Stranded With A Stranger

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.”