck to his fingertips, making them almost as silver as his eyes.

“Hold out your hand,” he said softly.

He poured the crystal fragments into her soft palm, reserving the perfect needle of tourmaline. She sighed and shifted her hand, making light melt and run over the piled shards of pink. After a few moments she looked up and saw him watching her.

“I know, I know,” said Reba, laughing at herself. “These aren’t worth two cents at a garage sale, but to me they’re . . .” Her voice faded.

“Signposts on the road to Oz,” Chance finished for her, smiling gently.

“Yes,” she sighed, watching the play of light over shattered tourmaline. “If only we’d gotten here sooner.”

“Before the dragon rolled over and crushed them?”

Reba’s lips curved. “How did you guess?”

His fingertip touched her nose, leaving a shiny residue of mica. “If it makes you feel any better, coming down here last night wouldn’t have helped. We’re several million years too late for these poor beauties. But not for this one,” Chance added, holding out the slender, flawless needle of tourmaline between his thumb and forefinger.

The crystal was an inch long, a sixth of an inch wide, and naturally faceted into a many-sided shaft. Though too small to have the shocking pink color of the larger crystal fragments, the shaft of tourmaline clearly showed the tricolor progression along its length that was unique to Pala’s tourmaline. It was as though the crystal were a cylinder lifted out of a watermelon. Nine-tenths of the tourmaline’s length was a pale, clear pink. Then there was a thin band of transparent white, like the rind of a fruit. A blunt cap of clear green marked the terminal phase of the crystal, recalling a watermelon’s dark skin.

Hesitantly, Reba touched the crystal with her fingernail, afraid that the mineral would vanish like a dream at the first touch of reality. “It’s real,” she breathed. “Oh, Chance, it’s real!”

“Very real,” he agreed, “but not half so beautiful as your smile.” His lips moved slowly over hers as he placed the crystal in her palm. “Welcome to Oz.”

She laughed softly, her breath a sweet warmth on his lips. “Thank you.” Then, with an eagerness she couldn’t conceal, “Can we dig some more?”

Chance smiled ruefully. “Spoken like a true gouger. Yes, we can dig. But first . . .”

Reba, who had been turning toward the pale fall of lepidolite on the floor, looked back. “First?”

Instead of answering, he pulled her against his body, wrapping her in his strength and warmth. She closed her eyes and let him flow over her, opening her lips to him with a surrender and invitation that had become as natural to her in his arms as her own accelerated heartbeat. The sweet, firm movement of his tongue over hers sent sensations shimmering through her like light pouring through crystal. When he lifted his head she had forgotten all about the tiny fragments and single perfect tourmaline held inside her closed hand.

“Thank you,” sighed Chance against her lips.

“My pleasure,” she assured him, laughter and longing making her voice smoky.

“Not the kiss”—he smiled—“although it was well worth the thanks.”

“Then what?” she asked, smoothing her lips over his moustache, enjoying the rough silk of its texture on her sensitive skin.

“You,” he said simply. “Seeing the China Queen through your eyes is like being young again, everything new and shining, hope and laughter.”

He kissed her slowly, moving his hands over her as though he wanted to memorize everything about her and the moment that she melted against him and they discovered again how perfectly they fit together. After a long time he reluctantly lifted his head.

“If we don’t stop,” said Chance huskily, “the only thing you’ll find in this mine is me.”

Reba smiled. One hand moved down his chest, tracing the muscles beneath the black flannel shirt. She paused at his belt before letting her hand drift lower. She heard his breath catch and thicken in the instant before he pulled her wandering hand to his mouth. He bit the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb with a restrained ferocity that made her shiver.

“The Queen’s floor is too rough for your satin body,” he said regretfully, “no matter who’s on top when we make love.”

Her eyes shimmered with desire and laughter and love. “It would be worth a few scrapes here and there.”

Chance’s eyes changed as he reached for her. He gave her a hungry, penetrating kiss that filled her senses with his taste. His arms crushed her but she didn’t protest, wanting to be even closer to him, wanting to feel him inside her, a part of her. With a hoarse, male sound he held her at arm’s length.

“I don’t trust myself to be gentle enough with you,” he said roughly, his eyes devouring her. “If I get you down on the floor I won’t want to let you up. Once, twice, three times. It wouldn’t matter. All I’d have to do is look at you and I’d want you all over again. You’re a fire in me,
chaton
.”

Reba’s fingers trembled as she touched Chance’s lips, feeling her own body burn with need of him. With a reluctance that she couldn’t conceal, she stepped back out of his arms.

“Tourmaline,” she said in a determined, shaky voice. “That’s why we’re here, right?”

His laugh was almost harsh. “I never thought I’d have to be reminded why I was down in the China Queen.” He drew a deep breath. “Tourmaline it is,” he said firmly.

But his eyes followed the lithe curves of her body as she knelt next to the small mound of lepidolite. The rock had sloughed from the ceiling near one of the thick pillars that had been left when the rest of the room was excavated.

When Reba began sifting through the crushed and broken minerals, Chance knelt beside her. Together they uncovered a few more shards of bright pink. They found a half-inch-wide shaft of pink tourmaline still embedded in a chunk of lepidolite. The tourmaline was a mere fragment of what it had been before the dragon twitched and shrugged and rolled the earth like a cloak over its massive shoulders. Even in the specimen’s diminished state, the contrast of hot pink tourmaline and cool silver-white lepidolite was quite arresting.

“A few million years sooner,” sighed Reba, when her fingers found the bottom of the white pile and scraped over the hard floor of the mine.

Chance smiled slightly and put the fragments of tourmaline crystals they had gathered into a small pouch on his belt. He would have left the worthless, glittering pieces behind entirely, but he knew that Reba would object. He wasn’t sure he blamed her. Even to his skeptical eye they looked special, a reflection of her joy.

Chance pulled Reba to her feet and led her a short distance away. “Stay here,” he said, getting a pair of transparent goggles out of the rucksack. He pulled them over his eyes and went back to the patch of white on the ceiling. Using the sharp end of his hammer, he probed the lepidolite. The ceiling was barely an inch above his head. Soon his face and shoulders were covered with shiny white grit and shimmering particles of mica.

Reba shifted impatiently, training her light on the pocket of rock where Chance was working. “Do you have another pair of goggles?” she asked finally.

Chance wiped his mouth on his sleeve before answering. As he turned toward her, bits of mica and crystal glittered in his moustache. “Yes. And no, you can’t use them. All the stuff I’ve found so far is small, but there’s no law that says it will stay that way. Lepidolite is nothing but a fancy name for hunks of minerals of all sizes that crystallized out of a particular kind of magma. The only thing keeping the different minerals together is proximity and habit. I’d hate to loosen a few kilos of rock and have it come down around your tasty little ears.”

She swallowed. “If it’s that dangerous, why are you doing it?”

“It’s not that dangerous for me,” he explained with a wry smile. “I just calculate the risks differently when it’s your head on the block.”

Before Reba could think of an answer, Chance went back to probing the lens-shaped pocket, pausing occasionally to lower a double handful of coarse minerals to the floor. Soon he had covered the short distance to the top of the nearby column. The lens of bright white continued into the column. Chance didn’t. He took off his goggles, spat grit from his mouth, and turned toward Reba.

“You going to help me look for tourmaline or are you planning to stick me with all the work?” he asked innocently.

“Chance Walker, you are the most maddening—” began Reba, but whatever else she said was lost in his laughter.

With a smothered word or two, she knelt and began sifting through the loose stuff he had piled up. He worked beside her, still chuckling from time to time. She ignored him until their hands met inside the pile of shiny white. His fingers entwined in hers. He lifted her hand, kissed it quickly.

“Even grit tastes good on you,” he said, his voice deep and his eyes very silver.

She shook her head, sending light swinging crazily. With a quick motion she brought his hard hand to her lips. The tip of her tongue flicked out, tasting him. Mica glittered on her tongue for an instant before it disappeared behind her smile. “You’re right,” she said. “On you, anything tastes good.”

“You’re tempting me,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her. When he lifted his head, particles of mica shone above her lips where his moustache had brushed. “My woman,” he murmured, “shimmering wherever I touch you.”

Her lips parted and softened, shining. With a soft curse he went back to searching for tourmaline. They found many fragments and a few cylindrical segments that had been shafts of tourmaline as long and thick as Chance’s finger before the earth had twisted, fracturing and finally shattering the tourmaline’s crystal integrity.

“Well,” sighed Reba, looking up at the patch of white shining at the top of the pillar, “back to digging in the ceiling.”

Chance followed the line of her light. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Let me tell you a story about digging in pillars,” he said, “or shaving, as we called it on Lightning Ridge. No piece of earth is exactly the same composition through and through. The Queen, for instance, is like a haphazardly layered fruitcake filled with different-sized goodies. The cake is what holds it all together, but in some places the cake is thinner than in others. Those columns may be no more than pockets of lepidolite held together by a veneer of chemically bonded dirt.”

Reba looked uneasily at the pillars rising throughout the underground room.

“On the other hand,” said Chance, smiling, “the columns may be as solid as the granite at the far end of the mine. I could shave a few and find out if you like.”

“Er, no thanks,” she muttered, moving her head so that a nearby pillar was bathed in light. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see the differences. They may be standing in a pegmatite dike, but pegmatite was another name for a mixed mineral pudding.

“Smart woman,” he said. “The Arabs weren’t that bright.”

She turned. “What do you mean?”

“They took some of their oil money and bought mining rights to the world’s only known tsavorite mine. It was a bargain. The African government that owned it was bankrupt.”

Reba frowned. “I read something about that. . . .”

“Did you read to the end?” Chance asked dryly.

“No.”

“It’s simple, really. Most human greed is. The Arabs decided that rather than pay to develop more of the mine, they’d just have the miners shave all those fat pillars. It worked, too. There were as many green garnets in those columns as there had been anywhere else in the mine . . . until the roof came down. Then there was only death. The stupid bastards who owned the mine weren’t the ones to be buried alive, of course.”

“I think,” said Reba, swallowing dryly, “that the China Queen’s columns look just fine the way they are. No shave. No haircut. Not even a bath.”

“Wise decision.” Chance’s headlamp slowly picked out each pillar in the room. “Only five,” he said. “That’s not a hell of a lot, given the restlessness of Pala’s dragon, not to mention the faults, the discontinuities and the general chemical mishmash that passes for rock around here.” His light revealed the worried expression on her face. “I’ve worked in worse mines,” he said. “But now that I’ve had a better look at this mine, you won’t come into the Queen with me again.”

“I’m not that frightened.”

“No more poking about for you until I’ve seen the reports your geologist wrote when you wanted to know what shape the mine was in,” said Chance as though Reba hadn’t spoken. “Maybe not even then. In fact”—his headlamp swept the room once more—“I think it’s time I took you back for lunch and a nap in the sun.”