Stranded With A Stranger

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.