Up Close and Dangerous Page 17

  With a spark, the lovely little flame whooshed brighter and higher, leaping to engage the paper, and then the bark. As she watched, the small sticks of kindling began to smoke, then glow as the flame caught.

  She began laughing, so beside herself with delight she thought she might cry, too. She turned to see Cam striding toward her, a wide grin on his face. With a whoop of joy, she jumped up and ran to him, throwing herself into his arms. He caught her, lifting her off the ground and giving her a little whirl.

  “It worked!” she half shrieked, clutching those broad shoulders and wrapping her legs around his hips for support.

  He didn’t say anything. His hands gripped her butt, pulled her tightly against him. A rock hard erection pushed urgently into the softness and heat between her legs. Startled, she looked up, her laughter dying in mid-note. She saw his vivid gray eyes, glittering with heat and hunger, and then he kissed her.

  22

  HIS LIPS WERE COLD, BUT THERE WAS HEAT IN THE KISS, a compelling hunger and expertise that drew an immediate response from her. The usual alarm sounded deep in her brain, but somehow it was less urgent, and for the first time in a long, long time, maybe forever, she ignored it. Instead she coiled her arms around his neck and kissed him back, parting her lips at the insistence of his and allowing the smaller penetration of his tongue to entice her to play.

  A confusing mixture of guilt and pleasure filled her. She hadn’t meant to precipitate this, hadn’t meant to go down this road, yet now that she was on it she wanted to stay.

  She should take her legs from around his hips, she knew, and withdraw to a less blatantly sexual footing, but she didn’t. Feeling the strength of his response was exciting, and the beckoning pleasure of what awaited her, if she just relaxed and let go, was a siren song of temptation. Even beyond that, and underlying it, was the simple pleasure of being held, the very human need for physical contact. She had been starved for so very long and suddenly she couldn’t deny herself any longer.

  She had slept in his arms, and he in hers, for two nights now, and though their physical closeness had been a necessity to share their body heat and stay alive, knowing that didn’t lessen the elemental trust and sense of connection formed during those long, dark hours. She’d never had that before, never wanted it. The best way to safeguard her emotions was to keep people at a distance, to rely only on herself; she’d learned that in lessons both early and hard.

  Yet here he was, close and strong and warm, and she didn’t want to let him go.

  He was the one who broke off the kiss, lifting his mouth and looking down at her with a heavy-lidded gaze. The bruises under his eyes and the scrapes on his face should have diminished the potency of that look, but somehow didn’t. Hot intent burned there, promised more. His hands still gripped her bottom, still moved her against his swollen penis in a slow rhythm that made her heart pound and her breath come in gasps. Then the corners of his mouth kicked up in a rueful smile. “I hate to break this up,” he drawled, “but I’m about to fall down.”

  She stared blankly at him for a second, then realization dawned. “Oh, damn it! I forgot! I’m sorry—” As she spoke she hastily unwrapped her legs from his waist and slid to the ground, her face turning hot from sheer mortification. How could she have forgotten how weakened he was? Just yesterday he’d barely been able to move around under his own steam!

  He staggered a little and she quickly jammed her shoulder under his arm, grasping him around the waist to steady him. “I can’t believe I forgot,” she mumbled as she helped him toward the fire.

  “Personally, I’m glad you did. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but what little blood’s left in me went south and I got light-headed for a minute.” He winked at her as she helped him sit down in front of the fire. The only thing to sit on was the trash bag of clothes they used to close the entrance to the shelter, but they were using her clothes for everything else, so why not a seat?

  “God, that feels good,” he groaned, holding his hands out to the flame, and with a start Bailey looked around.

  She’d forgotten about the fire, too. How could she? Excitement over the fire was what had sent her running to him in the first place. But as soon as he’d kissed her, zap, everything else in her mind had vaporized. What if the flame had started flickering out, what if she’d needed to adjust the position of the suitcases to block the wind? This fire was precious; she should have been watching it, tending it, not jumping into Cam Justice’s arms and riding him like a rodeo bronc.

  “I am such a numskull!” she muttered, watching the smoke spiral upward before being dissipated by the wind. The greener limbs had begun to sullenly burn and the smoke was heavy, far heavier than it would have been with a really good campfire, but miraculous for all that. “I should have been watching the fire.”

  “But we wouldn’t have had as much fun,” he pointed out. “Stop beating yourself up. You aren’t responsible for the world.”

  “Maybe not, but if this fire had gone out, neither of us would have been a happy camper.” Standing as close as she dared, she cautiously held her hands out. She could feel the heat of the fire on her face and it felt so good she almost moaned. People took things for granted, like heat, and food, and water. She didn’t think she would ever again travel without a pack of waterproof matches in her luggage, as well as a few other necessities she could think of, like a satellite phone. And long, insulated underwear. And a few dozen packages of field rations.

  “We’d have lived. We’ve lived without one for two days. This just makes us a little more comfortable.”

  Physically, maybe, but it was a huge boost to her morale, which had suffered some major blows already today, and it was just midmorning.

  “Although,” he continued reflectively, “I wish I’d remembered about the battery before now.”

  “Why? Neither of us was capable of doing anything about it,” she pointed out. “You were too injured to move, and I was too sick.”

  “If I’d known what the payoff was for starting a fire, I’d have dragged my naked body through the snow to get to that battery.”

  Bailey burst out laughing. The ridiculousness of that image was just too much to resist—not the naked part, because she thought he’d be damn fine to look at, judging from the parts she’d already seen, but anyone being willing to drag themselves naked through snow for a kiss.

  He reached out and hooked his fingers in her waistband, dragged her backward. “Sit down,” he instructed. “We need to have a talk.”

  There was an iron note of command in his voice. Bailey lifted her eyebrows at him. “Is that tone of voice supposed to make me click my heels and salute?”

  “It worked on the men under my command.”

  “Of which I’m not one,” she pointed out.

  “Thank God. If you were, there are regulations against some plans I have involving you. Do you want to hear about them or not? If you do, sit down.”

  He pulled on her waistband again. More than a little stunned, she found herself sitting beside him on the stuffed trash bag. The contents were a little uneven and she listed to one side; he put his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright.

  “I’m being honorable here,” he said, slanting a glittering look at her, “and giving you fair warning. But this is probably the only time, so don’t get used to it.”

  She started to ask, Fair warning about what? but was afraid she knew the answer. Maybe “afraid” was the wrong word. Alarmed, yes. Annoyed. Terrified. And most of all, excited.

  “When I thought we would be rescued, I tried my damnedest not to do anything to scare you off,” he said as casually as if they were discussing the stock market. “I knew you’d be back on your own territory, able to call the shots and avoid me if I made my move too soon. But now, I know rescue isn’t coming, and I have you to myself for days, maybe as long as a couple of weeks. It’s only fair to tell you I plan to have you naked in a day or so, once we’re at a warmer altitude and we’re stronger, feeling better.
”

  Bailey opened her mouth to say something, anything, then closed it because no words came to mind. Her mind was oddly blank. She should be…what? All her usual responses to a come-on seemed to have taken a vacation, because she couldn’t think of a single one. She tried again to say something, only to once more close her mouth. She should shut him down cold, the way she usually did when people tried to push past her defenses, and it flummoxed her that she couldn’t.

  “Is there a reason you’re imitating a guppy?” he asked with a little smile, tilting his head to the side.

  Afraid she wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent, she shook her head.

  “Any questions?”

  A million of them flooded her brain, most of them wordless, all of them things she couldn’t say. She shook her head again.

  “In that case, we need to get to work. We have a lot of preparations to make.”

  He started to stand, but this time it was Bailey who did the waistband-grabbing.

  “I left the pack of aloe wipes, and your clean change of underwear in there,” she said, indicating the shelter. She was glad her voice was working again, though what she was saying seemed completely inane. “You need to get cleaned up, or you’re sleeping outside tonight.”

  Five minutes later, she could still hear him chuckling inside the shelter.

  Getting her mind back on practical matters was an effort, but she was galvanized by the realization of how much needed to be done before they began trying to get themselves off the mountain.

  One of the first things, as Cam had said, was to rehydrate themselves, and that meant melting as much snow as possible, as fast as possible. The rocks he’d placed around the fire absorbed heat, but didn’t seem so hot that the plastic mouthwash bottle would melt, so she packed the bottle with snow and put it on the outside of the ring, against the rocks.

  The second thing, as far as she was concerned, was Cam himself. He was woefully unprepared for this weather. She had plenty of clothes, not a single item of which would fit him. On the other hand, she had plenty of them, and if one might not fit him, maybe two together would. His shoes were the big problem, but she had the leather from the seats. She needed to make a sort of overshoe that would provide insulation, keep the snow out of his shoes, and give him traction—a tall order, because she wasn’t a cobbler. She couldn’t cut and sew the leather into the proper shape. Neither could she waste the leather by cutting it in a way that wouldn’t work at all.

  She got the notebook and pen to try drawing a diagram of how she needed the leather to fold, so she could work out the cuts beforehand. She clicked the pen and drew the point across the paper, but the paper remained blank. The ink in the pen was frozen. Frustrated, she laid it against the warming rocks, too. Some of the snow in the mouthwash bottle had already melted, she saw. No doubt about it, fire was a marvelous thing.

  The plane had been sabotaged, and Cam’s logic about who had been behind it was hard to refute. Seth had tried to kill her, and hadn’t cared at all that he would have killed Cam, too. That was difficult to accept, difficult to comprehend. The last two days had been a nightmare of pain and freezing cold and sickness, of pushing herself far past her endurance. But sitting there watching the fire, she felt her spirits rise. No wonder primitive people danced around a fire; they were probably hysterical with joy to have heat and light. She leaned forward, stretched her hands out, and felt the heat on her palms. She would never, ever take heat for granted again.

  She felt better. The swelling and redness in her arm had receded. Cam was better. No one was coming to rescue them, so they would rescue themselves. For the first time, she felt confident in her own mind that they would survive, because now they had fire.

  And when they got back to Seattle, there was going to be hell to pay.

  23

  THE J&L OFFICE WAS LIKE A MORGUE. SHEER PHYSICAL necessity had forced both Bret and Karen to go home for sleep on the second night, but as Karen said as she left, “It feels as if we’re abandoning him.”

  The Civil Air Patrol search grids had turned up nothing. Bret had requested all the Skylane’s service records and he and Dennis, the head mechanic, had gone over and over them, looking for any unresolved problem that could have become catastrophic. There was nothing; the Skylane had been reliable, in for the normal maintenance and small things like the pilot’s window defroster.

  The man in charge of the search, a stocky gray-haired man named Charles MaGuire, was dedicated but pessimistic. He was a veteran of these searches, and he knew they almost never turned out well. If there were survivors, you knew it almost immediately. Otherwise, if the crash was in a remote site, the bodies, or what was left of them, would eventually be recovered…most of the time.

  “The transponder signal was lost…here,” he said, pointing to a point east of Walla Walla. “In the area of the Umatilla National Forest. We’ve concentrated the search grid there. But FSS picked up a garbled Mayday transmission about fifteen minutes after that. A lot of static, only a few words came through. We don’t know if it’s the same plane, but we don’t have anything else corresponding with a Mayday message. Obviously we don’t know the rate of speed or altitude, but we have to assume that the plane was in trouble from the time the transponder was lost.”

  “Cam would have radioed then, he wouldn’t have waited fifteen minutes,” Bret pointed out.

  “Maybe he tried. Obviously there were problems with the radio, too. I don’t know of any electrical problem that would take out both the radio and the transponder, but an accident of some kind…they were hit by something, maybe.”

  “If the plane was capable of staying in the air that long, Cam would have landed it,” Bret said positively. “You’re talking about a guy who never panics, who was practically born with wings.”

  “If something hit the aircraft, he could have been injured,” MaGuire said. “The passenger, Mrs. Wingate…was she the type who would panic and be useless, or would she have grabbed the wheel and kept the plane from nosediving?”

  “She’d have grabbed the wheel,” Karen said immediately. As usual, she was right there, listening to every word. “And the radio. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the radio. But she was in the backseat; she’d have had to lean over the seats and reach around Cam to get the wheel.”

  “Anything could have happened up there. If they lost the windshield, you’re talking about a tremendous wind force, but you can’t drop your speed enough to make any real difference, or you crash. She probably wouldn’t have known how to reduce power, anyway.” MaGuire shrugged. “The point is, something was very wrong with the aircraft. We can think of scenarios, but we simply don’t know what happened, only that something did. If we take the point at which the transponder signal was lost, estimate the distance they could have flown in the length of time before the Mayday transmission was received, then that stretches the search area all the way to Hell’s Canyon. That’s a damn big area, and some of the roughest terrain in the country. My guys are in the air every daylight minute, but this is going to take time.”

  Bret was a member of the Civil Air Patrol, but he was excluded from the search for several reasons, the most compelling being that J&L Executive Air Limo hadn’t closed its doors when Cam’s plane disappeared. There was still a business to run, and people who depended on that business for their living. He hadn’t flown the day before because he hadn’t had any sleep, but today he had to take a charter. Karen refused to let the business grind to a halt, even though her eyes were swollen from crying and every so often she would bolt to the bathroom for another crying jag. Bret would make the flight she’d scheduled, or answer to her.

  “There’s also the possibility the plane was tampered with,” Karen told MaGuire, giving Bret a defiant look. She was sticking to her theory, regardless of what he said. He wearily pinched the bridge of his nose.

  MaGuire looked startled. “What makes you say that?”

  “Mrs. Wingate’s stepson called the day bef
ore the flight, asking about it. He’s never done that before. They aren’t friendly, and that’s an understatement. She controls all the money, and he wants it.”

  Scratching his cheek, MaGuire darted a glance at Bret. “That’s interesting, but in itself doesn’t mean anything. Would the stepson have had access to the aircraft, and would he have known how to sabotage a plane so it wasn’t detectable beforehand?”

  “He has some knowledge of planes,” Bret said. “He’s taken a few flying lessons, I think. But whether or not he’d know enough—” He shrugged.

  “He could have hired someone,” Karen interrupted irritably. “I didn’t say he had to do it himself.”

  “True,” MaGuire admitted. “What about access?”

  Bret scrubbed his hand over his face. “This is a small airfield. It mostly serves private planes, and our charter service. There’s a fence around the field and security cameras, but nothing like what there would be at a commercial airport.”

  MaGuire walked to the window and looked out, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “You don’t want to think there’s foul play involved, and I have to say, in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen anything that made me think a plane had been deliberately sabotaged. Until someone presents some evidence that tampering took place, I don’t see any point in worrying about it. On the other hand, it’s always good to think about security. Is someone here twenty-four hours a day?”

  Bret shot a look at Karen. She’d narrowed her eyes and looked belligerent, but she didn’t say anything. He guessed that if MaGuire worked here, his personal mail would disappear for the next millennium. “Sometimes, but it depends. The mechanics may work late, or we may have a late flight scheduled. A private plane may come or go. I’d say there’s no predictable pattern.”

  “Not knowing when someone might show up would make it difficult to plan something like that. In the absence of, say, a hole cut in the fence or a break-in here in the terminal, I don’t think that’s an avenue of investigation that we should pursue. We’d be better off directing our available resources to locating the crash site.”