“C’mon, kids, time to descend,” he urged them quietly as he came up and put a hand on each of them. “And I want you to take your time. You got too much to lose if you don’t. Let’s get on with it….”
Fear ripped through Kulani. She glanced up sharply. Dev’s dark green eyes glittered with a burning look that made her feel simultaneously protected and hungered for. His kiss had been galvanizing and unexpected. But then, there was little to this man that was predictable, Kulani decided. He was surprising—all the time. She saw the look in Dev’s eyes soften. Her heart thumped once as he moved over to her.
The darkness was descending on them in earnest. “I’m just going to check your gear,” he told her in a low tone, his hands moving methodically, expertly, across her harness, the lines and their attachments.
Kulani trembled. His touch was brisk and professional. Nothing like moments before. “I can’t figure you out,” she whispered unsteadily. She watched him as he continued to lean over her, double-checking the harness system.
He chuckled and slowly raised his head. There were inches separating them. He could smell the fragrance of her skin. The taste of Kulani lay on his mouth like honey. He wanted her. All of her. “Me? I’m hard to figure out? I thought I was pretty forthcoming.”
Kulani stepped away when he was done. “My turn,” she said, and began to check his harness.
Grinning recklessly, he held up his arms so she could lean from one side to the other as she gave him one last safety check. “Far be it for me to stop you.”
“You’re impossible, Hunter.”
“Yes,” he agreed with a grin, “and you like me for it.” And you need me.
“I forgot to add egotistical to the growing list.” Kulani stepped away. It was so easy to be in his powerful, sunlike radiance. Far too easy, Kulani warned herself. She couldn’t ignore the pulse fluttering at her throat. Dev’s presence was enticing. Promising. He offered her hope when she’d had none.
Glancing over the ledge, which was covered with knee-high ferns, Kulani smiled a little. “Hunter, you’re like all the rest. Once this mission is done, you’ll be outta here like a shot. I know your type.”
He saw the challenge in her eyes and the mirthful grin on her lips as she made sure the fine, thin leather gloves fitted her tightly. Her fingers were long and beautiful. In a few minutes, he knew they would become bloodied. The thought of anything cutting into her golden flesh made him flinch. Dev wished that Kulani wouldn’t come along, but he knew it was too late to throw up an argument to stop her. She’d asked for his help and that was the one thing he couldn’t refuse her. Somehow, she’d found his Achilles’ heel when she’d said she needed him.
“Well,” he said in a silken tone as laid his hand on her shoulder, “I enjoy proving people wrong. You think you’re going to get rid of me, Ms. Dawson?”
His fingers sent tiny ripples of pleasure across her shoulder and Kulani savored his touch. His eyes were bright with laughter and challenge, and she saw the playfulness in them. “I didn’t say I wanted to get rid of you. All I said was that you’d leave the instant this mission is accomplished, that’s all.”
Gently, he ran his fingers down one of her long, thick braids. “I’m going to enjoy proving you wrong. Again.”
Her scalp tingled wildly. Dev had barely grazed her hair and yet his touch created a delicious ripple that moved all the way to her heart. Dev was so alive. So virile and strikingly handsome. That heart-stopping smile of his charmed her. “You should be paid to sell things,” Kulani said, “because you have a way of making people believe whatever you say.”
If he didn’t step away, he was going to kiss her again. This was not the time or place, as much as Dev wished it were. He allowed his gloved hand to fall to his side as Cappy walked over to them.
“Just remember that last kiss,” Dev murmured darkly, and then gave her a devastating smile meant only for her.
Kulani nodded to Cappy as the old man placed his hand on her back. It was time.
“You okay?” he demanded gruffly.
“As okay as I’m going to be,” she said. She positioned the night goggles over her eyes. Wrapping her gloved hands around the black nylon line, Kulani tested it against the block and tackle around the tree twenty feet away. It felt strong and solid. Cappy walked her to the ledge, the wet ferns swatting around their legs.
“Okay, take it easy on the descent. You know what you have to do—make your way down through the brush and ferns living on the sides of this slick, moldy wall. Feel your way, Kulani. Just remember, if you lose your balance or something breaks free and you start a free fall, I’ll be up here. We’ll stop you. You just hang on.” His fingers dug deeply into her shoulder. “I know you’re afraid. I know you’re remembering the last climb with Stephen.”
Kulani nodded. She could barely see the edge of the wall, but she could feel it with the heel of her boots. The surface was wet and slippery. Above them, the clouds were churning darkly and she knew they carried the bad news that more rain could hit at any time now. “I’m ready, Cappy.”
“Good luck.” He stepped away as she took the line in hand and moved the rest of it through her harness.
At the last moment, Kulani looked up. Up into the face of Dev Hunter, who stood tensely just behind Cappy. His face was shadowed, but she saw worry in his eyes. Worry for her. It was a good thing he didn’t know she was more worried about him than herself. Taking a deep breath and then releasing it, Kulani eased first one foot and then the other against the lava wall. Everything held as she stood suspended over the twenty-two-hundred-foot cliff, with nothing but a nylon line and her own experience keeping her from falling to her death.
Chapter Eight
Dev cursed richly. The tropical storm, which would come in bands of pouring rain, struck just as he shoved off from the lip of the ledge. Below him, Kulani struggled through bushes that grew out of the lava wall and ranged from three to ten feet wide. Because of the large sizes, some could not be avoided. He heard Kulani pounding a piton into the wall and knew she would then place a carabiner on it and slide the line through it. After carefully lowering herself another hundred feet, she would place the next piton and begin the process all over again. In this way, they would inch down the wall. As Dev descended, he found out quickly how important the bushes were as handholds when there were none to be found on the slick, moldy walls of the canyon. Dev knew hammering pitons in the growing darkness was challenging. The night-vision goggles helped tremendously. One miss and Kulani’s hand would be injured. It would require her complete concentration to place each wedge safely into the rock. But the brunt of this work rested on Kulani, who was suspended a hundred feet below him, leading the way. He had the easy part—just following the line down the cliff that she was putting in place with the pitons and carabiners.
Minutes after the storm struck, the rain slashed almost horizontally at Dev. The darkness was complete now. They did not dare use any form of light to make it easier to see where their next handhold might be. Everything must be done by touch and night goggles. His senses became quickly oriented by his grasping, searching hands. The rain was cold and jarring. The sleek black nylon uniform he wore repelled a lot of the water, but not all of it. All too soon, Dev felt raw moisture seeping in above his turtleneck, chilling his skin.
Wind came in breath-stealing gusts, howling up the long, narrow canyon and sounding like a banshee wailing out her grief. The gusts pounded him savagely, like a giant’s fists pummeling his suspended body. He was repeatedly swung this way and that by the brutal wind, batted around like a rag doll at the whim of the weather. Worse, the rain made his fingers slick and it became difficult to hunt for the next stabilizing piton and carabiner that Kulani had placed earlier.
As he ran his line through the next carabiner and continued to descend, he had to pull his line above him through the one overhead. Because the line was wet, it would drop heavily toward him. Then the wind would rip it out of his hands, and it took pr
ecious minutes to gather it all back up in a coil so that he could hang it on one of the snaps from his belt to use later. The whole process was painstakingly slow.
They each wore a headset with battery power packs snugly fitted into their belts so they could communicate when necessary. Grunting, Dev twisted around. Sheets of rain pummeled his face and he couldn’t see anything. The cloying blackness of the night made him feel like a blind man. Through his headset, he heard Kulani gasping abruptly.
“You okay?”
“Yeah…everything’s slicker than hell….”
He heard her hammering and knew she was placing another piton in some narrow crack in the lava’s surface. Grimacing, he searched around for another toehold to place the tip of his boot in. The brush was thick. He couldn’t find purchase. “This damned wall is something else,” he grunted, and heard Kulani give a choked laugh.
“Right now I’ll bet El Capitan looks like a walk in the park?”
He chuckled and allowed her husky tone to flow through him. “This is work. Real work. Now I see why it’s going to take us all night to drop a thousand feet.”
“Yeah…slow going. And you can’t hurry,” she huffed. “If I don’t find a deep enough crevice or crack to place the piton in, it’ll work loose and we’ll be in trouble. Trying to find them at night like this is taking more time than I care to give it.”
Dev knew he had to keep communications to a minimum. Cappy also had a headset and was monitoring their every move from above. In this kind of precarious situation, Dev was very glad to have an old hand like him involved.
The wind and rain grew more fierce. Dev wiped the night goggles with his fingers. Fortunately, the goggles not only aided him in seeing the glistening cliff but protected his eyes from the slashing water. Mouth open, he gasped for air as he hunted with his fingers for a good, solid bush that would hold him as he continued edging, inches at a time, down the wall to the next piton and carabiner. With his other hand, Dev followed the trail of line created by Kulani. Her expertise was undeniable, and Dev no longer was sorry she was along. Without her, he admitted, he could never have accomplished this climb. He intended to tell her that once they reached that cave, which seemed a million miles away right now. Kulani was right: this wall was slicker than goose droppings on a rainy day. He grinned tightly as he wrapped his bloody fingers around the roughened trunk of a bush. Giving it a good yank to make sure it would hold him, he released a few inches of his line. This was going to be a painfully long job.
“You okay?” he demanded of Kulani when he heard her grunt.
“Yeah…fine…just tore open my hand is all. No big deal. Off belay. Let me get it bandaged. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to belay on.”
Damn. The last thing he wanted was Kulani injured. “Off belay” meant “stop.” He cringed, thinking of her beautiful golden skin being ripped open by the piton hammer. He could feel warmth flowing over a number of his own fingertips and knew they were bleeding profusely. The leather gloves he wore protected all but the fingertips, which were left open to seek out and feel the grip of the next handhold on a slippery rock. Climbers couldn’t find good purchase if their fingers were encased in leather. He had to be able to tell a good handhold from a bad one, otherwise the risk of plummetting to his death was too real. Fingers always bled—just part of the dues paid when challenging a mountain.
He hung on the side of the wall, his back turned to the weather, gripping a bush on either side of himself to stabilize his body so he wouldn’t swing out and away from the rock. He heard Kulani breathing erratically.
“Got it dressed?”
“Yeah, almost…Damn, this weather is bad!”
“You need to talk to your gods and goddesses about this.”
Chuckling darkly, Kulani said, “But it provides us the perfect cover. There’s no way they can spot us descending in this stuff.”
Dev nodded. Again he wiped his fingers against the goggles that protected his eyes. Cold rain dripped in rivulets across his face, following the line of his jaw. “Damn, I’m cold. How are you doing?”
“So far, so good. I’m chilled, but not shivering.”
He worried now about a new threat to them: hypothermia. It wasn’t something to be taken lightly, either. Hypothermia was a cunning killer. It began its subtle assault on an unsuspecting victim with shivering. And then the mind began to be affected, causing poor judgments to be made—and the wrong decision on this wall could kill them. A person’s reflexes began to worsen over time as well.
Glaring out into the darkness and the unrelenting rain, Dev knew without a doubt that hypothermia was now their number one enemy on this descent. A tropical storm was in fact a small hurricane, with winds below seventy-five miles an hour. Swathes of rain clouds would sweep over them like ocean tides. This first onslaught would probably last an hour, maximum, there would be a lull of an hour or two, and then the second swath would hit. Mentally he calculated that it would take them until dawn, or seven hours, to reach the safety of the cave. That meant they would be soaked three times tonight, with the rains getting colder as the temperature declined.
There was no way to protect themselves against the rain and cold, either, apart from a thin fabric of nylon, a flak jacket and the knapsack each carried. That was it. Damn. As if they didn’t have enough against them! The wind chill was their worst threat. He estimated the gusts to be at fifty to sixty miles an hour as the wind hit the rear wall of Kalalau Valley, then roared straight up the canyon at them.
“Okay!” Kulani gasped, “I’m ready. Belay on?”
“Belay on,” he told her. In climber’s vernacular, that meant “ready to resume climbing.” Just hearing her voice made him feel better. “You let me know if you start shivering, okay?”
She laughed shortly. “Testing.” She jerked the line to indicate the direction in which the pull would occur. “Yeah, right. What are you going to do? Come down and hold me? Dry me off?”
Grinning into the slashing rain, Dev said, “Ready to climb,” he told her. “I’ll do more than that. When we get to that cave, I’m gonna hold you at my side and warm you up.”
Kulani laughed a little. “Descending. Stop talking, Hunter. I need to focus on where the hell I’m going.”
Chastened, he said, “Down rope.”
“Twenty-five feet,” she rasped.
Where was the cave? Kulani was exhausted. A bare hint of grayness was touching the horizon, and as her weary hands and sliced fingers searched for the next bush, and her boots moved to find the next steadying niche, she yearned to escape the icy coldness that had held her in its grip the last two hours. She had hypothermia. She knew it. But she hadn’t said anything to Dev. He would break radio silence every fifteen minutes and inquire as to her health, but she lied every time. There was nothing he could do to help her, anyway. Right now she had to draw on all her experience to get them out of this dangerous situation.
The last of the rain had ended an hour ago, and for that, Kulani was grateful. But where was the cave? She pushed away from the cliff and leaned out from the cliff wall to search the darkness. There! She thought she saw it to her left. Their descent down the wall hadn’t been vertical; they had had to move left and right to make it around massive bushes. Her fingers were numb from the cold and from hammering pitons. She was shivering violently. Her teeth were chattering and she couldn’t stop them.
“Check in,” Dev ordered.
Kulani gulped. She tried to force her teeth to stop chattering. She couldn’t. “I think I see the cave. H-hold on…” she stammered. Twisting her body, Kulani pushed herself away from the wall once again with her booted feet. She swung a good ten feet outward.
“Y-yes!” she crowed triumphantly. “It is the cave!”
“Your teeth are chattering.”
Kulani heard the worry in Dev’s voice. Her feet landed back against the wall and she absorbed the shock by flexing her knees deeply. “I’m okay. The cave’s just below me, maybe fifteen feet. I�
��ll make it. Don’t worry.”
Her hands slipped on the line. For an instant, Kulani dangled limply. Struggling, her movements now sluggish, she hung helplessly in the darkness of space. Exhausted, she calmed herself. It was so hard to think straight! She knew what she had to do. Twisting her body again, she thrust out her hand. Her fingers grazed a bush. There! Instantly, she grabbed at it, but her fingers weren’t working well and she missed. Now she sailed off the wall in a slow-motion semicircle. Cursing softly to herself, she tried to relax. She knew she would hit the wall with her body this time and not her boots. Damn. Preparing for the inevitable collision, Kulani sucked in a breath, and shut her eyes and waited.
Her body swung hard into the wall. A sharp breath of air exploded from her lips. The jarring motion moved up into her head and jolted gratingly across her hips. Momentary pain serrated her entire back. Making a grab, Kulani found and clung to a nearby bush, then sucked in several breaths of air. She was badly hypothermic, she knew. She had to think! She had to plan her next moves carefully or she could die. Dev was descending and she didn’t dare remain static too long. For safety, they had to maintain at least fifty feet of clearance between them. If they got their lines tangled with one another, it could be deadly.
“Kulani?”
It was Dev again. This time there was real worry in his tone.
“I’m okay!” she snapped. “Stop talking to me.”
Struggling wildly, Kulani used the bush to aim her in the direction of the cave, which wasn’t far away. The last ten feet were hellish for her. Everything went in agonizing slow motion. Each time Kulani lifted her arm, she felt like she was moving it through molasses. It took a horrific toll on her bankrupted reserves. Breathing hard, her legs dangling precariously, Kulani finally felt the opening to the cave with the toes of her boots. At last! Just a few feet to go.
Her lungs ached and her breath was fast and chaotic. Hands slipping dangerously on the wet line, Kulani lowered herself quickly onto what she thought was the lip of the cave. Her boots slammed into the rock below her. Out of instinct, she buckled her knees and pitched to the right to roll in order to absorb the shock of her fall. The rock was cold, hard and wet. Kulani let out a gasp as she hit and rolled. The line tangled around her, but again her experience counted. She threw out her legs and arms and came to a stop. Lying flat on her belly, with huge sobs shaking her chest, she realized she’d made it to the entrance of the cave.
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