When the front door closed behind Mariah, she made a stifled sound and swayed, hugging herself against a cold that no amount of hope could banish. Slowly she sank to her knees, wishing she could cry, but even that release was beyond her.
It will be all right. It has to be. Somehow I’ll make him believe me.
Slim chance, isn’t that what you said? But it came true, Cash. It came true and now you won’t believe in it. In my love. In me. And there’s nothing I can do. Nothing!
Mariah swayed and caught her balance against the table that stood near the front door. A small, flat package slid off. Automatically she caught it before it hit the floor.
Slim chance.
Almost afraid to believe that hope was possible, Mariah stripped off paper and tape until Mad Jack’s map fell into her hands. With it was a cover letter and a copy of the map. There was no blank area on the copy, no ancient stain, no blur, nothing but a web of dotted lines telling her that she and Cash had been looking at the wrong part of Devil’s Peak.
Will you believe I love you if I give you Mad Jack’s mine? Will that prove to you that I’m not after a free ride like your stepmother and your wife? Will you believe me if…
With hands that trembled Mariah refolded the copy and put it in her jeans. Silently, quickly, she went to the workroom cupboard and changed into her trail clothes. When she was ready to leave, she pulled out a sheet of notepaper and wrote swiftly:
I have nothing of value to give you, no way to make you believe. Except one. Mad Jack’s mine. It’s yours now. I give it to you. All of it.
I’ll find the mine and I’ll fill your hands with gold and then you’ll have to believe I love you. When you believe that, you’ll know the baby is yours. Slim chance. But it was the only chance Mariah had.
15
The memory of Mariah’s lost, frightened expression rode Cash unmercifully as he worked over his Jeep. No matter how many times he told himself she was an accomplished little liar, her stricken face contradicted him, forcing him to think rather than to react from pain and rage.
And reason told Cash that no matter how good an actress Mariah was, she didn’t have the ability to make her skin turn pale. She didn’t have the ability to make the black center of her eyes dilate until all the gold was gone. She didn’t have the ability… but those things had happened just the same, her skin pale and her eyes dark and watching him as though she expected him to destroy her world as thoroughly as she had destroyed his.
With a savage curse Cash slammed shut the Jeep’s hood and went to the old house. The instant he went through the front door, he knew the house was empty. He could feel it.
“Mariah?”
No one answered his call. With growing unease, Cash walked through the living room. Shreds of wrapping paper and tape littered the floor. On the table near the door was a typed note and what looked like Mad Jack’s faded old map. Cash read the note quickly, then once more.
There was no mistake. A copy of the map had been in the package, a clean copy that supposedly showed the way to Mad Jack’s mine. Automatically Cash glanced out the window, assessing the weather. Slate-bottomed clouds were billowing over the high country.
Mariah wouldn’t risk it just for money. She would count on Luke to support her even if I refused.
Yet even as the thought came, Cash discarded it. Mariah had been very careful to take nothing from Luke that she didn’t earn by helping Carla with Logan and the demands of being a ranch wife. That was one of the things Cash had admired about Mariah, one of the things that had gotten through his defenses.
As he turned away from the small table, he saw another piece of paper that had fallen to the floor. He picked it up, read it, and felt as though he were being wrenched apart.
It can’t be true. It… can’t… be.
Cash ran to the workroom and wrenched open the cupboard that held Mariah’s camping clothes. It was empty.
That little fool has gone after Mad Jack’s mine.
Mariah didn’t answer the phone. After ten rings Cash jammed the phone into his jacket pocket, zipped the pocket shut and ran to the corral.
Slim chance.
Ice crystallized in the pit of Cash’s stomach, displacing the savagery that had driven him since the instant Mariah had told him she was pregnant.
In three hours it would be freezing up in the high country. Mariah didn’t have any decent winter gear. She didn’t even have enough experience in cold country to know how insidious hypothermia could be, how it drained the mind’s ability to reason as surely as it drained the body’s coordination, cold eating away at flesh until finally the person was defenseless.
Three hours. Too much time for the cold to work on Mariah’s vulnerable body. Doubly vulnerable. Pregnant.
Slim chance.
Oh God, what if I was wrong?
Trying not to think at all, Cash caught and bridled two horses. He saddled only one. Leading one horse, riding the other, Cash headed out of the ranch yard at a dead run. Mariah’s trail was clear in the damp earth and slanting autumn light. Holding his mount at a hard gallop, Cash followed the trail she had left, forcing himself to think of nothing but the task in front of him. After half an hour he stopped, switched his saddle to the spare horse and took off again at a fast gallop, leading his original mount.
Although the dark, wind-raked clouds rained only fitfully, the ground was glistening with cold moisture.
In the long afternoon shadows, puddles wore a rime of ice granules left by the passage of a recent hailstorm. The horses’ breaths came out in great soft plumes, only to be torn away by the rising wind.
Except for the wind, it’s not too cold.
Mariah’s words haunted Cash. He tried not to think of how cold it was, how quickly wind stripped heat from even his big body. Even worse than the cold was the fitful rain. He would have preferred snow. In an emergency, dry snow could be used as insulation against the wind, but the only defense from rain was shelter. Otherwise wind simply sucked out all body heat through the damp clothes, leaving behind a chill that drained a person’s strength so subtly yet so completely that most people didn’t realize how close they were to death until it was too late; they thought they stopped shivering because their bodies had miraculously become warm again.
*
Mariah looked at the map once more, then at the dark lava slope to her right. There was a pile of rocks that looked rather like a lizard, but there was no lightning-killed tree nearby. Shrugging, she reminded herself that more than a century had passed since Mad Jack drew the map. In that amount of time, a dead tree could have fallen and been absorbed back into the land. Carefully Mariah reined her mount around until the lizard was at her back. The rest of the landmarks fit well enough.
Shivering against the chill wind, she urged her horse downhill, checking every so often in order to keep the pile of rocks at her back. The horse was eager to get off the exposed slope. It half trotted, half slid down the steep side of a ravine. The relief from the wind was immediate.
With a long sigh, Mariah gave the horse its head and tucked her hands into the huge pockets of her jacket. Once in the ravine, the only way to go was downhill, which was exactly the way Mad Jack had gone. Her fingers were so cold that she barely felt the hard weight of the cellular phone she had jammed into one of the oversize pockets and forgotten.
I’ll count to one hundred. If I don’t see any granite by then, I’ll get out of the ravine and head for Black Springs. It can’t be more than twenty minutes from here, just around the shoulder of the ridge. It will be warm there.
Mariah had counted to eighty-three when she saw a spur ravine open off to the right. The opening was too small and too choked with stones for the horse to negotiate. Almost afraid to breathe, much less to believe, she dismounted and hung on to the stirrup until circulation and balance returned to her cold-numbed body. Scrambling, falling, getting up again, she explored the rocky ravine.
When Mariah first saw the granite, she thought it w
as a patch of snow along the left side of the ravine. Only as she got closer did she realize that it was rock, not ice, that gleamed palely in the fading light. The pile of rubble she crawled over to reach the granite had been made by man. The shattered, rust-encrusted remains of a shovel proved it.
Breathing quickly, shivering, Mariah knelt next to the small hole in the mountainside that had been dug by a man long dead. Inside, a vein of quartz gleamed. It was taller than she was, thicker, and running through it like sunlight through water was pure gold.
Slowly Mariah reached out. She couldn’t feel the gold with her chilled fingers, but she knew it was there. With both hands she grabbed a piece of rocky debris and used it as a hammer. Despite her clumsiness, chunks of quartz fell away. Pure gold gleamed and winked as she gathered the shattered matrix in both hands. She shoved as much as she could in her oversize jacket pockets, then stood up. The weight of the rocks staggered her.
Very slowly Mariah worked her way back down the side ravine to the point where she had left her horse. It was waiting patiently, tail turned toward the wind that searched through the main ravine. Mariah tried to mount, fell, and pulled herself to her feet again. No matter how she concentrated, she couldn’t get her foot through the stirrup before she lost her balance.
And her pocket was jeering at her again. It had jeered at her before, but she had ignored it.
Mariah realized that it was the cellular phone that was jeering. With numb fingers she groped through the pieces of rock and gold until she kept a grip on the phone long enough to pull it from her pocket and answer. The rings stopped, replaced by the hushed, expectant sound of an open line.
“Mariah? Mariah, it’s Cash.”
The phone slid through Mariah’s fingers. She made a wild grab and caught the unit more by luck than skill.
“Mariah, talk to me. Where are you? Are you warm enough?”
“Clumsy. Sorry.” Mariah’s voice sounded odd to her own ear. Thick. Slow.
“Where are you?”
“Devil’s Peak. But isn’t hell warm? I’m warm, too. I think. I was cold after the rain. Now I’m tired.”
The words were subtly slurred, as though she had been drinking.
“Are you on the north side of Devil’s Peak?” Cash asked, his voice as hard and urgent as the wind.
Mariah frowned down at the phone as she struggled with the concept of direction. Slowly a memory of the map formed in her mind.
“And… west,” she said finally.
“Northwest? Are you on the northwest side?”
Mariah made a sound that could have meant anything and leaned against her patient horse. The animal’s warmth slowly seeped into her cold skin.
“Are you above timberline?” Cash asked.
“No.”
“Are there trees around you?”
“Rocks, too. Gray. Looked like snow. But wasn’t.”
“Look up the mountains. Can you see me?”
Mariah shook her head. All she could see was the ravine. “Can’t.” She thought about trying to mount the horse again. “Tired. I need to rest.”
“Mariah. Look up the mountain. You might be able to see me.”
Grumbling, Mariah tried to climb out of the ravine. Her hands and feet kept surprising her. She persisted. After a while she could at least feel her feet again, and her hands. They hurt. She still couldn’t claw her way out of the crumbling ravine, however.
“I can’t,” she said finally.
“You can’t see me?”
“I can’t climb out of the ravine.” Mariah’s voice was clearer. Moving around had revived her. “It’s too steep here. And I’m cold.”
“Start a fire.”
She looked around. There wasn’t enough debris in the bottom of the ravine for a fire. “No wood.”
She shivered suddenly, violently, and for the first time became afraid.
“Talk to me, Mariah.”
“Do you get lonely, too?” Then, before Cash could say anything, she added, “I wish… I wish you could have loved me just a little bit. But it will be all right. I found the mine and now it’s yours and now you have to believe me… don’t you?” Her voice faded, then came again. “It’s so cold. You were so warm. I loved curling up against you. Better each time
… love.”
Cash tried to speak but couldn’t for the pain choking him. He gripped the phone so hard that his fingers turned white. The next words he heard were so softly spoken that he had a hard time following them. And then he wished he hadn’t been able to understand the ragged phrases pouring from Mariah.
“It will be all right… everything will be fine… it will be…”
But Mariah was crying. She no longer believed her own words.
A horse’s lonesome whinny drifted up faintly from below. Cash’s horse answered. He reined his mount toward the crease in the land where Mariah’s tracks vanished. Balancing his weight in the stirrups, he sent his horse down the mountainside at a reckless pace. Minutes later the ravine closed around Cash, shutting out all but a slice of the cloudy sky.
“Mariah!” Cash called. “Mariah!”
There was no answer but that of her horse whinnying its delight into the increasing gloom.
Instants after Cash saw Mariah’s horse, he saw the dark splotch of her jacket against the pale swath of granite. He dismounted in a rush and scrambled to Mariah. At the sound of his approach, she pushed herself upright and held out her hands. Quartz crystals and gold gleamed richly in the dying light.
“See? I’ve pproved it. Now will you b-believe me?” she whispered.
“All you’ve proved is that you’re a fool,” Cash said, picking Mariah up in a rush, ignoring the gold that fell from her hands. “It will be dark in ten minutes – I’m damned lucky I found you at all!”
Mariah tried to say something but couldn’t force herself to speak past the defeat that numbed her more deeply than any cold.
Her gift of the gold mine had meant nothing to Cash. He still didn’t believe in her. She had risked it all and had nothing to show for it but the contempt of the man she loved.
He was right. She was a fool.
16
Broodingly Cash watched Mariah. In the silence and firelight of the old line shack she looked comfortable despite the stillness of her body. Wearing dry clothes and his down sleeping bag, sitting propped up against the wall, coffee steaming from the cup held between her hands, Mariah was no longer cold. No shivers shook her body. Nor was she clumsy anymore. The pockets bulging with gold-shot rock had been as much to blame for her lack of coordination as the cold.
She’s fine, Cash told himself. Any fool could see that. Even this fool. So why do I feel like I should call her on the cellular phone right now?
That’s easy, fool. She’s never been farther away from you than right now. Your stupidity nearly killed her. You expect her to thank you for that?
Flames burnished Mariah, turning her eyes to incandescent gold, heightening the color that warmth had returned to her skin.
“More soup?” Cash asked, his voice neutral.
“No, thank you.”
Her voice, like her words, was polite. Mariah had been very polite since they had come to the line shack. She had protested only once – when he stripped her out of her damp clothes and dressed her in the extra pair of thermal underclothes he had brought in the backpack. When he had ignored her protest, she had fallen silent. She had stayed that way, except when he asked a direct question. Then she replied with excruciating politeness.
Not once had she met his eyes. It was as though she literally could not bear the sight of him. He didn’t really blame her. He would break a mirror right now rather than look at himself in it.
“Warm enough?” Cash asked, his voice too rough. It must have been the tenth time he had asked that question in as many minutes, but Mariah showed no impatience.
“Yes, thank you.”
Cash hesitated, then asked bluntly, “Any cramps?” That question was ne
w. He heard the soft, ripping sound her breath made as it rushed out.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m fine. Everything is…” The unwitting echo of Mariah’s past assurances to herself went into her like a knife. Without finishing the sentence, Mariah took a sip of coffee, swallowed and regained her voice. “Just fine, thank you.”
But her eyelids flinched and the hands holding the coffee tightened suddenly, sending a ripple of hot liquid over the side. A few drops fell to the sleeping bag.
“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, blotting at the drops with the sleeve of her discarded shirt. “I hope it won’t stain.”
“Pour the whole cup on it. I don’t give a damn about the sleeping bag.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Kind? Good God, Mariah. This is me, Cash McQueen, the fool you wanted to marry, not some stranger who just wandered in off the mountain!”
“No,” she said in a low voice, blotting at the spilled coffee.
“What?”
There was no answer.
Fear condensed into certainty inside Cash. With a harsh curse he put aside his own coffee cup and sat on his heels next to Mariah.
“Look at me.”
She kept dabbing at the bag, refusing to look at him.
Cash’s big hand fitted itself to her chin. Gently, inexorably, he tilted her face until she was forced to meet his eyes. Then his breath came out in a low sound, as though he had been struck. Beneath the brilliant dance of reflected flames, Mariah’s eyes were old, emotionless, bleak.
He looked into Mariah’s golden eyes, searching for her, feeling her slipping away, nothing but emptiness in all the places she had once filled. The cold tendrils of fear that had been growing in Cash blossomed in a silent black rush, and each heartbeat told him the same cruel truth: she no longer loved the man whose lack of trust had nearly killed her. She couldn’t even stand the sight of him.
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