Lover in the Rough

by Lowell, Elizabeth

  As Chance sensed her response, he groaned softly. His mouth gentled, savoring rather than demanding, sharing rather than dominating. Without lifting his lips he shifted her weight, letting her slide down his body. He held her in a cage of strength and warmth, molding her to each breath he took, each tremor of need that whispered seductively through him.

  Reba’s head tilted back over the hard muscles of his arm as her body became a warm outline of his. Clinging to Chance, she gave him the response he so urgently sought, telling him with her touch that she was his.

  After a long, long time he lifted his mouth.

  “Chance,” she said shakily, eyes still closed, “I didn’t—”

  “No,” he said, taking her lips once more, devouring them tenderly, fiercely. “I don’t want to hear about it again. Ever.”

  Reba opened her eyes, only to see impenetrable darkness all around her. She had never experienced such a total absence of light. If she hadn’t been holding Chance she wouldn’t have known he was there.

  The darkness was a living thing with weight and texture and a presence that overwhelmed everything it touched … and it touched everything, a soundless primal tide of black lapping over her, dissolving her. With a sense of icy certainty, Reba knew why men went mad before they died of thirst.

  “Chance, what happened to our light?” she asked carefully, her voice strained, rising.

  “Close your eyes,” he murmured, then put his calloused hand over her eyes to make sure that she obeyed.

  She heard two clicks.

  “Open your eyes,” he said, tilting her face to the side with his hand.

  She looked. Two white cones of light illuminated the mine again. She sighed and leaned against him.

  “Sorry,” Chance said, smoothing his moustache over Reba’s cheek. “I thought you knew I’d turned out the lights. I didn’t want to blind you.” His lips felt the racing pulse on her neck. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, feeling foolish now that the lights were on again. “I’d just never seen, or not seen, anything like that. Even the blackest night has a star or two.”

  “The first time is always a shock,” said Chance, taking Reba’s hand and leading her back down into the China Queen. “Three days after my mother died, Dad took me down in a mine and turned out the lights on me. No warning, just darkness like the end of everything. I screamed my bloody head off. Luck grabbed me and hugged me until I stopped screaming. Then he cussed Dad hot enough to burn my ears. It was the only time I ever heard Luck angry with Dad.

  “I worshipped Luck after that. No matter how he teased me when I got older, I thought he walked on water. I always wanted to repay him. But when the time came, I was digging and he was drinking with a diamond miner. Luck died before he even knew his brother was coming to help.”

  Reba’s fingers tightened within Chance’s hand. She wanted to say she was sorry, but the words sounded banal even in her mind. And the only other words she could offer—I love you—weren’t wanted.

  “Don’t look so sad,” he murmured, tracing her lips with a fingertip. “It was twenty years ago. A long time.”

  “It still hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s as though it just happened. And it will keep on happening.”

  “It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. It doesn’t happen as often.” Chance lifted Reba’s hand, kissed the fragrance of her skin. He made a startled sound as he remembered something. “Where are your gloves?”

  “I took them off to scratch my head. The helmet itches.”

  He chuckled. “Remember them when we dig.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that.”

  “Gloves?”

  “Digging. When and where?”

  “Patience is a virtue.”

  “Tell it to your mirror,” she retorted.

  “We have to go through a few more twists and turns and tunnel choices. Your ancestors had bad luck guessing where the pegmatite would go next. Part of their trouble came with the territory. Earthquakes are notorious for snatching away promising veins and hiding them with the devil’s own cunning.”

  “What was the rest of my ancestors’ trouble?”

  “Ignorance,” said Chance bluntly. “From the looks of these tunnels, there wasn’t a real miner in the lot. Well, maybe one. A long time ago.”

  “Great-grandfather Mitchell,” said Reba promptly. “Or was it great-great-grandfather? Anyway, family legend has it that he was a hard-rock miner from South Africa. He was the one who bought what became the China Queen, plus the mineral rights to the surrounding land. He didn’t have long to mine the Queen, though.”

  “Cave-in?” asked Chance.

  Reba took a quick breath at the casual way Chance mentioned dying in a mine. “No. Cholera.”

  Chance grunted. “He was a miner, all right. Bad earth, bad water, bad men, and bad luck.”

  “I don’t know about the men, but—”

  “Quiet!”

  Reba froze, caught more by the pressure of Chance’s hand than by his command. She held her breath. From somewhere in the darkness came the tiny sounds of grit sifting down. After a few moments Chance’s grip on her fingers eased.

  “Feel that?” he asked softly.

  “What?”

  “The dragon’s tail twitching,” he murmured. “Very subtle. More a vibration in the air than anything else.”

  Reba shuddered. “I didn’t feel anything.” Privately, she was glad she hadn’t. The idea of an earthquake inside a mine was much more disturbing to her than it had been when she was on the surface, curled in Chance’s arms. “Is it safe?”

  She sensed more than saw his shrug. “How safe is safe?” he asked. “The quake wasn’t nearly hard enough to bring down the mine, if that’s what you mean. There’s no guarantee about the next one, though. Want to go back up?”

  “I want the earthquakes to go away,” Reba said firmly.

  “Sorry,” Chance said, his voice wry. “I can make the lights come on but keeping the rest of it together is beyond me.”

  “You don’t seem worried.”

  He hesitated. “I’m always worried when I’m down in a mine I don’t know. When I was here before, I took only a very fast tour of the Queen, just enough to reassure me that she wasn’t a bloody great trap waiting to be sprung. There are several tunnels where I won’t take you. There’s only one where I won’t go myself.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The left branch where we first came in. Partway down the tunnel there’s a slab of rock hanging from the ceiling. It’s been there since the tunnel was dug, but I wouldn’t bet a grain of sand on that slab being up there tomorrow. On the other hand, the rock may still be hanging when the rest of the tunnels are no bigger than a worm’s gullet. Mines aren’t a sure thing, Reba. You simply ante up and play the hand you’re dealt the best way you know how.”

  “Sounds like the freeway during the first rains of the season,” she said. “That’s when the oil that has seeped into the cracks over the dry months is forced out by the rain. The oil floats up to the surface of the road. Slippery time in the City of Angels.”

  “Do you stay off the freeway?” Chance asked curiously.

  “No”—dryly—“just off the brakes. Gently, gently, as the saying goes.”

  Light flashed startlingly as Chance bent and gave Reba a quick kiss. “You’ll be a bloody good miner. That’s the way to treat a mine, too. Gently, gently, until you’ve taken its measure. Then you can swing your pick as hard as you like.”

  The pale walls of the tunnel became dark between one step and the next. Reba paused, swinging her light over the nearer wall. “What happened?”

  “Discontinuity,” Chance said, tugging irresistibly at her hand. “A long time ago, this was the surface. The pegmatite was eroded away. Later this layer of dirt was deposited on top, then compressed as more stuff was deposited on top of it. Earthquakes shifted it all around, too, til
ting some layers, breaking others, and burying the rest.”

  “Nothing valuable in the dirt?” she hazarded.

  “Not unless you want to raise crops.”

  “No thanks. I kill plants faster than the average defoliant. It’s so bad that the nurserymen in the area all know me. The last time I went in the man gave me a pet rock and told me not to come back.”

  Chance’s deep laughter echoed through the tunnel, returning doubled. “Definitely a miner,” he said, rubbing his moustache over her knuckles. “Definitely my woman,” he added softly. “Watch your head. Your family never bothered to dig this one out. Just as well. It’s crumbly stuff here.”

  Reba waited while Chance ducked into an unappealing little side hole in the larger tunnel. As he went in he gouged two lines on the right-hand side of the smaller opening. She looked up the tunnel and saw other small holes leading off in other directions. She wondered where they led, and why Chance had chosen the opening he had just disappeared into.

  “Coming?” Chance’s voice floated back into the main tunnel.

  “Right behind you,” sighed Reba.

  She ducked and walked bent over for what seemed like a long time but probably wasn’t more than a hundred steps. The floor was ragged, catching at the sides of her feet with unpredictable ruts, legacy of dead miners’ wheelbarrows. Gradually the composition of the tunnel changed, became lighter, dirt mixed with minerals, as though a pegmatite vein had burst and blended with more ordinary earth. Finally, mineral masses predominated.

  “You can stand up now.”

  Chance’s voice was some distance off to the right. Reba stood and turned, keeping her head tilted down so as not to blind him accidentally.

  “Oh … !” Slowly Reba turned in a full circle, trying to measure the dimensions of the unexpected room. In the end she gave up, unable to estimate distances in the tricky light. Bigger than her living room, surely. Two times? Three? Five? It was impossible to tell without pacing off the area, because rough pillars of earth supported the ceiling at random intervals, breaking her cone of light into brightness and deep wedges of shadow.

  From every point, minerals glinted back at her, even from the most dense shadows. The far wall was almost white.

  “Granite,” said Chance, seeing the direction of her light. “Hard rock and no reward. This is as deep as the Queen goes, at least in this direction.”

  “All this and no tourmaline,” she sighed. “My poor ancestors, scratching at a mountain, looking for shiny little mites that never existed.”

  “There could be tourmaline under your feet, above your head, in the pillars, in the walls.”

  Reba turned, moving her light just enough so that Chance’s expression was visible to her. “You mean that, don’t you?”

  “Of course. You’re surrounded by pegmatite,” he said, his voice deep, rich with certainty and excitement. “You’ll never be closer to tourmaline until you hold it in your hand.”

  Her head tilted back as she scanned the ceiling. Light flashed back from a pocket of white overhead.

  “Don’t move,” said Chance suddenly. Then, in a reassuring voice, “Everything’s all right. Just don’t move.”

  Reba froze. Chance’s light swept over the ceiling until the two cones of illumination joined.

  “Okay, you can move. I just didn’t want to lose the white witch you discovered.”

  “Try that again,” she said flatly. “In English, please.”

  Chance’s teeth reflected the shine of helmet light. “See that pocket of lepidolite near the column, all white and shiny, mica flakes as big as your smile?”

  She stared along the beam of her light. “I see it.”

  “Then you’re closer to tourmaline than you’ve ever been.”

  Reba’s light jerked, then steadied. “What do you mean?”

  “Tourmaline matrix,” he said calmly, but currents of eagerness seethed just beneath his control. “I wonder why I didn’t see it the last time I was here… . Hold your light steady.”

  Chance waited until he was sure that Reba wouldn’t move before he swept his own light in a pattern across the ceiling, then down to the floor just beneath the pocket of lepidolite. He laughed softly as he realized that the recent tremors in the earth had caused part of the ceiling to slough away, revealing the white witch beneath.

  “Thank you, dragon,” Chance murmured, walking over and kneeling swiftly.

  His light raked over the small mound that had fallen from the ceiling. With quick, sure movements he probed the crumbling matrix. He unhooked the canteen, poured a bit of water into his palm and smiled.

  “Come here, chaton.”

  Reba walked over quickly. Her light outlined his powerful shoulders as he sat on his heels, holding something hidden in his hand. “What is it?”

  His hand opened. On his palm glittered shards of shocking pink crystal. Nested among them was one tiny, perfect needle of tourmaline.

  Eight

  Reba made a sound of disbelief as she looked at the fuchsia glitter in Chance’s palm. He saw the pleasure and the wonder shining in her eyes. He looked at the tourmaline fragments in his hand, seeing them as she did … pieces of dreams condensed into molten pink, hot promises shimmering and whispering in the cold wash of a miner’s light. He smiled and plucked the shattered crystals from their white bed of crushed matrix. Tiny flakes of mica stuck to his fingertips, making them almost as silver as his eyes.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said softly.

  He poured the crystal fragments into her soft palm, reserving the perfect needle of tourmaline. She sighed and shifted her hand, making light melt and run over the piled shards of pink. After a few moments she looked up and saw him watching her.

  “I know, I know,” said Reba, laughing at herself. “These aren’t worth two cents at a garage sale, but to me they’re …” Her voice faded.

  “Signposts on the road to Oz,” Chance finished for her, smiling gently.

  “Yes,” she sighed, watching the play of light over shattered tourmaline. “If only we’d gotten here sooner.”

  “Before the dragon rolled over and crushed them?”

  Reba’s lips curved. “How did you guess?”

  His fingertip touched her nose, leaving a shiny residue of mica. “If it makes you feel any better, coming down here last night wouldn’t have helped. We’re several million years too late for these poor beauties. But not for this one,” Chance added, holding out the slender, flawless needle of tourmaline between his thumb and forefinger.

  The crystal was an inch long, a sixth of an inch wide, and naturally faceted into a many-sided shaft. Though too small to have the shocking pink color of the larger crystal fragments, the shaft of tourmaline clearly showed the tricolor progression along its length that was unique to Pala’s tourmaline. It was as though the crystal were a cylinder lifted out of a watermelon. Nine-tenths of the tourmaline’s length was a pale, clear pink. Then there was a thin band of transparent white, like the rind of a fruit. A blunt cap of clear green marked the terminal phase of the crystal, recalling a watermelon’s dark skin.

  Hesitantly, Reba touched the crystal with her fingernail, afraid that the mineral would vanish like a dream at the first touch of reality. “It’s real,” she breathed. “Oh, Chance, it’s real!”

  “Very real,” he agreed, “but not half so beautiful as your smile.” His lips moved slowly over hers as he placed the crystal in her palm. “Welcome to Oz.”

  She laughed softly, her breath a sweet warmth on his lips. “Thank you.” Then, with an eagerness she couldn’t conceal, “Can we dig some more?”

  Chance smiled ruefully. “Spoken like a true gouger. Yes, we can dig. But first …”

  Reba, who had been turning toward the pale fall of lepidolite on the floor, looked back. “First?”

  Instead of answering, he pulled her against his body, wrapping her in his strength and warmth. She closed her eyes and let him flow over her, opening her lips to him with a surrender an
d invitation that had become as natural to her in his arms as her own accelerated heartbeat. The sweet, firm movement of his tongue over hers sent sensations shimmering through her like light pouring through crystal. When he lifted his head she had forgotten all about the tiny fragments and single perfect tourmaline held inside her closed hand.

  “Thank you,” sighed Chance against her lips.

  “My pleasure,” she assured him, laughter and longing making her voice smoky.

  “Not the kiss”—he smiled—“although it was well worth the thanks.”

  “Then what?” she asked, smoothing her lips over his moustache, enjoying the rough silk of its texture on her sensitive skin.

  “You,” he said simply. “Seeing the China Queen through your eyes is like being young again, everything new and shining, hope and laughter.”

  He kissed her slowly, moving his hands over her as though he wanted to memorize everything about her and the moment that she melted against him and they discovered again how perfectly they fit together. After a long time he reluctantly lifted his head.

  “If we don’t stop,” said Chance huskily, “the only thing you’ll find in this mine is me.”

  Reba smiled. One hand moved down his chest, tracing the muscles beneath the black flannel shirt. She paused at his belt before letting her hand drift lower. She heard his breath catch and thicken in the instant before he pulled her wandering hand to his mouth. He bit the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb with a restrained ferocity that made her shiver.

  “The Queen’s floor is too rough for your satin body,” he said regretfully, “no matter who’s on top when we make love.”

  Her eyes shimmered with desire and laughter and love. “It would be worth a few scrapes here and there.”

  Chance’s eyes changed as he reached for her. He gave her a hungry, penetrating kiss that filled her senses with his taste. His arms crushed her but she didn’t protest, wanting to be even closer to him, wanting to feel him inside her, a part of her. With a hoarse, male sound he held her at arm’s length.

  “I don’t trust myself to be gentle enough with you,” he said roughly, his eyes devouring her. “If I get you down on the floor I won’t want to let you up. Once, twice, three times. It wouldn’t matter. All I’d have to do is look at you and I’d want you all over again. You’re a fire in me, chaton.”