Lover in the Rough (20 page)

“I thought we were going to eat lunch down here.”

“Not this time.”

“What about you? Are you going to give up on the Queen?”

He smiled. “I’ll prowl around a bit while you sleep.”

“If it’s safe enough for you, it’s safe enough for me,” she said, her voice even, stubbornness in the set of her jaw.

“I’ve already explained about that,” Chance said easily, drawing Reba to her feet. “My standards are different for your safety.” When she would have argued he kissed her into silence. “Don’t you want to go back to the hill where the grass is as soft as the wind?” he murmured, moving his tongue over her lips with each word. “But nothing is as soft as you,
chaton
. . . . My God, how I want you.” With a deep sound he pulled her close, possessing her mouth as he hungered to possess her body.

“You win,” she said breathlessly when he finally lifted his head. “Let’s go find that hilltop.”

Chance bent and pulled the rucksack into place. After a last look around to make sure he hadn’t left anything, he gathered both pick and shovel in his left hand, held out his right hand to her and smiled. “I’m going to enjoy loving you in the sunlight,” he said softly, “all of you, sweet and hot and soft around me.”

A delicious languor shimmered through Reba. She wanted to stretch and rub over her man like a honey-haired cat, purring the demands of love. “Chance,” she said in a low voice, “it’s such a long walk to sunlight. . . .”

Before he could answer, the floor shifted minutely. A tiny shower of dirt came down. Vibrations shivered through the air, rock strata groaning in octaves too low for humans to hear. The ceiling stretched and tilted subtly, shifting rocks that had sagged beneath a skin of dirt since the room had been dug more than a half-century ago.

Chance’s body hit Reba in a flying tackle that sent both of them rolling toward the hard white granite wall at the end of the mine. Behind them the ceiling sighed and shuddered in the moment of release. With a ragged roar, a cataract of rocks poured down, burying the place where Reba and Chance had just been standing.

Chance covered her body with his own, protecting her the only way he could from the cave-in. Dirt and rock dust billowed outwards from the fall, covering them in a choking mass. When the last of the rocks had fallen and it was quiet again, Chance shifted his weight. Rocks the size of his fist rolled off his back and clunked to the mine floor.

“Reba,” he said urgently, “are you hurt?” His hands ran over her trembling body, searching for injury.

“A little bruised,” she said, her voice shaking, “and a lot scared. What happened?”

“One little shaker too many.”

“Like the straw that broke the camel’s back?” she said, lifting her head and giving him a tremulous smile.

“Yeah. Only we had the bad luck to be riding the bloody beast when it happened.”

“You’re hurt!” said Reba, seeing rivulets of blood bright against Chance’s dark cheek.

“Just a bit of flying rock,” he said, dismissing it.

The cone of light from Chance’s helmet moved over Reba, checking for cuts. Her clothes—and his body—had protected her from the worst of it. Her shirt was torn and she had some scrapes and bruises, but she was more scared than hurt. Reassured, he sat up and began looking for the tools he had thrown toward the granite wall when the cave-in occurred. They were nearby, buried but for a bright wedge of steel pick poking up out of the fringes of the rubble. He pulled out the pick and shovel and set them beside her.

“Stay put,” he said. “If the ceiling starts to go again, hug the granite wall. It’s the safest part of the mine.”

Reba watched as Chance carefully walked along the edges of the cave-in. At first she thought it was the grit filling the air that made the room look so small. Then she realized that the cave-in had filled half the room. Cold fear crawled over her skin as she leaned forward, staring across the room, trying to pick out the small tunnel where they had entered.

There was no tunnel, simply a mound of dirt and rock that went from floor to ceiling without interruption. The entrance tunnel had been sealed beneath tons of earth. She and Chance were trapped in the China Queen.

Buried alive.

Panic went through Reba, shaking her until her teeth clattered. With a strangled noise she forced her fist into her mouth, biting down until no sound could escape. Pain cut through her panic, wrenching her out of mindless fear. She forced air into her fear-paralyzed lungs, forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly despite the thick air, forced herself to think instead of react.

After a few minutes the worst of her panic passed, leaving her sweating and shaken but in control of herself again. Watching Chance had helped. His strength, his stillness, his calm prowling along the perimeter of disaster all reassured her. If anything could be done, Chance would do it. And whatever happened, she wasn’t alone. He was there, strength and light moving through the darkness toward her.

Chance knelt easily in front of her, his head tilted to the side so that he could look at her expression without blinding her with his helmet light. He took her hand, saw the livid marks left by her teeth, the extreme paleness of her skin, the fine tremors that shivered through her every few breaths. Very gently, he put his mouth to her palm.

“It could be worse,
chaton
,” he said. “Neither one of us is injured. The oxygen should last as long as our water. But the tunnel entrance is gone.” When there was no reaction from Reba, he squeezed her hand. “You knew that already, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked. She swallowed dryly and tried again. “Yes, I saw.”

“There are at least six meters of loose rock and dirt between us and the tunnel, and no guarantee that the tunnel itself isn’t gone. The cave-in started at that end of the room.”

Reba waited, holding his strong hand with both of hers.

“If I have to, I’ll tunnel through that mess,” Chance continued calmly. “It would be a real bastard, though. I don’t have any way to shore up the sides. And it’s loose now, really loose. It will come apart at the first sneeze.”

Reba nodded slightly, sending light dipping across the face of the cave-in.

“I think we’d have a better chance if I tunnel through that side,” Chance continued, turning his head until his light shone on the wall to her left, which ended in a pale thrust of granite. “There should be another tunnel not more than a few meters away, one of the narrow ones your family dug trying to locate the pegmatite again.”

She hesitated, searching his dirt-streaked face. He met her eyes, but there was something hidden beneath his calmness. “Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

Chance frowned and held her palm against his cheek. “There’s no guarantee that the tunnel I’m looking for parallels this room at this level,” he admitted. “Digging for it is a gamble.”

“But it’s less of a gamble than digging in that?” she asked, gesturing toward the cave-in.

“Yes.”

“Do what you think is best,” she said simply.

“Chaton,”
he whispered. “I never should have brought you into this bloody hole.”

“With or without you, I would have come to the China Queen eventually. If it’s possible to get out of this, you’re the man who can do it. Alone, I’d be . . .” Reba threw her arms around Chance suddenly, hung onto him with surprising strength, then let go. “I’m glad I’m with you,” she said, touching his hard mouth with fingertips that trembled. “Whatever happens, I’d rather be with you than anywhere else.”

Chance closed his eyes, unable to conceal the emotion that gripped him. When his eyes opened again they were very silver, very bright. Without a word he stood and began pacing off the distance from the cave-in to the wall where he hoped to dig through and find a tunnel leading up to the sun.

“When I came to the Queen before,” he said, prowling the wall that came into the granite at a right angle, “I could tell that she’d been dug by amateurs. All those tunnels leading off the main one are pretty much parallel to each other in three dimensions. A real gouger would have dug up, down and sideways looking for the displaced vein. At the time I thought those parallel tunnels were amusing. Now, I’m damned grateful your family didn’t know the first thing about tracking a drift.”

Reba didn’t answer, knowing he didn’t expect her to, that he was talking to reassure her with the sound of his voice. She kept her helmet light trained in front of him when she could, helping him to judge the composition of the wall.

He paced the wall and edges of the cave-in several times, measuring angles and distances with an experienced eye. From time to time he stood very still, eyes closed, as though reviewing or creating a map in his mind. Finally, he chose a place just a few feet out from where the granite and earth walls angled together.

Before Chance began digging, he came to Reba and knelt in front of her. He smiled slowly, his teeth very white against the dirt-streaked tan of his face.

“One kiss for luck.”

She felt his lips warm and sweet, his arms as hard as the granite wall, heard beautiful liquid words she couldn’t understand and then he was gone from her arms. The harsh, gritty sound of a pick gouging into mixed earth and rock came back to her. She eased down the granite wall until she found a position where she could add the light from her helmet to his, making it easier for him to see as he worked.

For a long time the only sounds were those of metal and rock and steel. A mound of earth formed at Chance’s feet. He ignored it, swinging the pick rhythmically, tirelessly, more like a machine than a man. Sweat turned his dust-covered shirt into a wet blackness that clung to his flesh. He peeled off the rucksack, shotgun sheath and shirt with hardly a break in rhythm. Rubble piled around his feet.

Reba pulled her gloves out of her back pocket, put them on, and picked up the shovel. “If I stand on your left, I can shovel some of this junk out of your way.”

Chance’s lamp swiveled suddenly, picking out Reba’s shape in the darkness. Her determination was clear in every movement of her body. He hesitated, then said only, “Shovel it as far away as you can, otherwise we’ll just have to move it again.” His teeth flashed in a thin line. “You’d be surprised how much dirt there is in a few cubic meters.”

For the first few minutes Reba struggled with the heavy, unfamiliar tool. The last time she’d used anything remotely like a shovel, it had been in a kindergarten sandbox. On the other hand, gymnastics built coordination as well as stamina. Before long she had established a rhythm that allowed her to handle the shovel with a minimum of wasted effort. She hadn’t a quarter of Chance’s muscle, but she had a gymnast’s appreciation of leverage that allowed her to get the most out of the strength she did have.

Even so, it wasn’t long before her muscles began to ache from the unusual exercise. She ignored it, knowing from her past gymnastics experience that physical discomfort didn’t mean the end of the world. When her muscles began to tremble and cramp and refuse to work, then she would rest. Until that point she would work as hard as she could.

By the time Reba looked at her watch, her shoulder muscles had settled into a steady burning that she knew would eventually lead to cramps. She was surprised to discover that more than an hour had passed since the cave-in. She leaned on her shovel as she wiped her face on the sleeve of her flannel shirt. For a moment she was tempted to shed her shirt as Chance already had done. In the end, she settled for rolling up the sleeves, unbuttoning all but two buttons, and tying the shirttails in a knot just under her breasts.

“Drink some water.”

Chance’s voice startled Reba. She looked up. He hadn’t stopped swinging the pick. He hadn’t paused at all except to heave aside stones that were too heavy for her to shovel out of the way.

“What about you?” she asked, watching the rippling power of his body as he buried the point of the pick deep in the wall. Sweat tangled in his hair, threw back glints of light like crystal drops, gleamed and followed the line of muscles down his body. He was extraordinary in his movements, his presence, his determination and grace, as elemental and male as the Tiger God.

“In a bit,” said Chance. “I know my limits.”

Silently, Reba wondered if he had any. Even though he was kneeling in order to reach into the crawl space he was digging, Chance seemed to tower above her, filling the room with his tireless strength. She pulled the canteen off her belt and drank sparingly, knowing the dangers of filling her stomach with water and then going back to hard work. She replaced the canteen, stretched burning muscles, and picked up the shovel again.

After the second hour she stopped looking at her watch. Time was measured shovelful by shovelful, seconds punctuated by the ring of steel on stone, minutes by the grating fall of rubble out of Chance’s narrow tunnel, hours by the fatigue pooling like a grey sandy tide in her body. She became an automaton, seeing only the rubble that had to be moved, hearing only her own breath, aware of nothing beyond the flat cone of her helmet light.

Suddenly, strong hands gripped Reba’s shoulders, rubbing out knots and cramps that had become as much a part of her as the blisters forming beneath her gloves. Chance’s breath moved coolly across her hot cheek.

“I’ve been in a lot of mines with a lot of men,” he said quietly as he stood behind her, soothing her knotted shoulders with his hands. “I couldn’t ask for a better partner than you. Where did you learn to be so brave?”

Reba took a ragged breath and leaned against him. “I’m screaming inside,” she admitted.

His hands hesitated. His helmet rubbed against hers as he kissed her shoulder. “So am I.” With a gentle squeeze he released her. “Rest. There isn’t enough room anymore for both of us to work. If you get cold, use my shirt.”

“Cold?” she said in disbelief.

“Lean against that granite wall for a few minutes and tell me how hot you are.” Chance turned away, then paused. “If it wouldn’t bother you too much, you might turn out your light while you sit. But if you’d rather keep it on, do.”

Reba hesitated, then reached for the battery pack on the back of her belt. Chance wouldn’t have asked unless he thought it necessary. Her light clicked off.