Bound to You (2 page)

“This shake hole has been collapsing slowly, apparently,” he said as his hands moved over her shoulders and neck. She had the strangest impression he was reading her flesh with his fingertips.

“Shake hole?” she asked, eager for the distraction of his rough voice.

“Sinkhole, shake hole, same thing. This area is riddled with them. It was a good thing this one had already started to collapse.”

“Good?”

“Because of the slow collapse, there’s soil and debris down here. If it’d only been rock, we’d be a heap of broken bones,” she heard him mutter. His hands were moving now over her shoulder blades, along her upper arms, down over her sides, skimming her breasts. She opened her mouth to protest, but there was something so detached—almost clinical—about his touch, that she focused her energy on panting shallowly, trying to catch her breath. He wrapped his hands just above her waist.

“Take a deep breath,” he said gruffly. “Nice and slow.”

Her panting ceased for a few seconds. She realized she’d been afraid to breathe deeply, guarding instinctively against the possibility of broken ribs. She followed his instructions hesitantly. It hurt, but there was no unduly sharp pain. Her lungs seemed to be fully regaining function after the shock of her jarring fall. She heard him make a satisfied sound, and he moved his hands yet again.

He palmed both of her hips and lifted her an inch off the ground. He gave her a tiny twist, shifting her lower body ever so slightly. “Does this hurt?”

“Everything hurts, to be honest.”

“You’re not screaming bloody murder, so that’s something.” He palmed the back of each of her thighs and gently bent her legs in succession, moving each knee toward her chest. She hardly reacted when he bent her left leg, but groaned in discomfort when he did the same to the other.

He straightened her leg and continued his examination—for it struck Jennifer suddenly that was precisely what he was doing.

“Are you a—” She paused to cough some dust and soil out of her lungs. “Doctor?”

“Chiropractor,” she heard him say through the darkness as he unlaced her hiking boots with rapid precision.

“The ground just gave way under me,” she said more to herself than to him. She gritted her teeth when he used both of his hands to slowly circle one of her feet, testing her ankle. It hurt, but not in the shooting-pain, broken-bone manner—more like in the she-was-going-to-be-sore-and-bruised-for-weeks variety.

“You shouldn’t have entered this part of the forest. This area used to be owned by the Black Velvet Mines. The original miners didn’t realize how porous the top layer of limestone is for about a three-mile radius. They eventually pulled out of this area and focused down south, but all the tunnels and caverns remain while the ground above them is eroding every year. Every schoolkid in a ten-mile radius of Vulture’s Canyon knows to stay away from here. A school bus could be eaten up by some of the shake holes in this canyon.”

“I’m not from around here. How was I supposed to know? There weren’t any signs.”

“There
are
signs. And blockades. You’d have seen them if you stayed on the forest preserve path. You decided to leave it though, didn’t you? You wandered onto my property.” He matter-of-factly stuck her feet back into her hiking boots. Jennifer cautiously sat up, this time successfully, and gently batted his hand away from a boot.

“I didn’t plan on us falling into a big black hole,” she said half annoyed, half overwhelmed. “Trust me. This is the last place I’d choose to be.”

She began to retie her boot, pausing when she heard a dog bark from above.

“Get back, Enzo!” the man shouted so sharply she jumped. “Go get help.” She heard the animal’s whine. He cursed again.

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.

“He won’t leave me,” he said morosely. “Enzo won’t go get help. I should have invested in a trained dog.”

“Your dog doesn’t have to go on a rescue mission. I have a cell phone right here in my pocket,” Jennifer said, the realization hitting her with a wave of relief.

He grunted. “Good luck with it. The service in these hills sucks. Add to that, we’re about twenty feet underground.”

Jennifer hit a button on her phone. The light from the panel immediately came on, illuminating the space to a surprising degree. She stared around, trying to make out the parameters of their trap. They were in a chamber shaped like a square with the corners rounded off, approximately twenty by twenty feet wide. In one stretch of the cavern, water flowed down a stone wall into a ground-level pool. The other two walls of the chamber were naked limestone, but at the fourth there was a large pile of debris, soil and splintered wooden planking.

“It looks more like a cave than a mine,” she mumbled. “Except for the wooden beams over there. That looks like a collapsed mine tunnel, all right.”

“There are plenty of caves hereabouts. The mines often hooked into them, for convenience’s sake. Easier to use what was already there to join tunnels instead of using dynamite to blast through rock.”

Her phone light reflected in his eyes when she glanced back at him. He knelt on his knees, his head about two feet above hers. He stared at her face. Something about his gaze felt different, almost like he was seeing straight through her. It was a little like waking up and finding yourself in a dark cave with a large, wild animal peering down at you.

It also struck her that he was good-looking, if you preferred the raw, rough, masculine type. Jennifer did—firemen, cops, forest rangers; uncomplicated, sweet, masculine to the core, demanding in bed, but singularly undemanding in other ways. She liked to take her men to her small vacation house in the San Gabriel Mountains and appreciate their physical attributes to the fullest in absolute privacy.

The problem was, real men were in somewhat short supply in Los Angeles these days. After her two-year relationship with actor Everett Hughes ended, Jennifer had been largely abstinent. Everett and she were both cautious about who they saw because of their celebrity backgrounds. Locating the rare man who also wouldn’t sell her out to the press was becoming increasingly difficult.

“Well? Do you have service on your phone?” he asked.

She started, momentarily forgetting the task at hand. She glanced at her phone and groaned. “No.”

He said nothing, nor did he seem particularly affected by the news. She winced as she tried to stand.

“I told you stay still for a moment.”

“Fine,” she said irritably. She plunked her butt back down on the ground. “You seem to be fit and feisty—
you
walk around the chamber and see if you can get service anywhere else.” She stuck her hand out, but he made no move to take her phone. He was obviously angry with her, and she couldn’t say she blamed him. Her carelessness had landed them both here. Literally.

“I told you I didn’t mean to fall down this hole. It’s not my fault you followed me.”

“You’re right. I only have my own idiocy to blame for that,” he said under his breath. He sat down on the ground, his long legs sprawled before him. He whipped off his coat and began to dig in his coat pockets.

“What are you doing?” she asked nervously. Surely he wasn’t searching for a knife or gun, was he?

“I’m checking my pockets.” He stated the obvious in a dry tone. “You might do the same. It’ll help to know what supplies we have. At least we have water,” he added, nodding toward the trickling waterfall.

“I already know what I have in my pockets. A protein bar, half a package of Certs, my thermos, keys, some ID, tissues—”

“Check anyway,” he interrupted. “Sometimes we forget about stuff we put in our pockets.”

She scooted closer to the beam of dusty sunshine and stuck her hands in her pockets. “Why don’t you come into the sunlight to do that?” she asked. She could make out his outline clearly now, could even see the bright white background of his plaid shirt.

“I don’t need sunlight,” he said, sounding distracted as he searched his pockets.

“Do you have a cell phone too?”

“No. I left it at the cabin.”

“Don’t you think it’d be best, then, to take my phone and try to find coverage somewhere in this hellhole?” she asked, her patience ebbing.

He continued to search in the many pockets of his coat, calmly ignoring her question. He never drew anything out for her to see, just moved from one pocket to the other. She was reminded of the way he’d examined her body so thoroughly. A shiver of excitement coursed through her, but irritation prevailed.

To hell with this
. She knew precisely what was going to happen if she stopped moving and reflected on the fact that she was trapped underground. Best to do anything to distract her overactive brain from working her into a frenzy of fear. She groaned as she stood slowly, all the while cursing the man for his aloofness.

“I told you to sit still for a while before you tried to stand, honey,” he said calmly. She was too busy fighting against aches and pains to snap at him for calling her “honey.” Besides, it didn’t sound anywhere near as patronizing as she would have thought it would. The term rolled easily off his tongue in a subtle country drawl, pleasant . . . warm.

“Did you check your pockets?”

“Yes, and you were right,” she admitted a few seconds later, gritting her teeth against discomfort. “I have another protein bar in a pocket I’d forgotten about. Can’t say how old it is, but it’s something. Plus, I have some hand sanitizer.”

She staggered toward the rock wall to her right, determined to ignore the aches that plagued her. The darkness crowded around her faster than she’d imagined it would. She used her cell phone like a flashlight the farther she got from the beam of sunshine. Thankfully, her pains faded somewhat as she walked.

She circled the periphery of the chamber. She noticed she still didn’t have cell phone coverage at the same moment she spied the white skeleton of a small animal on the ground.

“What?” he demanded a second later.

Jennifer glanced back, her cheeks heating. She’d let out an embarrassing shriek at the sight of the bones. “Nothing. It’s just an old animal skeleton.”

He stood so agilely she was taken aback. Clearly he wasn’t in as much discomfort as she was. He strode toward her, his shadow growing darker and more sinister-looking the closer he got. He knelt when he got near her and put out his hand. When he reached the bones, he touched them briefly.

“Squirrel,” he said.

“Fascinating. Maybe we can find a live one and roast it if we can’t get out of here,” she said as she watched him reach for the caved-in portion of the manmade tunnel. She could just make out his fingertips running over the pile of soil, timber and debris.

“Be careful! There are nails in some of those pieces of wood,” she warned.

He didn’t respond, just stood and stepped several feet to their right, his hand brushing against the solid limestone wall.

“You’re not going to get any cell phone coverage down here,” he said as he walked. She followed him.

“Don’t be so negative,” she remonstrated lightly. He approached the waterfall and rolled back one sleeve of his shirt. He reached through the water and touched the stone behind it. Then he rinsed both his hands. Jennifer hesitated, wanting to do the same, but not wanting to forsake the light of her phone. She compromised by setting it down, the greenish light glowing at her from the ground.

“It’s cold,” she murmured, her fingers moving in the trickling water. She watched as he cupped some water in his hand, smelled and then tasted it. It must have passed the test because he took a larger swallow of it and wiped his mouth before turning away.

At least they had water, she thought, lifting her jacket and wiping her hands on her shirt. She retrieved her phone and hurried after him. She wouldn’t allow the panic that had entered her awareness a moment ago to take hold of her. It’d been pure shock that had made the image of two human skeletons spring into her mind’s eye when she’d seen the squirrel bones. Just because a forest animal had died down in this underground trap didn’t mean they would. And wasn’t there that wonderful, blessed beam of sunshine partially lighting up the darkness? A thought occurred to her and she brightened.

“You live near here, don’t you? Surely someone will miss you and come looking for you in a bit.”

“I stay alone.”

Great,
she thought, images of psycho Unabomber-type characters living alone in the woods flickering through her brain. Still, he’d said he was a chiropractor. He wasn’t entirely a societal misfit. And she’d caught a whiff of him when he’d been examining her after the fall. He smelled of the woods and a lime- and spice-scented soap. Surely Ted Kaczynski hadn’t taken so much time with his hygiene.

His touch had certainly been gentle. And knowing—

“What’s your name?” she asked as they continued to make their way around the periphery of the cave. He seemed to be looking for something along the rock walls, using his hands to aid him in the near-pitch blackness.

“John Corcoran.”

“I’m Jennifer. Look, I’m really sorry about this.”

Panic curled around her throbbing heart when the darkness swallowed him and he didn’t immediately reply.

“I was a fool to follow you,” he said.

She exhaled in relief when his gruff voice emanated from just a few feet ahead. She flipped her cell phone around and saw a hazy image of his face in the glowing light. He’d paused, one hand on the rock wall. He stared back at her. Had he heard her gasp of fear?

His jawline was strong and tilted at a determined . . . possibly stubborn angle. His beard wasn’t quite as long as she’d imagined when she’d first seen him standing on the path. It was more like a two- or three-day shave-free scruff. His hair looked thick and midnight black in the shadows. He hadn’t had it cut in a while. It had a natural wave. Jennifer figured it was the kind of hair most women and a good portion of men on the planet would have gladly given a couple of years off their life to possess. His nose seemed at first a little large, but then she realized it fit somehow perfectly with the rest of his masculine features. It was a bold face . . . a masculine one . . .