Lover in the Rough (14 page)

C
hance handed Reba a plate of lamb chops and boiled potatoes. “Do you mind if we share the salad bowl?” he asked.

She shook her head, more interested in listening to him than in eating. She sensed that he didn’t talk about his past very often. He sat next to her and began to eat. She was about to ask a question when he resumed talking quietly.

“We found enough to stay alive at the
bombas
, but never more than that. Dad and Luck didn’t care. Glory did. She wanted more out of life than a dirty campsite on the wrong side of nowhere. I was too young to know how Mother felt about it. She went with Dad until it killed her. I guess that’s the only answer that matters.”

Chance sipped wine in silence for a moment. “I didn’t like South America much. Not then. Not now. I haven’t been back to Venezuela since Luck died. Australia’s Outback is different. Good country. Hard. Bloody unforgiving, sometimes. But clean and fine and wild. You can measure yourself against a land like that. Some men do, and come up short. Others find they’re bigger than they thought.”

Reba ate quietly, listening, watching the shifting shadows of fire and night across Chance’s face, hungry to know the places and circumstances that had helped to shape the man who sat next to her.

“The basin and range country of the U.S. is like the Outback,” continued Chance. “More land than people, more possibilities than rules.” He smiled slightly to himself. “No black opals, though. I’d like to take you to Lightning Ridge. It’s easier now than it was twenty years ago. Then it took twenty-six hours by train from Sydney. All you saw was an occasional village, herds of kangaroos, flocks of emus, and flat red desert land. The tracks stopped about ninety kilometers short of Lightning Ridge. For the rest of the way you either hitched a ride on the mail truck or found a friendly rancher heading out to his station.”

Chance was quiet for a moment, remembering. “Glory had her hands full on that first trip out of the jungle with me. She was up to it, though. That’s one good woman. She did what had to be done and never whined.”

Silently, he stared into the darkness beyond the fire. After a time he looked at the entrance to the China Queen, invisible beneath the seamless black of night. “At least you don’t have to haul water in to the Queen. And I won’t have to be lowered by a rickety winch into a shaft barely wider than my body. At Lightning Ridge you spend your time clawing and crawling like moles through the earth, sniffing out dark treasures. Moles . . . except that we were always armed, always awake, because the men who weren’t, died.”

“It sounds as bad as the jungle,” said Reba.

“No. In the jungle, a ‘partner’ was a man who hadn’t turned on you yet. Two ‘partners’ would go into the jungle and find a handful of diamonds. One man would come back, saying his partner had drowned or been killed by a snake or eaten by cannibals or piranhas.” Chance shrugged. “Any of those things could have happened. Funny how they only happened
after
a find, though. In the Outback, gougers only kill ratters, not partners.”

“Ratters?”

“The men who sneak into someone else’s claim when honest gougers are asleep. If a gouger catches a ratter, he usually belts him around a bit and puts him on the next train to Sydney. But sometimes the gouger just fills in the shaft—ratter, opals and all.”

Reba’s fork clattered against her plate. Chance looked at her over the rim of his mug, took a sip, and set aside both the mug and his plate.

“The gougers risk their lives every day going down into the earth in narrow, unshored tunnels. There are no surface signs that say, ‘Dig here. Opal below.’ Anywhere is as good as anywhere else. You’re either lucky or you aren’t. Your tunnel either caves in or it doesn’t. Thinking about it won’t help, so you believe the gouger’s myth that cave-ins only happen between midnight and one
A.M.
and you stay out of the shafts for that hour.

“The rest of the time you swing your pick in an area half again as wide as your shoulders, you eat dirt and hold your breath, listening for a gritty sound. When you hear that, you know you’ve found a ‘nobby,’ a nodule that may or may not be opal bearing. You scrape dirt away from the nobby with your fingernail or a small knife. And you do it slowly, gently, even if your hands are shaking with excitement. When the dirt is gone you nip off a corner of the rock with pliers. If your light picks up a flash of color, you keep the nobby. You won’t know what you have until later, when you put it on the cleaning table. Most of the time it’s nothing. Once in a lifetime it’s a chunk of black fire as big as your fist.”

He looked at her out of narrowed silvery eyes. “That’s when the ratters come. And that’s when someone can die.”

Reba stared at Chance, trying to understand a life so different from hers. “It’s so alien,” she said finally, “the danger and the death. . . .”

“Is it?” he asked quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“Take danger. What kind of courage or foolishness does it take to roar down a concrete raceway six abreast, tons of hurtling metal and explosive fuel separated by less than a meter of air and whatever small skill or luck the drivers around you have. When it comes right down to it, you’ve probably seen almost as much violence on the road as I’ve seen in the diamond strikes. It’s all in what you’re used to.”

With an easy motion Chance stood. “Finish your dinner. I’m going to check the area once more. I’ll call out before I come into camp.”

Before Reba could say anything, Chance merged with the darkness. She listened for sounds of his leaving. She heard only her own heartbeat. He had gone as silently as a breath. Slowly she finished eating, barely tasting the food, too full of his words to concentrate on anything else. She set aside her plate and sipped the Cabernet, remembering how sweet it had tasted from his lips.

Water steamed gently above the pan that Chance had set on the grate after he had cooked the chops. Reba cleaned up the remnants of dinner quickly, washing and putting away the utensils that they had used. When she was finished, she poured a little more wine in her mug and sat next to the fire.

Gradually Reba realized that she wasn’t uneasy even though she was alone in the camp. She knew that Chance was out there beyond the light, moving silently, checking that no one else was near. The thought was reassuring. If there were danger, Chance would find it and deal with it. She was as safe here as she was behind the locked doors of her own home. Safer, probably.

She stretched luxuriantly, feeling more at peace than she had in a long time. She wondered how it would feel to move like a shadow through the night, to be a part of the silence and moonrise and black mountains reaching toward the stars.

“Reba?”

The voice was soft, deep, very near. She turned toward it, smiling. Chance walked out of the night into the twisting golden glow of the campfire.

“Are you too tired for a short walk?” he asked.

“I was just wondering what it’s like out there.”

“Quiet. Dark. Peaceful.” He unrolled a sleeping bag and draped it over his shoulder. “Cool, too. The wind is moving. Bring your jacket.”

Reba put on the windbreaker that Chance had bought her. “Ready.”

“Not quite.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her away from the fire. “Don’t look at the flames for a bit. Let your eyes adjust to the moonlight.”

“Is that why you never look directly into the fire?” she asked.

“Yes. It makes you blind.”

“But it’s beautiful.”

“So is night.”

Reba closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of Chance’s hands on her shoulders, the sense of his presence so close to her, his breath stirring wisps of her hair. She relaxed, letting her senses expand into the night.

“Can you see the boulder ahead of you on the ridge?” asked Chance after a long silence.

She opened her eyes and was surprised at how much she could see. “Yes.”

“Imagine a clock in front of you. What do you see where the three would be?”

“A clump of chaparral.”

“How do you know it isn’t a ridge?”

“It’s too light. Not the color, the feeling. The ridges feel dense.”

His hands squeezed her shoulders approvingly. “You’ll do fine without a flashlight.”

Chance put the flashlight in a loop hanging from his belt and picked up the shotgun. He made as little fuss over the weapon as he did over the flashlight. Both were simply useful things to carry in rough country at night. When he held out his hand to Reba, she took it without hesitation.

He led her across the clearing in front of the mine and around a clump of chaparral. To her disgust, she wasn’t nearly as quiet as he was. On the other hand, she didn’t sound like a one-woman wrecking crew. After the first hundred yards she caught the rhythm of his walk, the careful yet firm strides that soundlessly tested the ground underfoot before trusting it with his full weight. She imitated him as best she could, walking with the same poised control she would have used on a balance beam. Immediately she found she made less noise and much faster progress.

Chance noticed the change as quickly as she did. He put her palm against his lips and whispered, “You were made for more than city streets.”

She followed him up a small rise, threading between boulders that condensed out of darkness and moonlight like immense baroque pearls. The top of the rise was rounded, bare of chaparral. The ground became less stony, almost soft, and the springtime smell of grass lifted into the night.

“Look to your left,” said Chance softly.

Reba turned and stood transfixed. Serrated, sable, endless, ridge after ridge fell away in shades of black to a distant, invisible sea. The outlines of the ridges were clean and bold against a multitude of brilliant stars. Chaparral made ebony lace designs against the brighter moonlight. A vague shimmer of mist curled along some of the valleys. Moonlight and shadows, grass a lighter shade of black, chaparral glistening like obsidian, boulders a ghostly grey, the moon itself a silver radiance that was almost overwhelming.

“I never knew night came in so many colors,” whispered Reba.

“Glory used to say that only a mine and a miner’s heart are truly black,” said Chance, pulling Reba down onto the ebony sleeping bag he had spread on the grass like another shade of night.

She shivered.

“Chilly?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. “You’re a miner—does Glory think that of you?”

Chance removed the flashlight and belt knife. He lay on his side, his chin propped on his fist. He stared out at the rugged, black-and-silver land. “No,” he said finally, softly. “Do you?”

“No,” said Reba, kneeling next to Chance, watching his face rather than the moonlight-washed land.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m here,” she said simply.

“Why does that seem so close,” he whispered, “and so damn far away?” His hand went around behind her head, pulling her closer to him. “Just a kiss,” he said huskily. “Don’t be frightened,
chaton
. I won’t even hold you unless you want me to.”

Reba felt the tremor that went through Chance when her lips touched his. His hand lifted from her neck, slid the comb out of her hair and then released her. A shimmering fall of hair spilled over him. He whispered a phrase in the strange, liquid language she had heard him use before.

“What does that mean?” she murmured against his lips.

“There’s no translation,” he said, curling his fingers through her hair. “The shimmer of water at dawn . . . the flash of an opal in a miner’s light . . . the kind of beauty that makes me want to shout and laugh and cry. You.”

“Chance,” she whispered, then was unable to say more.

She kissed the corners of his mouth, felt the sable smoothness of his moustache with her sensitive lips, kneaded her fingers into his thick hair. With a sigh she returned to his mouth, parting her own lips, silently asking him to do the same. His mouth opened to her. She kissed him slowly, savoring each change of texture, each moment of increasing intimacy.

Her hands slid from his hair down to his shoulders, his arms, the hard muscles of his torso. Slowly, she lowered herself until she was lying close to him, holding him and kissing him, her body resting along his. The longer she kissed him the more she wanted to share her pleasure the only way she knew how—by touching him.

Chance made a sound deep in his throat and shifted, bringing his body even closer to hers. His hands were clenched in the ends of her hair. Reba sensed how much he wanted to hold her, to run his hands over her, to know her body as intimately as he knew the night. But despite the hunger seething in him, when she lifted her head he immediately opened his hands and let her hair slide away between his sensitive fingers.

His restraint reassured her as nothing else could have. She lowered her head again, letting the tip of her tongue touch his lips. “Hold me,” she whispered.

Slowly his arms closed around her, hard and strong and warm. A quiver of pleasure went through her. He felt it. His arms tightened, then released her before she could feel trapped. But she hadn’t felt trapped. She had felt wanted. The difference was both simple and overwhelming. Her body softened, flowing over him.

“Chaton,”
he whispered hoarsely, “do you know what you’re doing to me?”

Reba shivered as Chance’s hand went down her spine, drawing her closer to his male heat.

“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured.

“I’m not. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?” he asked after a moment, kissing her forehead.

“I just realized I’ve never made love with a man, not really. I mean, I was married and I’m not a virgin, but my husband is the only man who’s touched me. And he”—she hesitated, staring into Chance’s silvery eyes so close to hers, so intent—“he never wanted me the way you do. He never made me want him at all. But you”—she brushed her mouth over Chance’s lips, glorying in the instant response she felt go through him—“you make me want you so much that I’m helpless.”

“That doesn’t frighten you?” he asked softly, kissing her eyelids, the corners of her mouth, the pulse beating strongly in her neck.

“Not any more. I just don’t know what to do. I want to please you but I don’t know how.”