Stranded With A Stranger

“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.

But Kurt was more than that. More than she had remembered. He was, first and foremost, disturbingly and attractively, all male.

She pushed against the cushioned seat of her chair to stand up, eager to reach a height where his size wasn’t such a disadvantage. It wasn’t easy.

Her hands sank deep into the pillowy softness that had almost seduced her into sleep. However, the angle of the seat—knees higher than her bottom—made it impossible to stand with any semblance of elegance.

“Here, let me.” Kurt held out his hand and, fool that she was, Chelsea took it in hers. The world blurred at his touch. He pulled her to her feet and released his hold. And with its loss she felt nothing would ever be the same again.

He was dressed in the same casual outdoorsy style as most of the guides she’d met in Namche Bazaar—sun-faded khakis topped by a checked shirt under a black anorak. On him it had a style she hadn’t perceived last night. The long stretch of muscled legs moved with a singularity that made him stand out in a crowd. She took a drawn-out look, knowing something was different.

Sure, he’d shaved, she’d give him that. But it wasn’t simply that the razor had highlighted the dimple on his chin that made her stomach flip over, or the fact that the touch of his hand had sent an icy shiver down her spine.

No, it was in his eyes and the way he held himself. He reminded her of someone, but for the life of her she couldn’t say whom. She returned his gaze and recognized awareness in his eyes, a knowing that hadn’t been there before, as if in a past life they might have been lovers.

Flustered, she bent to flick the creases out of her skirt till it swung lightly from her hips, skimming the tops of her calves. When she had picked out the light cream cashmere top and natural linen skirt, she hadn’t considered its subtle sexiness as part of her plan to get her own way. Now she realized that like everything she had done since their first meeting, it had been part of her strategy, part of her seduction.

Too bad she hadn’t reached a definite conclusion on how to go about this master plan.

Just when it counted most, she was going to have to wing it.