Lover in the Rough (3 page)

The stranger’s hand moved so quickly that she didn’t have time to step back. Surprisingly gentle fingers brushed away strands of hair that the dry wind kept blowing across her face. “It was worth every minute,” he said, looking from the ring to the clear cinnamon depths of her eyes.

“That’s what Jeremy said.” Her voice broke as sudden tears magnified the beauty of her eyes. She blinked and looked away, unable to bear the stranger’s penetrating gaze. Brilliant tears clung to her lashes but did not fall. She looked at her watch. “I have to be at the dunes in fifteen minutes.”

A long finger tilted her chin up. “Are you sure you’re feeling tough enough to face down loverboy?”

She met the stranger’s transparent green eyes without flinching. “He’s the least of it,” she said, thinking of Jeremy and the cold emptiness of loss. “But yes, I’m ready. I have no choice.”

He held her glance for a long moment before he nodded. “All right.”

He turned away and walked around the ancient bed of black rock. She followed, her attention divided between the rough land and the hard-faced man with the gentle voice and hands. She had met many men in her travels as a collector, men who were polished and men who weren’t, men who had graduated from the great universities of the world and men who had graduated from the school of mean streets, but she’d never met anyone like the man who walked in front of her. His combination of intelligence and toughness was new to her, as unsettling as the strength and gentleness that characterized his touch.

She followed him around the rumpled chocolate tongue of an ancient landslide and found herself looking out over the valley. He had brought her to a point just below the tiny dirt parking lot at the head of the Mosaic Canyon trail. There were only two cars left in the lot, Todd’s Mercedes and her own BMW coupe. She looked, but saw no sign of Todd.

“Waiting up the canyon no doubt,” said the stranger.

“Yes,” sighed Reba, no longer surprised when his thoughts paralleled her own. She rubbed the back of her arm over her forehead, wiping away beads of sweat. “I hope he cooks.”

“Not in April. July, though.” He smiled grimly. “In July it’s so hot that the soles of your feet burn and blister right through your boots. The Outback is like that, sometimes.”

“Lightning Ridge,” she said, and felt absurdly pleased when he gave her a startled glance.

“How did you know?”

“Most people would think this was either topaz or zircon,” she said, looking at the diamond on her hand.

He shrugged. “It has too much dispersion to be anything but a diamond.”

“Which proves my point,” said Reba. “You know gems. And to gem people, the Outback means only one thing. Opals. You don’t strike me as the type to waste your time on anything but the best. That means black opals, and that means Lightning Ridge. There’s also the fact that you look”—she hesitated—“well, rough enough to survive the black opal mines.”

“Oh, they’re not that bad,” he said, smiling down at her. Then his mouth changed, hard rather than curving, and his eyes became the color of hammered silver. Whatever his memories were, they weren’t pleasant. “The diamond strikes in South America are worse.”

Reba’s eyes widened. She wanted to ask a hundred questions but doubted that he would want to answer. South American diamond strikes were like the Vietnam War—the men who had seen the most were the ones who talked about it the least.

“Are you going straight to the dunes?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be out in the dunes the rest of the day?” Silver-green eyes measured the angle of the sun as he spoke.

“Probably.”

“Are you carrying water in your car?”

She shook her head. “In April, I didn’t think I’d need it.”

“You always need water in a desert.” He reached behind his belt and unhooked the canvas-covered canteen he carried there. He pulled a leather thong from his pants pocket and rigged a sling for the canteen. “Take this.”

Reba licked her dry lips as she looked from the canteen to the hard face of the stranger who was offering her the only water in miles. “But what about you?”

He shrugged. “Like you said, it’s April. Besides”—he smiled gently and touched her still-wet lashes with his fingertip—“you need it more than I do right now.”

“I—” Her breath rushed out and for a moment all she could do was stare at the man’s oddly colored eyes. Pure, almost transparent green with a silver shimmer. “I’m glad I don’t have to find a gem to match your eyes,” she said musingly. “It would take a lifetime.”

When Reba heard what she had said, she shook her head and laughed helplessly. “Forgive me. I’m not usually so, so
unwrapped
.” She looked away from his unique eyes and shook the canteen briskly. Full. She unscrewed the top, drank quickly, put back the top and handed the canteen to him. “That should hold me. Thanks.”

Without looking away from her eyes, the stranger removed the canteen top, drank deeply, sealed the canteen and gave it back to her. For an instant all she could think of was his lips touching where hers had so recently been. The thought sent an odd feeling through her. She tried to look away from his eyes but could not.

“Mint,” he murmured. “Nice.”

“Mint?” Then she realized that she must have left the taste of her favorite candy on the rim of the canteen. “Oh . . . mint,” she said. She laughed and held her hands up to her flushed cheeks. “My God, what you must think of me!”

He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick black hair. “I think you can drink out of my canteen any time,” he said, chuckling.

Reba caught herself wondering if his hair felt as springy-silky as it looked. He smiled down at her suddenly, as though he knew what she was thinking and it pleased him. She took a shaky breath. He had the most unsettling effect on her of any man she had ever met.

“I’m going to be late,” she said quickly. She turned away, then looked back. “Thanks for helping me.”

His smile widened. “If you hadn’t been wearing those silly sandals I’d have let you run loverboy right into the rocks,” he said, looking down at the smooth curves of her legs, at their feminine strength and grace. “You’re in a hell of a lot better shape than he is. No wonder he couldn’t wait to find out if you’d feel half as good as you look.”

“Do you ever have an unspoken thought?” she asked tartly.

“All the time,” he murmured in his husky drawl, looking at her mouth, at the outline of her breasts beneath the clinging silk blouse, at her bare legs and the smooth feet he had brushed off and fastened into delicate sandals. “You’d better go before I start thinking out loud.”

She tilted her head to the side as she looked up at him. “Aren’t you afraid I’d run you right into the ground?”

His slow smile sent warmth curling through her. “Want to try?”

For a wild moment she wanted to do just that. Then sanity returned. But he had seen the moment of wildness in her, and responded to it with a ripple of movement that reminded her of the change that had come over him when Todd looked as though he would fight. Muscles taut yet relaxed, silvery eyes intent, body poised for whatever might come, the stranger waited for her to decide.

Reba closed her eyes and shivered, suddenly not trusting her own reactions. The weeks since Jeremy’s death had shredded her usual control, threatening to reveal her most private feelings. And this rough stranger had the uncanny ability to touch those feelings. No matter how gentle the touch, it frightened her. She hadn’t been this vulnerable since she was a child. She didn’t like it one bit.

When she opened her eyes, the stranger was watching her. The intensity of a moment ago was gone, replaced by a gentleness that was almost tangible.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? The man loverboy wants to replace.”

“Yes. A month ago.”

He lifted his hand, then let it fall without touching her. “The first weeks are the worst,” he said simply.

“I hope so,” she whispered. “I can’t live like this, with my skin inside out, every nerve exposed.”

“You’re still fighting it. When you stop fighting you’ll begin to heal.”

“Yesterday I would have said
‘Never!’
But today, when you showed me a rock as old as time . . .” Impulsively Reba touched his cheek with her fingertips, a light brush of warmth. “Thank you.”

She turned around and walked quickly to her car. She turned back once, realizing that she still was holding his canteen. There was no one behind her. He had gone as silently as he had appeared. If she hadn’t felt the weight of his canteen in her hand, she would have thought she had dreamed him.

Were there any lingering doubts about the stranger’s reality, though, Todd’s presence at the dunes would have removed them. He hung around the edges of the activity like a sullen cloud looking for a place to rain. Reba stayed out of his way. The third time she casually evaded Todd’s attempts to get her alone, she remembered the stranger’s words:
It’s not as easy to be trapped in the open
.

Reba waited patiently while the photographer rearranged the last pieces of the Green Suite on the lip of a dune. The descending sun threw out long, crisp shadows, emphasizing ripple marks in the sand. Cut stones and gem crystals in matrix gleamed against the umber sand, tints and tones and every possible shade of green. Emeralds cut and in matrix, tsavorite cut and in matrix, peridot and diopside and corundum, topaz and diamonds scintillating; a stunning crystal shaft of Brazilian tourmaline that gave new meaning to the word
green
.

A smile curved Reba’s lips as she looked at the tourmaline. That, at least, was one thing time could not take from her, the only thing that she had left of her childhood; half-ownership of the China Queen, an abandoned tourmaline mine in the Pala area of San Diego county.

The mine had come down to her from her great-great-grandmother. The terms of her will stated that it was to go to the oldest girl in each generation on her twenty-sixth birthday. That had worked well until her mother was born, one half of identical twins. The birth had been accomplished in the backseat of a car. By the time her grandmother and the twins were in the hospital, no one knew which girl had been born first. So her mother got half of the mine and her aunt got the other half. The aunt had married an Australian and vanished into the Outback, taking her half of the mine with her.

Once, Reba had dreamed of opening the China Queen and finding fabulous treasures overlooked by earlier miners. Sometimes she wondered if that fantasy hadn’t been what urged her onto the gem trail with Jeremy, a dream of treasures come true. But as for the mine itself . . . it remained merely a childish fantasy. The costs of mining were staggering and the mine itself sagged under eighty years of neglect. She hadn’t been to the China Queen since she was a child.

“Ms. Farrall? We’re ready to leave if you are.”

Reba looked up at the owner of the patient voice. “Sorry,” she murmured. “The Green Suite always sets me to dreaming.”

The photographer grimaced and watched the last of the precious specimens being packed away in their individual cases. “It gives the insurance people nightmares. They can’t wait to get back to L.A. and steel vaults. That guy hanging around a few dunes over isn’t doing anything for their nerves, either.”

Reba turned and saw a man standing outlined against the late afternoon sky. Lithe, relaxed, radiating strength even in his stillness, unmistakably the stranger whose canteen now bumped companionably against her hip. “Tell the guards to relax,” she said. “That man has seen more rare gems than a tour guide at the Smithsonian.”

“Tell it to Mr. Sinclair. He’s been trying to talk the guards into running the guy off.”

“Death Valley is a national monument. He has as much right to be here as we do.”

“That’s what one of the guards said. Several times.” The photographer shrugged and turned away. “I’ll call you when I have today’s proofs.”

From the top of her dune, Reba watched as the group of people slowly fragmented and retraced their hollow footprints back out to the road. She looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the stranger. The ridge was empty of all but wind. When she turned back she saw Todd struggling up the face of the dune, determination in every stride. She turned and lightly ran down the back side of the dune. By the time Todd reached the spot where she had been, she was several dunes away, moving with an ease that he couldn’t hope to equal.

Sound carried very far in the desert but meaning was quickly lost. She was just as glad. She didn’t need to know precisely what names Todd had called her.

Though Reba was headed toward the spot where the stranger had been, she didn’t see him. She climbed several more dunes before she turned and looked back. All she saw was Todd struggling in the crimson sunset light, moving slowly away from her toward cars that looked no bigger than one-carat stones scattered along the narrow road.

She waited until she saw Todd get into his car and drive away. It was almost cool now, the temperature descending with the sun. Slowly she turned in a full circle. Nothing moved but her shadow and the wind. There was no one in sight, nothing near her but softly folded dunes glowing in the rich evening light. All around her was silence and beauty.

The western mountains were glittering mounds of black crystal suspended against a ruby sky. The eastern mountain peaks were a transparent, icy pink, fractured into spires and pinnacles that scintillated in the twilight. Every color had a gemlike clarity and radiance, as though she were suspended in the heart of an immense black opal with darkness all around a fiery center of life.

She didn’t know when she began to cry. At first it was a gentle rain. Then it became a torrent that shook her mercilessly, bringing her to her knees. She tried to stop sobbing but could not. The nerve and discipline that had carried her through the month was dissolving away, leaving only icy loss and scalding grief. She sank to the sand and wept helplessly, holding onto herself like a child.

Dimly she was aware of the stranger’s hands lifting her, strong arms folding around her, pulling her across his lap and rocking her slowly, his deep voice murmuring comfort against her hair. She tried to talk, to tell him about Jeremy, but all she could say through her tears was, “I I-loved him and now he’s d-dead.”