Up Close and Dangerous (16 page)

“Nothing,” he said briefly.

“Terrible thing. I was awake most of the night, hoping to hear something,” Grant said, indicating one of the chairs with a wave of his hand. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

“Yes, thanks.” Seth thought another shot of caffeine couldn’t hurt. He sat down. “Black.” Grant hadn’t offered to shake hands, an omission that could only be deliberate. In the business world, shaking hands was as automatic as breathing. Seth doubted the gesture hadn’t been made because Grant considered him an old friend, almost like a son; no, the subtle message was that Grant wasn’t happy to see him and didn’t want to extend a hypocritical welcome.

He waited until the cup of coffee was in his hand and Grant had reseated himself before getting down to business. “Now that Bailey’s dead—”

“Is she?” asked Grant, his eyebrows rising. “I thought you hadn’t heard anything.”

“I haven’t. It stands to reason, though. The plane disappeared, and they haven’t shown up anywhere. If there was mechanical trouble and the pilot was able to land the plane at some podunk airstrip, or on a road, in a field—we’d have heard. They’d have radioed in. They haven’t been heard from, so that means the plane crashed, and they’re dead.”

“A court wouldn’t see it that way,” Grant said in a cool tone. “Until Bailey’s death is confirmed, or a reasonable length of time has lapsed and she’s declared dead, she’s still officially in charge of your trust fund.”

Seth could see it in Grant’s face: he thought that was why Seth was here, to find out how soon he could take control of his own money, part of which was tied to stock in the Wingate Group. Grant was also one of the trustees of the fund, but only in an advisory capacity; all final decisions had been Bailey’s.

“She can’t be, if she isn’t here,” Seth said, struggling to keep the temper from his voice.

“Provisions were made for automatic dispersal, so you don’t have to worry. You’ll still get your allowance.”

Allowance? The word burned through his mind. He was thirty-five years old, and he was relegated to the same level as a ten-year-old. The indignity had never occurred to him before; he’d seen the trust fund as his rightful inheritance, not an
allowance.

“I want an audit,” he heard himself say. “I want to know how much the bitch siphoned off.”

“Absolutely none,” Grant barked, his sharp gaze narrowing as his temper rose. “In fact, the fund has had a very healthy growth, thanks to her. Why do you think your father chose her?”

“Because she screwed him into blind stupidity!” Seth shot back.

“On the contrary, the whole idea was his from the very beginning! He had to talk her into it, into marriage, the whole—” Grant broke off, shaking his head. “Never mind. If Jim didn’t tell you what his plan was, I certainly won’t, because he knew you better than I ever will. All I’ll say is this: Bailey has taken as much care with your money as she has with her own, and that’s saying something. She’s one of the most careful investors I’ve ever seen, and there hasn’t been a dime taken from the fund other than the monthly disbursements to you and Tamzin.”

Seth’s attention sharpened and he skipped over everything Grant had said about the money. “Plan? What plan?”

“Like I said, it’s not my place to tell you. Now, if that’s all—”

“It isn’t.” Seth stared down at the coffee in his hand, furious that he’d let himself be sidetracked. He hadn’t come here to talk about Bailey, or ask about his money. He hesitated for a moment, trying to think of the best way to approach the subject, but nothing occurred other than just saying it. The necessity galled, but it was now or never.

“I need a job. I’d like to start learning the business…if there’s an opening.” He hated having to ask; this was his father’s company, he should automatically have a place here, but he himself had deliberately distanced himself from it and there was nothing automatic about it now.

Grant didn’t immediately respond. He leaned back in his chair, that shark gaze giving nothing away. After a moment he asked, “What kind of job?”

Seth started to say “Vice president sounds good,” but he bit back the words. He was acutely aware that he was the supplicant here, that he hadn’t built up a supply of goodwill from which he could draw. “Anything,” he finally replied.

“In that case, you can start tomorrow in the mail room.”

Seth went cold. Mail room? He hadn’t expected a corner office, but he
had
expected an office…or at least a cubicle. Hell, in that case, why not make him a janitor? Then he gave a wintry smile as the answer occurred to him. “I suppose the cleaning is done by a professional service, huh?”

“Exactly. If you’re serious about working here, you’ll take the job seriously, no matter what it is. If you blow it off, if you get here late—or don’t bother showing up at all—then I’ll know you’re just fucking around as usual. My time is valuable. I don’t see any point in wasting any of it on you until you’ve proven it
won’t
be wasted.”

“I understand.” Seth hated saying that, hated being in the position of begging, but he’d put himself there; he had no one else to blame. “Thank you.” He put the coffee cup on a table and stood; as Grant had pointed out, his time was valuable.

“One thing,” Grant said.

Seth paused, waiting.

“What brought this on?”

He gave another wintry smile, this one underlaid with bitterness. “I looked in the mirror.”

16

B
AILEY PUSHED THE TRASH BAG OF CLOTHING AWAY
from the shelter’s opening and began crawling out into the gray morning light. She paused with one hand in the snow, staring at the whiteness around her. “Crap.”

“What’s wrong?” Justice asked from behind her.

“It snowed some more,” she growled. “The plane’s covered.” Not completely, but near enough. The snow cover made spotting them from the air even more difficult, even if the mountains weren’t wreathed in misty clouds, which they were. Visibility was no more than fifty yards, max. This latest development was almost like adding insult to injury. Why couldn’t they have a heat wave, a nice warm chinook to melt some of the snow and make waiting for rescue just a tad easier? She was cold, and she wanted to be warm. Her head still ached; her entire body ached. She still had a fever. All she wanted was to be rescued off this damn mountain, and now—more snow. Great.

She’d fallen into a fitful doze just before dawn. Now the sun was well up, not that she could see it through the clouds, and she had an urgent nature call. So did Justice, and she was torn between the necessity of helping him and the feeling she couldn’t wait that long. Her own urgency won out. “I’ll be right back!” she called, hurrying—as much as she was capable of hurrying—deeper into the trees. When she emerged it was to find he’d managed by himself; he was leaning against a tree, his back to her.

She stopped where she was, to give him a moment of privacy. That little bit of exertion had completely exhausted her and she closed her eyes. The realization of how sick she was swept through her—not deathly sick, but enough so that she felt frail, and that was unsettling. Between the fever, the cold, the altitude, and the lack of food and water, she wasn’t capable of doing a lot today. It was a damn good thing she didn’t
need
to do a lot. They could eat another candy bar, melt some more snow to drink, and rest in the shelter while they waited for a rescue team to locate them.

Justice was better than he’d been yesterday. He’d managed to take a few steps under his own steam, but he still looked terrible, with that huge bandage covering the top half of his head, two black eyes that were almost swollen shut, and all the other scrapes and bruises he’d sustained. His physical capability didn’t run to much more than lying in the shelter either.

She was a little indignant at the injustice of
her
having the fever when
he
was the one with the nasty cut on his head, a concussion, and the recipient of some inexperienced field doctoring, while all she had was a small puncture wound. Where was the logic in that? In retrospect, though, she should have poured some of that mouthwash on her arm, too.

“You can open your eyes now,” Justice said, and slowly she did so.

He was leaning against the tree for support, his posture telling her that even that much effort had wrung him out. White vapor formed in front of his face with every breath he puffed out, and he was visibly shivering. His only shoes were the black lace-ups, and they did nothing to keep out snow. His pants were his suit trousers. He didn’t even have a T-shirt to layer under his white dress shirt. He had wrapped a couple of her shirts around his shoulders and neck for extra warmth, but there wasn’t much more that he could do to protect himself from the elements. Seeing him merely reminded her that she was the one who’d have to take care of their needs.

Slowly, cautiously, she made her way on rubbery legs down the slope to him and pulled his arm around her shoulder while she put her arm around his waist and grasped his belt to hold him in case he began toppling over. “Let’s get you back in the shelter. How’s the head?”

“It hurts. How’s yours?”

“About the same. Are you seeing double, feeling nauseated?”

“No, nothing like that.” Using her for support on one side, and bracing his other hand against trees as he came to them, he labored to take each step. Sometimes he wavered and she had to grab him, hold him until he could get his legs steady again, but overall the process wasn’t nearly as exhausting or time-consuming as it had been the day before.

He stopped once, lifted his head to survey the mountains around them. She could tell he was listening for something, but she heard nothing other than what she’d heard from the beginning: the wind whistling through the silent mountains. “Do you hear anything?”

“Nothing.”

She caught the grim note in his voice. “We should hear helicopters or something by now, shouldn’t we?”

“I hoped we would, but not necessarily. The weather could have delayed them. We know it snowed up here, so there was some sort of weather system moving through. A more realistic guess would be around noon, at the earliest.” He shivered, his entire body tensing against the cold, then he said prosaically, “There’s no sense in standing out here freezing our asses off when there’s nothing we can do.”

Bailey agreed wholeheartedly with that and helped him the few remaining feet to the shelter. As he half crawled, half dragged himself inside, she said, “Give me the bottle and I’ll fill it with snow again. Are you ready for breakfast?”

“What are we having?” Swollen and blackened as they were, his gray eyes still glinted with humor as he held the mouthwash bottle out to her.

“The same thing we had for dinner: a candy bar. I actually have three more, so we can each have a whole one if you want.”

He paused, the humor fading from his expression. “We’d better ration them,” he finally said. “Just in case.”

Just in case they weren’t rescued today, he meant. The idea was almost overwhelming. Another night on the mountain, in the dark and the cold? The darkness hadn’t been absolute, but they’d used her little book light sparingly. Not knowing how long it would take a rescue team to reach them was unnerving. What if no one came tomorrow either?

Silently she took the bottle and moved to a clean patch of snow. She wore a pair of socks on her hands now, which made scraping snow into the bottle with the poker card a little clumsy, but no way did she want to let herself get as cold as she had the day before.

The task was a small one, a minuscule one compared to the herculean labors she’d faced the day before, but it was almost more than she could handle. Wearily she crawled back into the shelter, welcoming the protection from the wind. The air inside the shelter definitely felt warmer than that outside, whether just from the absence of the wind or from their body heat it really was making a difference. She didn’t care what made it feel warmer, just that it did.

Light crept through tiny crevices; the interior was dim, but not dark. There was no need to turn on the book light in order to find where she’d put the candy bars. She was starving, but when she began chewing the first bite off her half of the bar, her appetite suddenly fled and the candy began growing in her mouth. She fought back the nausea and managed to swallow it, but folded the paper around the remainder of the candy and put it back in the plastic zip bag.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, frowning at her.

“I was, until I started eating. I’ll take another bite in a little while.” Her mouth felt grungy, so she rooted around until she found the pack of disposable foam toothbrushes. She took two from the pack, stuck one in her mouth, and extended one to him. “Here.”

“What is this?” he asked, frowning at the pink circle of cut foam as if it were alive.

“A disposable toothbrush. It doesn’t need water. This shelter’s too small for morning breath on top of yesterday’s and last night’s breath, so take it and brush.”

His mouth quirked in a smile as he took the small stick and began swabbing the foam around in his mouth. Bailey was pleasantly surprised by the minty taste, and by how much cleaner her mouth felt when she finished. Now if she could just have a nice, hot shower…

Dream on, she told herself as she relaxed her aching body on the cushions and dragged a pile of clothing over herself. The clothes would cover them better if the garments were straightened out and layered, but she was too tired and felt too sick to deal with it just now. Justice stretched out behind her, then he pulled her close and rearranged the pieces of clothing so nothing was between them except what they wore.

How odd it was, she thought, that in just one night they’d already established a sort of routine. They already knew, and automatically sought, the positions where they fit best together and were most comfortable. He was a good six inches taller than she, maybe more, so with her back to him they spooned together almost perfectly. His arm draped over her waist, and his hand slipped up under her shirt for warmth, so his hand was resting on her stomach. It was odd, she thought, how fast the situation had forged a sense of familiarity, even intimacy, with him, but she supposed that was a survival mechanism. Together they had a better chance of making it off this mountain alive than they would have alone.