Stranded With A Stranger

Every night, as he lay there in the dark, his own doubt assailed him. Was there anything more he could have done?

What a waste of two good lives.

“I caught it on CNN. I always watch it in the evening to catch up on news from home.” He watched her sigh and wondered if the deep sigh had been dragged up from the same kind of place he kept his regrets.

“I’d received a letter from my sister two or three days before I heard of the tragedy. Her death brought a lot of emotions bubbling to the surface—besides grief, that is. We’d planned a reunion…in Paris.” Chelsea dipped her head, but he could see a sparkle of tears on her lashes. It gutted him that he had to turn her down, but it would be suicide—hers—to take her up a mountain that showed no mercy. Rookie climber or old hand, one wrong move and they fell off the top of the world to their deaths.

Everest took no prisoners.

“If there was any way I could help you, I would do it—you know that, don’t you? I’ll be honest. I need the work. There have been a lot of rumors doing the rounds of Namche Bazaar. Not one of them is true.” Her hand lay on the table, and he reached for it.

To comfort her or himself, he had no answer.

Though she wasn’t a small woman her hand felt tiny, fine boned compared to his. The temptation to cling tightened his grip, a reflex based on the same instincts that had made his palm measure her fullness when she came tiptoeing into his life.

“There’s one way you can help—give me a chance to take my sister home.”

Without preamble he changed the subject. “You still hungry? I’ve ordered a whole swag of food.”

Tears ceased to sparkle on her lashes. He hoped this meant he’d turned her thoughts away from climbing Everest. It had been ages since he’d had a chance to talk to any woman but Atlanta. In the three years since he’d met her and Bill, she’d become like a sister to him, closer than his own sister, Jo, whom he hadn’t seen for years.

One difference—in his exchange with Atlanta he hadn’t gotten the sexual buzz he felt now. Part of him wished he were able to grant Chelsea her wish and take her with him—and not just because of the amount of money involved. Sure, he was practically broke, but he had broad shoulders and knew how to work. He’d be all right someday.

She pulled her hand from his, lifted her glass to her lips and spoke over the rim. “What kind of food?”

“Strips of barbecued lamb and some flat bread to wrap it up in. I thought that would be more filling than kebabs.”

“Great. I seem to have been hungry ever since I arrived in Nepal.” She sipped some more whiskey. He’d bet the shudder went right down to her toes. “Must be all the clean air.”

He found another smile and gave it to her with genuine pleasure as he looked around the smoky room. “You’re easily satisfied.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m not one bit satisfied. I won’t be until I get up that mountain and recover my sister’s body.”

He heard undertones of poor-little-rich-girl in the ringing echoes of her empty glass as she slapped it down on the wood.

Bill had been a good friend to Kurt. A rich man in his own right without the added advantage of his wife’s money, he had never made himself out to be better than anyone else. And listening to Chelsea, he didn’t like the fact that she almost never used his name. “I notice it’s always your sister you mention when you talk about retrieving the bodies. What about her husband? Where does Bill’s body figure in your scheme?”

Was she that obvious? Had Kurt looked into her psyche and seen the grudge she’d carried for fifteen years? “All right, you got me. I never liked Bill.”

Kurt drew back and sat up in his chair, as if to get away from her. “What’s not to like? He was a great guy, never harmed anyone.”

“It’s not that I want to leave him up there. It’s just that Bill’s the reason for the gulf between Atlanta and me. Aided and abetted by my father, of course.”

Although Kurt had distanced himself, no longer stretching his legs out under the table at ease, she felt relieved when he propped his elbows on the table and nursed his glass between his hands. “You’ve lost me. Start at the beginning, for we seem to be talking about two different guys. Bill was one of the kindest people I ever met.”

Just as she opened her mouth to begin, Chelsea had a lightbulb moment. She licked her lips, but the words refused to come. In a blinding flash Chelsea had seen how she must appear to Kurt, and the picture wasn’t pretty. She pointed at the bottle. “Can I have another shot?”

“You don’t think you ought to wait until the food arrives?”

“No. I need it now.” She held out her glass.

As he poured, he lifted his eyes so they clashed with hers, and it was as if he could read her mind and knew all her secrets, but all he said was, “Dutch courage?”

“Something like that.” She took a mouthful and threw it back, the burn mellowing the more she drank. Or maybe the first few sips had cauterized her nerve endings. Whatever it was, the whiskey slid down easily.

She’d heard you could tell a stranger things you wouldn’t dare tell a friend. In another moment of revelation, she realized she didn’t have a lot of friends who wouldn’t make some use of her confession if it were told to them. Which didn’t say much for her taste in friends. A pity Kurt didn’t look like a priest. It would make this a whole lot easier.

“You’ve got to remember I was only thirteen—”

She broke off to regroup her thoughts. Had that sounded like an excuse or what? She needed to tell it straight and start at the beginning. “Atlanta would have been four when my mother married Charles Tedman. They had a very short courtship, and I guess she was already pregnant and that hurried things along, because I was a seven-pound premature baby—though who gives a damn about how close the wedding is to the birth these days. Except maybe if you are Argentine, and come from a proud family like my mother did.

“I think I fell in love with Atlanta from the moment I opened my eyes and was able to see her. Even then I recognized our differences. She was so pink, white and gold like a china doll.”

“You’re not without top-notch qualities yourself.”

Chelsea smiled as the memory brought up an image from her childhood. “She was like my little mom, always there when I woke up. My mother was a horsewoman who traveled the world riding in the top events. She was better at schooling horses than children.”

“So, who brought you up? Did you have a nanny?” He reached out and tucked back the strands of black hair that were blocking her view of him, and vice versa, and she wished he hadn’t. Bad enough spilling her guts without catching his expressions of sympathy or otherwise.

Suck it up, Chelsea, she told herself, but as he ran the tip of his index finger around the curve of one ear, his touch made her quiver.

She felt her color deepen, and lowered her eyelids as if that would hide her reaction to him. “No, just a housekeeper and Atlanta. By the time I started kindergarten she was ten and used to boss me around, but at the same time she always made sure no one picked on me. I was the black moth in a field of butterflies, too exotic for most of the cool New England blondes I went to school with. Atlanta had no problem. Her mother had been one of them and Father had loads of money, even if he was a self-made man.”

She flashed a smile meant to say But look at me now—I got by, but sensed that Kurt saw through her bravado.

“How many did you beat up?” he asked.

“Not too many. Remember I had Atlanta.”

“I have a twin. That made fighting our battles easy. Besides which we’re identical and it was difficult to know which of us to blame. Of course, if the crime was too bad, Grandma Glamuzina punished us both.”

“Poor you,” she teased.

“Don’t get me wrong—the punishment rarely fit the crime. But this is your story. What happened when you were thirteen?”

“Atlanta married Bill. She was only eighteen and Bill was almost thirty. God, I’ll be thirty myself soon, but to me he looked like an old man and I couldn’t see how she could love someone that old. I blamed it on my father. He’d made two profitable matches himself, and I knew that if Bill had been poor my father wouldn’t have let him through the door.”

Chelsea laughed as she remembered something else. Another swig of whiskey eased her throat. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked so much straight up. “You should have seen Father when he discovered Bill had decided to give up making money and live on what he had. He went apoplectic. I don’t think my father took a day off work in his life, except to get married. Though I guess you could say that was all part of business. Thank God neither of us took after him. Cousin Arlon is the nearest thing he had to a son.”

Her stomach curdled as she remembered what had brought her to Namche Bazaar, and this tavern, and this man. “It didn’t make any difference, though. Father didn’t believe in leaving money out of the immediate family, not even to a cousin.”

And there of course was the problem. A good-paying appointment wasn’t enough for Arlon. He wanted it all.

Her gray eyes went opaque, making the dark rim around the irises stand out. Kurt wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have poured her that last drink. But she brightened up as their food appeared on a large wooden platter for them to share. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” she said as she grabbed a piece of flat bread before starting in on the barbecued meat. “Ooh, this is hot. Watch your fingers.”

“The tips of my fingers are like asbestos. That’s what years of climbing mountains does for you.” He still felt the heat, though, as he grabbed a few strips from the huge pile of meat, and for a few minutes all they did was chew and moan about how good it tasted.

“Mmm, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. I can’t remember the last time food tasted so great. I must take some of these spices home with me. Think I can buy them in the market?”

“I should imagine so. They sell almost everything else there.” As he spoke he watched her reach for another round of bread and begin filling it with more lamb. The way she ate was very sensual, without a hint of prissiness. She’d chomp down with her white teeth, laughing with sheer enjoyment as the sauce hit her chin. He was amazed how disappointed he felt when she pulled a handkerchief out of the reaches of some pocket to clean her face and hands. She’d only to say the word and he would have licked them clean.

Just the thought of it made him grow hard, and he was glad the table sheltered his problem. Bad enough her knowing that wiggling her butt against him turned him on, without letting her in on the secret of the effect watching her eat had on him.

Time to change the subject and save his hide. “You didn’t finish your story. Tell me what Bill did to create a gulf between you and Atlanta besides being an old man. I mean, you’re what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and I’m past thirty-four. So far this conversation hasn’t done wonders for my ego.”

“Okay.” She put her roll of bread and meat on the edge of the half-empty wooden platter. “Short and sweet this time. Bill took her away clear across the country and I never spoke to her again.”

Chelsea rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe I shouldn’t have gulped down all that food. This seems to be turning into a guilt trip. I was a little witch back then, stubborn as they come. After that, everything I did was the opposite of Atlanta. No ballet lessons for me—I rode horses, played basketball. In short, I became a tomboy. My father went ballistic. I didn’t care. He wasn’t turning me into the perfect little daughter so he could marry me off to a rich old man.”

Chelsea sniffed, looked at her small stained handkerchief and rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. “I needn’t have worried. No way did I fit the criteria for a good upper-crust wife…but that’s another story.”

Kurt searched his pocket, then handed her a handkerchief. “Here, take this—it’s clean.” He eyed her warm black sweater. It might be a slightly chunky knit, but that didn’t exclude elegant from its description. “And don’t worry, the tomboy image didn’t take.”

“But it did. I still spend a lot of time at the gym. I’m strong. Want to feel my muscles?” She held out her arm.

Nuh-uh—hands off, boy. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

He wanted to feel a lot more than her muscles, and if he started there he might not stop. From his memory of her pulled against his length there was absolutely nothing hard about her, just soft warmth that fitted against him perfectly.

No point in heading in that direction, though. Even if the unheard-of happened and the attraction did turn out to be mutual, the accident would always come between them. The memory of a tragedy whose edges were as sharp and jagged as the mountain it happened on would be equally difficult terrain to get over. From what he could tell, both of them were carrying a heap of guilt. Not a good thing to have in common.

“Well, for your information, I’m quite the basketball star. We make up a couple of teams from the embassy and play at least once a month—clinging to our roots, don’t you know.”

“The embassy?” Why was he just hearing this?

“Yes.” She looked quite proud. “I’m a translator at the American embassy in Paris. I like to keep busy.”

If ever he needed another reason not to take her up Everest, this was it. She might act as if she were alone in the world now that Atlanta had gone, but he’d met a few of those embassy types and he was certain she’d have more people watching her back than she realized.

Time to bail out. He made a show of looking at his watch, surprised to see that in Chelsea’s company time had actually spun away from him much faster than he’d guessed. “It’s getting late. I ought to walk you back to your hotel.”

Her eyebrows rose and her accent became snotty. “There’s no need. I can take care of myself. You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do. You might have noticed this isn’t the most salubrious neighborhood. Why do you think I greeted you with a knife? I’ve been robbed twice, and foiled another attempt before it got started.”

“In that case I accept your company.” Chelsea proceeded to shrug into her lilac anorak, sliding the zip up to her neck. It didn’t make any difference that her curves were covered by a jacket cut in a similar fashion to his; he still couldn’t see her as a tomboy. No, Chelsea was all red-blooded woman. And the pity of it was, after tonight he would never see her again.

In this quarter of town the street lighting was practically nonexistent, but he wasn’t taking her back up to his room to fetch a flashlight. It was too dangerous. Just the thought of being alone in his eagle’s nest with Chelsea gave him a testosterone high.

His luck was in. A three-quarter moon rode in a cloudless sky and was enough to light their way back to her hotel.

“Here, better take my arm. These cobblestones are rough underfoot,” he said, discovering—by letting her come close—masochistic tendencies that had never surfaced before. But then, he’d never claimed to be all wise. If he had been, he would have sent her packing before he decided to feed her. However, after he dropped her at the hotel he never had to see her again.

“Kurt, I’m not ready to give up on this yet. I’m certain that given the chance I can persuade you I’m not a liability. When can I see you again?”

No one was more surprised than Kurt when he heard himself say, “How about lunch tomorrow?”

Chapter 3

Shank’s mare was the main mode of transport in Namche Bazaar, and for once Kurt was glad of it. Walking gave him time to phrase the exact wording of the refusal he meant to hand Chelsea once he reached her hotel. He would hang tough. She wasn’t about to catch him oversexed or underprepared, not this time.

The trouble was he liked her. More than liked—wanted.

Chelsea was something beyond his experience. He couldn’t remember meeting another woman quite so…damn it…intriguing.

Only look at the way they’d met. Their rude introduction hadn’t sent her into screaming fits of hysteria.

He felt a stirring in his groin as he indulged in a wry, one-sided twist of a smile at the memory of those few minutes.

“Hell.” He shook his head. If ever a dame was ballsy.

All kidding aside, he had no intention of taking her anywhere near Everest. Not damn likely. Nothing Chelsea Tedman could come up with would change his stance on that. The bones of his guiding career had been picked clean since the accident. He had nothing left to offer as far as that was concerned.

Besides, turning up at Base Camp with Atlanta’s sister in tow would only add grist to the rumor mill.

He turned a corner and headed up the slope that would take him from one terrace to another. The Peaks Hotel was on the highest terrace looking down on Namche Bazaar, but then that’s what five-star accommodation was all about.

“Hey, Kurt…Kurt Jellic.”

Kurt spun around. He recognized Basie Serfontien and stopped to let him catch up.

“Where have you been hiding, man? There is this woman, a bit of all right. She wants to recover the Chaplins’ bodies for burial, God help her. I told her you were the only mountain guide who wouldn’t be booked solid.”

And I bet you told her why.

“’S okay, mate. She found me.”

Smiling, Basie slapped him on the shoulder. “Good news, man. You need to get back on the horse.”

Kurt shook his head. “Not if it’s likely to take me for a ride. I’m still thinking about it.”

“Ach, you’ll be mad if you don’t, man. She’s easy on the eye, that one. And money is no object for the Tedman woman.”

Kurt shook his head. He couldn’t be like Basie. If a client had money but no experience, the man would just add a couple of extra Sherpas into the equation to drag the wanna-be climber up to the summit. “I’ll probably see you up at Base Camp, either way. Someone has to do more than just leave the Chaplins lying there.”

He waved Serfontien off and carried on his way. The South African’s easy-on-the-eye comment sent his thoughts wandering back to the restless night he’d spent. Hours of half-remembered dreams where Chelsea fitted over or under him, skin to skin, pounding heart to pounding heart in earth-shattering sex.

Kurt let rip a heartfelt groan. It earned him a surprised look from a guy he was about to pass. “What’s up, mate?”

Tourist. Australian. One look was enough to distinguish the climbers from the wanna-bes. Some of them actually climbed as far as Base Camp, using up much-needed space on the rocky lower reaches of Everest, including adding to the horrendous pollution when they left their rubbish behind.

Kurt shook his head. “’S all right, mate. No worries.” He saluted him and walked on. The sight of these pseudoclimbers was so common that the Aussie’s presence evaporated from Kurt’s mind before he’d taken another two strides.

Back to Chelsea.

If only she hadn’t mentioned that one of her pleasures was horseback riding. The vision that had conjured up had played in some of the more erotic fantasies he’d had in the night. Yet he wasn’t so blinded by lust that he couldn’t recognize his dreams were just visions distorted by a bad case of desire. And all of it brought about by wishful thinking.

In other words, it wouldn’t happen in a million years.

For one thing, he dared not let it.

If he felt the rumors about his part in the accident were bad now, no matter what Basie Serfontien thought, getting involved with Chelsea would be like throwing gasoline on a fire to put it out.

At first sight Chelsea had christened her hotel the Raffles of Nepal. The all-white interior, combined with punkah fans that adorned the ceilings of the first-floor rooms as well as the bedrooms, reminded her of a trip she had once taken to Singapore. Everyone ought to experience Raffles Hotel at least once.

But unless the weather improved, she wouldn’t be switching on the fan in her bedroom. She imagined July and August really heated up, but early May was still reliving the crisp spring days of April.

Even so, she’d heard that on Everest it was easy to get sunburned by the reflected rays piercing the thin air. At least, she’d read it in one of the Everest books she’d brought to read on the plane.

“And you’re still a long way from there, bébé,” she mused.

Paris felt like a lifetime ago. Maybe it was? Sooner or later everything was bound to change. Her job at IBIS looked likely to be the first casualty now that her responsibilities to Tedman Foods and its employees had increased ten thousandfold.

A server dressed in a short white jacket appeared in her peripheral vision. “Can I bring you something, lady? A cocktail? Some tea?”

She looked up at the steward. He was very young and no doubt glad of work that didn’t entail carting seventy-five pounds or more up a mountain, strapped to his back with a strip of webbing across his forehead to balance the weight.

“No, thank you. I’m going inside for lunch as soon as my friend arrives.”

The chairs of the veranda weren’t the high-backed cane found at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, but the seating did provide Chelsea with a comfortable spot to formulate her plan of attack while she watched for Kurt to arrive.

What had she just called him? Her friend? She wasn’t certain they could ever be friends. Lovers or enemies? Only time would tell. Her brain said be wary, but her body had a mind of its own.

She rested her head on the back of her chair and let the peace soak into her. The veranda was fairly deserted. Tourists didn’t pay the fortune it cost to get here to waste their time watching Everest from afar. An idea about that had occurred to her that morning over breakfast, but would Kurt go along with it?

Kurt Jellic. Now, there was a man of contrasts. He looked rough, hard-bitten with his unshaven face and dark, almost black Gypsy eyes. Not what she had expected when Atlanta had said in her letter that he was a New Zealander. She tried to picture Kurt, with sun-bleached hair and light blue irises, sliding down a wave on a surfboard, her former stereotypical idea of a New Zealander.

It didn’t take, but she couldn’t discard the impressions that came from being held against his long, lean-limbed body, while her life trembled on the edge of the knife blade in his hand.

Color and heat rushed to her face and scorched her insides with a sudden rush of arousal. He’d certainly proved he was human…and the attraction was mutual.

Would it be an underhanded trick to use that attraction against him? Despite his initially forbidding appearance, Kurt had turned out to be a nice guy. Hadn’t he listened to her without complaining while she provided him with proof positive she had been the kind of spoiled teenage witch he probably hated?

A teenage witch who had fought against losing the closest thing to a mom she had ever known.

Her eyes welled with unshed tears. Damn, Atlanta’s death had made Chelsea’s intentions of saying, “I’m sorry, sis—I didn’t mean it” an impossibility. There was only one thing she could do for her now. One last thing.

Her tear ducts overflowed before she could prevent it.

They had been doing a lot of that lately. Chelsea opened her eyes wide to halt the hot slide of teardrops onto her cheeks, and then changed her mind. Scrunching her eyelids together to form narrow slits, she let her full weight sag against the cushions in an attempt to relax.

The rustle of prayer flags accompanied the sighs that whispered over her lips until a few minutes later she hovered on the edge of sleep and the world around her became a jumble of light and dark shapes.

Bam! She was wide-awake. One of the shapes lost its hazy edges and turned into a living, breathing Kurt Jellic.

“Am I disturbing your beauty sleep?” His voice had the husky edge it had lost when she had imagined him into a nice guy who would jump to do her bidding and give in to her every whim.