Stranded With A Stranger

“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.”

He took her at her word, taking a smaller mouthful than the one that had made his throat work as he swallowed the last of the whiskey in the mug. “Okay. Prepare yourself for it taking a week or more to get everything organized. Where are you staying?”

“At the Peaks Hotel.”

A raised eyebrow was his only acknowledgment that the hotel was the most expensive accommodation in Namche Bazaar.

“Have you done any climbs with Bill and Atlanta? Better tell me what experience you’ve had.” He waited expectantly

This was the crunch moment that would make or break her chance of recovering her sister and the key. “No, I’ve never climbed with my sister and her husband. We didn’t see each other that often. I live in Paris and…well, you know where they lived.”

“So what’s it been—the French Alps, Mont Blanc?”

“None of those. I stayed in Paris mainly, but I belong to this gym with a huge climbing wall and my speeds on that are considered expert level.”

He let out a whoop that ran around the attic, bouncing off the walls and coming back to her more times than she appreciated. What did he know? She was expert level.

He stopped chortling long enough to spit out, “A climbing wall? Lady, you crack me up.” Then he sobered. “No way am I taking a rookie climber up Everest. My reputation is shot as it is. It would be dead in the water if I took up an inexperienced climber. It was hell losing your sister and brother-in-law. If I lost a third one I might as well shoot myself. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.”

“But—”

“No. Don’t try to persuade me, or bat those eyelashes my way. If you think that would work, then you are greener than a cabbage.”

Chapter 2

She let Kurt lead the way out of the attic, quite content to follow him into the darkness of the stairs instead of tackling them first.

He’d thrust his arms into a red anorak on the way out, a color that would be glaringly obvious against ice and snow. Chelsea had noticed how he automatically angled himself to exit without brushing his shoulders against the doorjambs on each side.

As Kora had said, he was a very big man.

Every few steps Kurt stopped and lit one of the small lamps set into shallow alcoves in the wall.

The creaky steps hadn’t seemed so steeply pitched when she’d climbed up them, and losing her balance on the way down was the last thing she needed. She would never be able to persuade him to take her up Mount Everest if he thought she couldn’t manage a flight of stairs.

No use pretending a few drinks would loosen this guy up. He’d drunk his whiskey, then hers, and it hadn’t affected him one iota.

She might have to use her feminine wiles.

Oh, God! She might be reduced to begging.

Chelsea squared her shoulders before once more measuring the width of Kurt’s, which were so wide, so reassuringly strong and masculine.

Kurt reached the green door leading into the barroom that she had come through earlier. Kora had inquired of the barman as to Kurt’s whereabouts, then hurried away smiling, her fingers curled around the tip Chelsea had slipped her. It was a small price for finding the one man in Namche Bazaar who could help her. As he reached for the handle, Kurt turned and gestured for her to go in front of him. “After you.”

His cheekbones cut two curved slashes of shadow in the hollows of his cheeks, yet the leanness of his face didn’t fool her into thinking that this was anything but a strong man.

A man, a tiny voice told her, who sounded as if he saw things in black and white, right and wrong. Not one to put her in danger no matter how much she pleaded her case.

She should be extremely careful never to get on his wrong side. Thanks to the experience of their first meeting, she knew the man carried a knife and wasn’t afraid to use it. All of that aside, she would do whatever it took to succeed. Beg, cajole, seduce.

Come up with a plan.

More was at stake now than at any other time in her life.

Inside, the tavern walls were lime washed, same as the outside, though around the fireplace, white had given way to smoky gray. Someone had lit the fire since she had stood there with Kora, and now more than ever the place reminded her of an Indiana Jones movie set. More tiny pots of yak-butter oil burned on a ledge that ran around three sides of the room, throwing pockets of light into the gloom. Overhead, the same pots tipped the branches of the wooden chandelier that swung in the breeze they’d brought in with them. Chelsea held her breath waiting for the main door to slam open. Out of the wild and windy landscape Indy would stride into the barroom in all his whip-cracking, world-saving majesty.

She suddenly saw the humor of it. That’s what she’d come to Nepal looking for, hoping for—a man to help her save her world. But was Kurt Jellic that man?

The door shut and Kurt crowded behind her, so close she could feel his deep voice rumble where his chest touched her shoulder. “Live up to your expectations?”

“I don’t know if I had any, but it’s certainly something else. I’m just letting my eyes become accustomed to the light, or lack of it, so I won’t fall over anything.”

“All right by me.”

His breath on her neck caused her to shiver.

Of course he noticed. “If you’re cold we can sit near the fire.”

“No, thank you. Let’s find a happy medium. I would soon get overheated next to the fire and have to start shedding.”

His eyes narrowed as he studied the men sitting around the tables. “I don’t think there are many here who would object, but to be on the safe side we can take that table in the corner.”

As they reached the table he’d pointed out, a gust of wind blew down the chimney, adding to the smoky atmosphere, well aided by two of the older citizenry puffing on their pipes at a table between them and the fireplace. “I take it that this end of town doesn’t have electricity.”

“Scared of the dark?”

She twisted around to answer him. His eyes stared into hers, and there was a question in them she didn’t know how to answer. Not yet. She blinked, hiding her awareness of his gender. He was all predatory male, and it would take a brave woman or a fool to march into his territory and expect to get away scot-free.

She hoped it would be worth her effort.

Her gaze fell and focused on his mouth. She bit her lip and stifled a laugh. Damn, she’d outed herself, but what was she? A fool, or just a woman doing the best she could with what she had?

His hand touched her shoulder as he smiled wryly. “You sit nearest the wall so you can take in the sights.” She did as he suggested, and now she took a good look around the tavern. The sights were on the rough side, and not all the men were Sherpas or Nepalese. One huge man wore a fur hat that screamed of the Russian steppes, an impression colored by the way he was scowling into his glass.

Kurt waited until she was seated. “What can I get you to drink, and how hungry are you?”

“Whiskey, with water this time since I don’t suppose they have soda, and whatever you’re having. I could eat a horse.”

“Be careful what you wish for. I’ll see if they have any lamb or goat kebabs.”

Kurt towered over the bar. The tough-looking guy serving behind it wasn’t nearly as tall, just bulkier, with a neck that overflowed his shirt. As she got her bearings she noticed blue smoke issuing from a door behind the bar. It curled up high and twisted around Kurt’s dark hair like a halo.

A dark angel? No, there was nothing angelic about this guy. He was too big, too tough, too much of everything—overwhelming.

When he’d turned and looked at her on the stairs she could have sworn he could see right through her, see past the front she always wore to the woman underneath. Could she trust him enough to tell him the truth about her quest? That she not only wanted her sister back, but also had to find the key Atlanta had worn around her neck.

Bad idea. Atlanta hadn’t even told Bill, but what if someone had found out? Her sister hadn’t believed in coincidence when Maddie died, and one death plus two others amounted to one huge coincidence that beggared belief. Thank God she’d used IBIS’s facilities to have Jellic checked out before she left Paris. He had come up clean as a whistle, but there had been some blot on his father’s record. She didn’t believe in all that sins-of-the-father rubbish, though.

Her own father, Charles Tedman, had a lot to answer for.

Chelsea sucked in a breath and took in all the flavors of the room right with it. Apart from the butter oil and tobacco there was a definite hint of barbecued meat. The smell made her mouth water. Would it spoil her chances of getting what she wanted out of Jellic when they diluted the effects of the whiskey with food?

On his way back from the bar, Kurt juggled a whiskey bottle, two shot glasses and a jug of water. Although he’d been the one to ask her downstairs for a drink and some food, her ready agreement somehow raised his suspicions that there was more to Chelsea than met the eye. It wasn’t what he’d expected after laughing at her climbing experience. But the moment he’d suggested it and she’d said, “I’m starving—aren’t you?” his stomach had felt as if it was sticking to his ribs.

He began filling their glasses. Chelsea had reassured him that the tavern wasn’t below her standards. But compared to the hotel she’d booked into, this place was in a class of its own. That’s why he’d picked it; no one he knew frequented this type of dump.

“Here’s looking at you.” He lifted his glass and tossed half of it back. The name on the label should have been Rotgut, but he didn’t care. He’d needed the burn lately to prove that, unlike Bill and Atlanta, he was still alive.

“Cheers,” she said, and followed suit. The woman had guts, because once he’d poured her drink the only room for water had been a meniscus on top of the whiskey.

He pulled out the chair kitty-corner to hers and sat letting his long legs sprawl under the table. She pulled hers back out of the way as he invaded her space, again. Chelsea had taken off her lilac anorak and hung it over the back of her chair, and the black sweater she wore under it, though thick wool, assured him that he hadn’t imagined the fullness of the breast he’d cupped. Their greeting hadn’t been as politically correct as a handshake, but it had been a hell of a lot more fun.

He leaned forward while she was busy taking a more wary sip of her drink. “You don’t look anything like Atlanta. I’d never have taken you two for sisters.”

He ruffled the hair above her ears. It was soft, straight and slippery, sliding through his fingers like water. “Where’d you get all this black hair from? Atlanta’s curls were as blond as they come.”

She almost choked on her words as the whiskey went down. “Same father, different mothers. Atlanta’s mother died in a car accident, and mine didn’t fare much better. She fell off a horse and broke her neck.”

“With that kind of history I wonder your father didn’t keep the pair of you wrapped in cotton wool.”

If Chelsea was his, he wouldn’t let her loose around mountains.

Hell, where had that come from? The whiskey must be talking back at him.

“Not so much wrap us in cotton wool, but he made a good show of running our lives. It had to be the best schools, the best clothes. Nothing was too good for us as long as we did everything his way.” Her chin rose and there was a trace of a pout on her lips as she murmured, “I was the rebel of the two, the one who wouldn’t conform, unlike Atlanta.”

He noted the belligerence in her eyes. Kurt gathered she was harboring some held-over resentment from the past. He recognized it easily. Didn’t the same type of emotions emanate from his twin, Kel, the moment their father’s name was mentioned? The trouble with the powerful bond between identical twins was that no words were necessary to know what the other was feeling.

Kel had been the first to call him via satellite phone. Kurt had been back at Camp Three less than half an hour after the tragedy. Dazed with shock, he’d had to force himself to speak to Rei, his head Sherpa, and Paul Nichols, the only other paying customer on their team. He’d never discovered how Kel had found him, but his brother was the twin with connections, working as he did with the Global Drug Enforcement Agency.

“It must have come as a great shock when you heard of your sister’s death.” He said the words gently, for Chelsea’s sake, though part of him still raged inside because of what had happened and the way it had happened. He hadn’t had an accident on any of his climbs until this one. He still could hardly believe it himself, though he had only to shut his eyes at night for the tragedy to start playing over and over in his mind.