He locked his jaw and nodded once. “I will.”
When Trask and Hazel had been swallowed up in the sulky forest mist, Dale turned to Tansy. “Think the gun is any good now that it’s been in the river?”
“I don’t know.” She handed it to him, then opened her palm and held it up. Dull purple glittered, reflecting the gray light off broken amethyst facets. “She gave me this, as well. She was right, she’d found one of the stones.”
As though her words had unlocked the secret, a breath of warmer air blew across them, sweeping aside the rain and the wind. A gap in the clouds allowed the sun to struggle through in a single spotlight-beam of radiance that lit a cliff face across the river upstream of them. Tansy gasped and grabbed Dale’s sleeve, but it was unnecessary.
He saw it. A glitter of purple fire cascading down from the dark, gaping mouth of a cave. He cursed under his breath as the knowledge washed over him, and the memory of Hazel’s words. Curtis was incoherent by then…kept rambling on about lightning bolts and Ali Baba’s cave.
The teenagers, Dale’s parents and God only knew how many others in between had been murdered to protect the location of the cave. And if they didn’t get out of here, fast, he and Tansy would be next.
“COME ON. We’ve found the stones and missed Roberts. Let’s head back and regroup.”
Tansy braced her feet in the mud as the feeble sunlight guttered and died. “Shouldn’t we investigate the cave?”
Dale’s face darkened and the sky rumbled behind him. “Absolutely. Positively. Not. Let’s go.”
She allowed him to tug her down the path they’d cut through the bracken, but she took one long look back over her shoulder. The gray sky cast no sparkles on the runoff, but she’d seen them. The gems drew her just as surely as the cave repelled her. Like the forest, it seemed old and evil. Waiting.
She shivered as the rain began again and a fat drop slid down the back of her neck. Trying to hurry, she scrambled along the sloppy track behind Dale, feeling the mud suck at her boots with every step. Feeling as though something dark and evil was chasing them down to the beach.
“Faster!” she shouted to Dale, sensing the storm building more violently than she could have imagined, knowing that the hurricane had finally arrived. “We’ve got to get down to the— Aah!” The mud gave way beneath her right foot and she fell to the side. Kept falling as her leg plunged through into emptiness. “Dale!”
“Damn!” He grabbed her arm and yanked her back to solid ground. They stared at the hole, breathing heavily. He cursed. “Another pit trap.”
By poking the ground before they stepped on it, the group had avoided two more of the booby traps along the way. They’d missed this one, which was just to the side of the path they’d cut.
His fingers gentled on her arm, though he didn’t move away. Tansy’s urgency of a moment ago shifted, becoming a new, warmer urgency. One she didn’t trust.
“Come on, we need to get moving,” she called over the rising wind, and the rattling sound of raindrops hitting their yellow rubberized slickers like drumbeats.
But Dale didn’t move. He stayed there, fingers now caressing her arm as he stared down at her with unreadable emotions crowding his eyes.
Dale? Emotions? Confusion pricked deep in Tansy’s chest. But before she could ask, he said, “I am so sorry I got you into this, Tans. So damn sorry.”
And like a punch in the gut, she finally understood that part of his need to drive her away came not from the fact that he wanted her out of his life, but because he was afraid for her. He wanted her safe.
He cared.
But just as she was thinking it was too little, too late that she had learned her worth on Lobster Island and she deserved better than scraps of his heart, he kissed her.
And all other thoughts fled.
His taste, familiar yet not, exploded across her lips and tongue like the flash of lightning that glowed red through her closed eyelids. Thunder chased on the heels of its lightning, but she could barely hear it over the pounding of blood in her ears as Dale crowded close to her.
Dale, her mind whimpered as her body flared to life. Dale.
Everything was cool and wet—from the rain, from the air. Except for their mouths. The heat lay there, in the slippery junction of bodies otherwise held apart by rubber rain suits and history.
She sank, almost unwillingly, deeper into the kiss when he slanted his mouth across hers, seeking more. Always more. This was the one place he never held back from her.
Straining closer to him, she felt cold, wet clothing stick to suddenly heated places with a torturous friction. When the rain cascaded down on them amidst a mutter of thunder, neither of them moved. The touch of their lips heated the rain to a warm shower, and the contrast of hot and cold was maddening.
Like the man himself.
Remembering her vow, and her worth, Tansy eased away from Dale with real regret. He stared down at her, eyes huge and dark, then shook himself, face suddenly fierce. “What the hell are we doing?”
Tansy ignored the twinge of hurt. Hot and cold. That was Dale. “We’re getting out of here,” she yelled over the wind, then jumped and shrieked when there was a strange zzzzzt sound and the twisted tree beside her jerked and toppled over. “Lightning!”
“Hell!” Dale knocked her down and covered her with his body as two other trees were cut down with wet-sounding thwacks from invisible machetes. “It’s not lightning. He’s shooting at us!”
“He’s what? Who?” Tansy yelled over the wind and the rain and a scattering of wild shots, unable to believe this was actually happening to them. They were being shot at, for God’s sake.
“Roberts,” Dale yelled back, keeping his head below the level of the knee-high leafy ground cover. “We found him. Or he found us. Come on!” He bellied backward off the path, staying low and moving fast.
Tansy followed, expecting at any moment to feel the heavy thud of impact, feel the delayed burn she imagined would come with a bullet wound. Her heart hammered in her ears, or maybe that was the ever-nearing thunder and the voice of Harriet as the hurricane descended upon Lobster Island.
They huddled behind a larger tree at the edge of the path and Dale peered around it. He held a hand back. “Give me the gun!” he yelled over the storm and the river’s rush.
She passed it to him. “It’s wet.” There was no telling whether it would fire now. But it was their only hope.
“It had better,” Dale called back, confirming her thoughts. “He’s over there, between those two big rocks.”
Tansy risked a look, figuring from the brief lull in the firing that Roberts must be reloading. She saw the rocks but not the man. “Are you sure?”
“Trust me.” He clasped her shoulder in a brief squeeze, so the two words took on much more meaning. Then he let his hand drop and jerked his head back toward the cave. “When I say the word, I want you to run for the cave, got it? I’ll cover you.”
A bullet smacked into the tree beside Tansy’s hand and she jumped back, feeling the sting in her fingers. “Dale, wait! I…”
“It’s our only chance, Tans. We’re sitting ducks out here, and the storm is only going to get worse. We’ve got to get across that river and up to the cave. It looks dry and we can defend it. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.” He gave her a not-too-gentle shove. “Now, go!”
Lightning flickered above them, and in its flash Tansy noticed something new in his eyes, though she couldn’t have said exactly what it was.
Without another word, she turned and ran for the cave, trusting Dale to guard her back.
Gunfire erupted from the rocks on the other side of the path, quickly answered by the shotgun’s deep-bellied roar. Thank God it had fired.
Tansy felt the mud give beneath her borrowed shoes and lunged forward, narrowly avoiding another pit trap. A bullet sang above her, in the place where her head had been just moments before.
The shotgun blasted again, sounding farther away, and Tansy
cursed at the knowledge that Dale was backing down the hill, endangering himself as he tried to buy her more time. “Damn it, Dale. Come on!” she muttered in between gasps as she gained the gritty shore of the river and fixed her eyes on the cave mouth high above the opposite side. An incongruous thread of white mist, maybe steam, bled from the tip of the cracked mouth. She had no fear of small spaces, but this cave, like the opening the men had hacked into the forest, seemed to be waiting for something. It seemed almost…alive.
She heard running footsteps behind her and spun to find Dale nearly on top of her. “Come on, sweetheart. Time to go!”
That was when she knew she was never coming out of the rabbit hole. Dale Metcalf had called her sweetheart.
“Did you get Roberts?”
His lack of a reply was answer enough, as was the ready hold he kept on the shotgun. They’d started the trip with twelve rounds. She’d counted ten blasts. That left them with two waterlogged shells.
Tansy gritted her teeth. “Let’s go, then.”
Hands linked, they waded into the water with Dale upstream so the force of the river would break around him. She gasped at the first shock. She’d thought herself cold and wet before. She’d been wrong.
The wind tore at them, howling through the shallow canyon like fury and beating against her until she thought it might be easier just to collapse into the river and let it sweep her away.
“Come on, damn you. Don’t quit now.” Dale dragged her a few steps closer to the far shore, which seemed a mile away. Her legs were numb and heavy. Her feet could have belonged to someone else. “Don’t you dare quit on me!”
She took another step. Another. And the riverbed disappeared beneath her.
At her cry, Dale braced himself as best he could on the slippery rocks beneath the water and held tight to her hand. “Come on, you can do it!”
He couldn’t drop the shotgun to save her. It was all they had. He’d left his duffel back by the bullet-riddled tree. Ropes and machetes would do them no good if they didn’t make it to the cave.
“Dale!” Eyes wide with fright, lips blue with cold, she struggled back to her feet, hauling on his hand until he thought his shoulder might pop. She set her lips. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
God, she was tough. Together, they trudged across the river. Inch by inch. Step by step. There was no sign of Roberts. Maybe he’d winged the man with one of his shots. Dale could only hope, because he was down to his last shell, having dropped one in his mad, zigzagging dash to the river. The force of the current dragged at his legs and the howling wind dragged at his body, but he did his best to shield Tansy from both. Slipping, stumbling, they hauled each other out of the water to the base of a steep in cline. A crude flight of steps was hacked into the hillside.
“Wait.” Tansy held him back. “The pit traps.”
Dale froze and cursed himself for being stupid. The path to the river had been booby-trapped. Why not this one? “Do you see another way up?” The wind ripped the words from his mouth, but he barely felt the gale’s brutal force anymore. His face was numb, and his hands and feet. They needed to get inside, out of the wind and the rain, out of the open.
He felt eyes on the back of his neck and glanced again at the dark forest on the other side of the river. Was that movement? Or just the bowing and swaying of the strange, twisted trees? Where the hell was Roberts?
“This way.” Tansy scrambled up a narrower, faintly marked trail, testing each step and watching the ground carefully. “It seems okay.”
Dale followed, keeping watch behind them. But even so, he couldn’t help noticing the slick cling of wet cloth to her body as she worked her way up the slope. The surge of lust was familiar, yet spiked with something new. Desperation.
She stopped at the cave mouth and waved him forward, the caution in her eyes bringing a new fear. What if Roberts had an accomplice? What if someone was waiting for them in the cave?
Zzzzzzzt. Crack! The bullet smacked into the rock wall beside Dale’s shoulder, and suddenly there was no time to worry about what waited for them inside the cave, because a tall figure in a long, dark green raincoat was wading determinedly across the river toward them.
Roberts.
“Get in the cave!” Dale yelled, shoving her inside. He had to yell, because the wind suddenly doubled in intensity, wailing and gnashing at the island, whipping the river to whitecaps that swirled around Roberts’s legs, then his waist.
The raincoated figure staggered and dropped to one knee in the rushing water, leaving Dale to wonder whether he’d wounded the man already. Then he decided he didn’t care. It was Roberts or them, and Dale had promised to keep Tansy safe. He was going to get her off the island or die trying.
Calmly, he lifted the shotgun and fired into the wind, trusting Hurricane Harriet to send the pellets back into the river. The blast was quiet in comparison to the sound of the storm, which blotted out any cry from the man below. The figure simply jerked, folded over and fell into the rushing, white-flecked water.
In moments, the dark green raincoat slipped around a bend in the river and was gone.
It took longer for Dale’s system to level, and for the rough, ready rage to subside. Then he waited another minute, thinking the feeling of vindication should come next.
But it didn’t. In its place lingered a vague disquiet and a growing, numbing cold where the wind and the rain bit down to his skin.
“Dale? Are you okay?” Then Tansy was at his side, and the cold didn’t seem so bad anymore. But the adrenaline and the rage remained, tempered now to something that felt less like anger and more like heat. She touched his arm, igniting a thousand pin-prick fires. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the cave.” She was silent for a moment, then asked, “Do you think he had a chance to dump the toxin in the river?”
“I don’t know.” Lightning flashed and thunder grumbled. The sky closed in for good, and almost all of the yellow-gray light was extinguished as though it had been sucked into the clouds. “I guess we’ll have to trust Hazel, Trask and Churchill to keep the islanders away from their taps until the storm passes.”
Trust. It was a new concept for him, yet it seemed to fit well here, in this place that felt like the end of the earth.
“Come inside,” she urged, tugging him toward the cave. “You’re freezing.”
They both were. Tansy’s lips were blue, and Dale’s fingers, nose and toes were numb. Now that Roberts was gone, they needed to concentrate on practical matters like getting warm.
Feeling as though he was taking a monumental step, Dale set one foot inside the cave. The wind pushed him with a gentle hand and he stepped another foot inside. And waited.
But there were no ghosts waiting for him. Only Tansy.
And she was everything.
The floor of the cave was covered with coarse, faintly purple sand. Hundreds of boot tracks pock-marked the surface, beginning four or five feet inside the cave as though the last big storm had washed away part of the humans’ passing.
A few feet past the boot marks, the dim outside light failed and the cave, about ten feet across at that point, faded to inky black. Resigned to the sight he feared would greet him, Dale reached into his pocket and pulled out the sadly abused waterproof flashlight he’d borrowed from the sorting shed.
He flicked on the light and panned it across the cave, empty shotgun at the ready, just in case.
Then the light faltered.
The gun sagged.
And Tansy gasped.
It was beautiful. The flashlight’s feeble yellow glow was picked up and thrown back at them from a hundred thousand facets. Purple-black. A slash of orangey yellow. Deep, throbbing green.
“God,” Dale breathed, the word coming from deep in his gut. The walls of the arched cavern were an artist’s palette, the stalactites hanging from the ceiling, spears of pure color.
“This is why they died,” Tansy breathed at his shoulder, “so nobody would find this place.”
&
nbsp; She gestured, and Dale followed her gaze to the far wall, where tool marks and shattered crystal marked crude mining efforts. Dale felt his heart squeeze in his chest. Greed. It all came back to greed. “Yeah.”
Almost unable to bear the sight of a natural wonder perverted to man’s grand design, he doused the flashlight, once again becoming aware of the chill. The wind. Tansy’s shivers. His own.
“Come on,” he urged. “Let’s see where the steam is coming from.” Logically, it had to be hotter than the outside air, to create that thin track of white that wound around the jagged ceiling.
It wasn’t until they’d crept halfway across the immediate cavern that Dale realized he could see shapes in the darkness, even though the flashlight was off.
“There’s light up ahead,” Tansy murmured, a quiver in her voice betraying cold or fear or both. “And it feels warmer.”
There was no hum of machinery. No whisper of cloth or murmur of voices save their own. The place felt deserted, though Dale wasn’t yet ready to trust his feelings.
She was right. His face was warmer than his back. He moved toward the heat, aware of Tansy close behind him, and stopped dead when he reached a man-high opening in the gem wall and smelled the warm, moist air coming from the natural antechamber.
An opening high above them let in the light, which filtered through a jutting purple stone to give the grayness a touch of lavender.
Tansy’s gasp reverberated through his body, set ting up greedy little thrills and warning bells. “Is that…?”
He nodded, though he wasn’t sure anymore what he was agreeing to. “Yep. It’s a hot spring.”
Chapter Twelve
It shouldn’t have been awkward for them to undress together. They’d done it a hundred times on assignments before they became lovers, and many more times since. But Tansy turned away from him now, and her fingers shook from more than cold as she tugged at her shirt and pants.
After an agonizing moment, he turned away. “I’m going to scout the rest of the cave and make sure there’s really nobody here. I’ll probably take a look outside, too.”
Body Search Page 16
