by Kay Hooper
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
author’s note
Praise for Kay Hooper
“A multi-talented author whose stories always pack a tremendous punch.” —Iris Johansen
“A master storyteller.” —Tami Hoag
“Kay Hooper’s dialogue rings true; her characters are more three-dimensional than those usually found in this genre.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Kay Hooper is a master at painting the most vivid pictures with words!”—The Best Reviews
“Not to be missed.”—All About Romance
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ENEMY MINE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author.
PRINTING HISTORY
Published in 1990 in Great Britain by Mills & Boon Ltd.; 1992 by Silhouette Books
Included in The Real Thing published by Berkley Sensation November 2004
Jove mass market edition / November 2005
Copyright © 1989 by Kay Hooper.
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To Leslie, Who waited very patiently for this, And for Eileen, Who never wailed at me, even though I’m sure she wanted to
chapter one
“PENDLETON! OH, GREAT, that’s just great. It had to be you!”
“Nice seeing you again, too, Tyler. Damn it, will you get your foot off my—”
Tyler found a bit of purchase against his upper thigh and managed to boost herself higher. “Go to hell!” she snapped, holding on to an all too narrow ledge.
“We’re both likely to get there any minute now,” he told her, a little winded but entirely his normal insouciant self. His left hand groped and discovered a murderously narrow crack in the rock about two feet below her shoulders; wedging his long fingers into that, he hung by one hand long enough to remove her foot from his thigh and place it on an almost nonexistent ledge she couldn’t see.
Tyler would have choked thanking him, but she felt more secure.
Kane Pendleton worked his other hand into the crevice and pulled himself higher, the strain bunching powerful muscles beneath his khaki shirt and cording his forearms. Rock splintered a scant few inches from his shoulder, but he paid no attention even when the crack of the rifle echoed down the ravine.
His boots scrabbled for a foothold, discovering one finally, and he was hanging on to the same ledge, showing her white teeth as his tanned face split in a grin. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said cheerfully.
Tyler ducked instinctively as another rifle shot chipped rock above her head, but her voice was as steady as it was fierce. “What’re you doing here, Kane?”
“The same as you, I’d bet. Work your way along the ledge; the one you’re standing on gets wider a couple of feet to your left. Come on, honey, move—that guy can’t keep missing us forever.”
“Don’t call me honey!” she muttered, but began moving cautiously to her left. The ledge beneath her feet was soon wide enough to lend considerable security, and her tense fingers eased somewhat, no longer forced to bear most of her weight.
Since Kane was occupying himself in finding a more secure perch, she risked a glance at him. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see that he had changed not at all in the several months since their last encounter. Only his face, throat and forearms were bared to her sight, and she could see no scars, no recent marks on his flesh.
He was, as always, darkly tanned, his big, broad-shouldered body unnervingly powerful, those beautiful long-fingered hands of his still filled with their amazing strength. He wore no hat despite the heat, and his thick, shining black hair was, as always, a little long and somewhat shaggy.
A black-maned lion, she had always thought, proud and strong in the summer of his life.
Annoyed with herself, Tyler returned her full attention to the task of moving along the ledge, seeking some shelter from the sporadic gunfire far below them. She sent mental advice to the part of her that wanted to look at him, reminding herself that nothing would be different this time, nothing at all.
They were after the same thing—again—and neither would stop until the chalice was found and claimed. By one of them.
It had been a beaten gold necklace last time, she remembered, working her way along the ledge slowly and carefully. And before that—What had it been before that? Oh, yes . . . An uncatalogued Rembrandt offered for sale by a private collector in France.
Three years since their first meeting under the burning sun of Egypt, where they had met and fought for a golden figurine. And during those years they had clashed a dozen times all over the world. Mexico, Budapest, Hamburg, Madrid, the Sudan, Athens, Venezuela, Madagascar. To date, she thought wryly, the honors were evenly split. In twelve face-to-face confrontations, she had come away with the prize six times—and so had Kane.
Tyler found it incredible that she and Kane worked for bitter rivals, two indecently wealthy men who thought nothing of sending their representatives halfway around the world in a hurried and
often dangerous search for certain carefully chosen rare art objects, antiquities and artifacts. She still found it hard to believe that those two men enjoyed a mutual bitter delight in their games of one-upmanship, each spending vast amounts of money to get the objects each coveted—and to get them first.
She could hardly complain that her own part in the games had not been both exciting, adventurous and profitable—all three being reasons she had taken the job in the first place. Her employer had found her in a small antique store in London, where her reputation for possessing an unerring instinct for detecting genuine antiquities over faked ones had grown so that even some museums kept her on a retainer.
Robert Sayers had introduced himself, talked to her for less than an hour and then offered her a job. Tyler had been twenty-three and restless; she had spent most of her life in following her archaeologist father into some of the most remote parts of the world, and her settled life since his death had taught her nothing if not that the gypsy in her was still strong.
She had been ripe for Sayers’s offer.
Her mind in the past, Tyler stepped off the ledge and into thin air. Her fingers scrabbled for a hold and she felt Kane’s hard arm lock around her waist.
“I’d hate to lose you now,” he remarked, his deep voice showing none of the strain he must have felt; he was leaning outward from the cliff face to support her, one hand jammed in a crevice above them—and she was not a little woman.
She managed to regain her fingertip hold on the ledge and get her feet beneath her again. “You can’t lose what you’ve never had!” she snapped, turning her head to glare at him. “And I thought you said the ledge widened.”
His remarkably vivid green eyes were amused. Ignoring her second comment, he responded to the first. “Now that’s a provocative thing to say. A challenge, no less.” His arm tightened around her waist before releasing her. “One of these days—when we have time—we really should explore that. I wonder if I would lose you once I had you.”
Tyler showed him a smile that was all teeth and no humor. “Don’t hold your breath, pal,” she advised.
Kane laughed softly. “Right. The ledge did widen by the way, and it widens again, on the other side of this spur. But we’ll have to go around the tip.”
She looked in the opposite direction and winced, grateful that he couldn’t see her expression. Unnoticed by her, the ledge they’d traversed had swung outward to follow the spur that protruded into the ravine like some granite giant’s elbow. They couldn’t climb higher since the cliff face was sheet-smooth, and they certainly couldn’t descend into the ravine where that gunman waited with his trusty rifle. They had to go on.
“Great,” she muttered.
“Give me your hand,” he instructed, “and stay pressed against the cliff. Try to stretch your foot around to the other side; the ledge should be within reach.”
Tyler usually trusted Kane Pendleton about as far as she could throw a bull elephant, but she didn’t hesitate to give him her hand and follow his orders. If she had learned nothing else of him during their past encounters, she had learned to trust him in times of danger. He might well pull every trick he could think of in order to beat her to whatever they both sought, but he would no more abandon a bitter enemy in trouble than he would his best friend.
She fell somewhere between.
And the strength of his big hand was comforting as she braced one foot on the ledge and stretched the other around the spur, keeping her body pressed to the rock. She searched blindly with that extended foot, holding her breath, feeling the rock dig into her painfully. She was no mountain climber, but this wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to broaden her horizons out of the need to escape something or someone. The survival instinct, Tyler had learned, was a great motivator.
Her foot finally located the ledge, and she was pinned there momentarily while her hand searched for something to hold. Then she was sliding cautiously around the point of the spur, knowing that Kane wouldn’t let go until she felt secure.
“Got it,” she called breathlessly, all of her once more on one side of the spur. She moved along the ledge, pausing once she was a couple of feet away from the point to watch Kane work his way around. Within seconds, he appeared, moving far more easily than she. But then, he was a mountain climber. Among other things.
Securely on her side of the spur, he nodded toward what looked like nothing more than a crooked gash in the face of the cliff. “There’s a cave, and it’s invisible from the bottom of the ravine; if we get inside fast enough, our friend with the gun may lose us.”
Tyler didn’t waste time in working her way toward the cave, but she wondered silently how Kane could possibly know of it. Still, she didn’t doubt his knowledge. Kane, damn his black-hearted soul, was always right. Always. It was enough to give a woman a complex.
She slid into the narrow opening of the cave easily and stood staring, discovering that he could still surprise her.
“Hey, you’re blocking the door.”
Casting an irritated glance over her shoulder, Tyler moved farther into the cave, muttering to herself. Obviously he hadn’t planned to be absent long, because he’d left a lantern on. The welcome scent of coffee filled the small cave, and Tyler’s jaundiced eye took in the creature comforts that Kane always—somehow—managed to scrounge from what anyone else would consider barren wilderness.
A double-sized, double-thick sleeping bag was unrolled welcomingly a short distance from a small fire burning brightly in the center of the roughly ten-by-twelve-foot cave. A backpack leaned against the wall near a rifle, with two plastic jugs of water close by. A camp chair was set up on the other side of the fire, and it was here Tyler sat, frowning at the lantern.
It shouldn’t have surprised her, she thought. Kane had an absolute genius of making himself comfortable wherever fate happened to drop him. He would, she knew, abandon most of his stuff before he moved on, but he’d find more later when he got tired of roughing it. He always did. She had once seen him find the only sleeping bag within two hundred miles. And he’d made it look easy.
“Coffee?” he asked, folding gracefully into a cross-legged position before the fire.
Even though she was thirsty, Tyler was in no mood for pleasantries. “What’re you doing here?” she asked tautly.
Kane poured coffee into a gaily decorated ceramic mug and sipped, gazing at her with thoughtful, shuttered green eyes. “The chalice, of course,” he said, calm. “You didn’t come way the hell out here without a rifle, did you?”
Tyler gritted her teeth. “No, I didn’t come here without a rifle. I dropped it in the ravine when that maniac started shooting!”
Kane shook his head pityingly. “That was hardly the best time to lose your only means of defense,” he pointed out.
“You didn’t have your rifle, either. You left it in here like the rawest tenderfoot.”
“Touché,” he murmured.
She saw the hidden smile and realized he had side-tracked her—again. It was a favorite ploy of his, and one she was ridiculously prone to accept. Determinedly she reclaimed her major grievance. “You won’t get the chalice. I talked to the man who found the cache, and he—”
“Told you he’d give you the chalice if you brought the rest of the stuff back to him,” Kane finished smoothly. He smiled a little as surprise and rage widened her fine amber eyes. His had been a guess, but her reaction was proof enough; they’d both been suckered. “Funny. He told me the same thing.”
Kane sipped his coffee and watched her while she absorbed the implications. Tyler St. James was nothing if not quick, and Kane enjoyed the play of emotions across her delicate, expressive face. He remembered those tense moments on the cliff face and kept a grin off his own face with an effort. How many women, he wondered, could have spit curses at a man while dangling from a cliff by her fingertips? With someone shooting at her?
Not many.
She was one in a million, Tyler was. A strong, intelligent woman
with the beauty to launch ships and the courage to follow them into battle. Kane could recall a number of past occasions when he’d been glad to have her at his side when things had gotten sticky. Tyler never waited for the cavalry to come charging to the rescue, but instead grabbed a big stick and started swinging.
She’d very nearly brained him once or twice.
That memory helped alter admiration to uneasiness. Apparently history was about to repeat itself yet again, and the duration promised to be bothersome. A hunter by choice and by nature, Kane certainly had no objections to Tyler’s company on this particular hunt—in theory, that is. He wouldn’t have minded another opportunity to discover what made the lady tick, for one thing. And, as partners went, she was far better than most at this sort of thing, and unlikely to panic if things got rough—and they almost always did at some point.
The trick, he thought, would be to come to some sort of understanding with her. They were rivals, after all, both after the chalice and both determined to have it. Still, with unknown dangers lying ahead of them and the gunman—who might or might not be after the cache, as well—possibly tagging along, two stood a better chance than one of making it.
Kane met that amber gaze, reflecting that he’d never met another woman who hid her thoughts so well. She made no secret of her emotions, but the thoughts behind them remained enigmatic. One in a million.
Her musical, deceptively gentle voice was even. “We both have the same information. The same directions to where the cache is hidden. So it’s a race.”
“Is it?” Kane freshened his coffee, frowning a bit. Apparently going off on a tangent, he said, “I was out reconnoitering when I saw you coming along the ravine. Then that shooter chased you up on the cliff face. Since you and I were obviously both after the chalice, I thought it’d be smarter if we teamed up.”
“Really?”
Kane kept his gaze on the coffee; he wasn’t sure that his ability to hide his thoughts was as good as hers. “Why not? We make a good team. When we aren’t trying to con each other six ways from Sunday, that is. This clearly isn’t going to be a piece of cake, not with a trigger-happy unknown likely dogging our steps and after the same thing.”
