Rainbow Fire

by Emilie Richards

  Dillon was sure that once Kelsey was alone again, she would chide herself for telling him so much. He didn't want to make her regrets worse, so he changed the subject. "When we get to the mine, have a look around while I unload our equipment. Just watch where you set every foot. Jake and I are right good about marking our shafts, but not everyone is. You can be on solid ground one moment and at the bottom of a hole in the next."

  "I'll be careful. What would it do to your reputation if two Donovans ended up unconscious in the Rainbow Fire?"

  Dillon swung the ute around and turned off the engine. His grin was a warm caress. "I can't say about my reputation, but the Donovans wouldn't be able to hold their heads up, would they?"

  Trying to ignore the grin, Kelsey opened her door and stepped down, checking the ground at her feet first. Since they had entered the mining field, the vista had changed. There were conical heaps of dirt as tall or taller than a man scattered over the flat plain. Machinery of all sizes lay in various stages of repair, although some particularly abused pieces looked as if they would never be used again.

  Proceeding with caution, Kelsey wove her way in and out of the accumulated junk that littered the area between machines and hills. Crumpled sheets of corrugated iron, metal barrels, two-by-fours and the sadly rusted shell of a jeep were a maze of man-made eyesores. Something pink caught her eyes, and she bent over to see one lovely pale flower growing in the shade thrown by the jeep's running board.

  "Ready?"

  Kelsey was startled. For a moment she had forgotten all about Dillon. Now he was standing right beside her, and she could feel the brush of his leg against hers as he stooped. She gestured to the flower. "How can anything grow out here?"

  "It's hard to imagine, I know, but millennia ago, when water flowed freely, this was a fertile plain. Before that it was a vast cretaceous sea." Dillon's eyes took on a faraway gleam. "Come swim with me, Kelsey."

  Kelsey straightened and tried to break the spell. "You haven't been out in the sun long enough to get crazy."

  He straightened, too, and moved closer. His words were spoken softly. "Come swim with me, Kelsey. Come see the ocean's treasures."

  And this was the man who was supposed to have pushed Jake down a mine shaft? Kelsey searched Dillon's face. For that moment he was a dreamy-eyed visionary. "Swim under the earth?"

  "Treasures no man has ever seen."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "You've no imagination?" He shrugged. "Then come dig in the dirt with me, and help me gather some specimens of silica."

  For a moment Kelsey had seen a glimpse of the real man under the veneer of casual good humor. An outback dreamer clad in worn denim and rainbow-fire hope.

  She was a dreamer, too, although no one knew it. She had dreamed of the things she would have one day. Now the lure of his dreams was impossible to ignore. "What will I see if I come?"

  He saw her lower the shield that protected her from everything and everyone. Vulnerability and hope shone in her desert-brown eyes. He lifted a hand to her hair, brushing a curl off her cheek before he answered. "We'll descend through time, through the history of this continent. We'll touch an earth no man ever walked upon and swim through seas no whale ever knew."

  She couldn't pull her gaze from his. "And find opals fit for the queen?"

  "Fire and all the colors of the spectrum, eternally doomed to darkness if we don't bring them to the light."

  She wanted to cover his hand and hold the rough tips of his fingers against her skin. Instead she thrust her own hands into her pockets. But she couldn't stop her words. "I'll swim with you."

  "You'll trust me enough to go down with me?"

  She nodded.

  His hand dropped to his side, but his smile warmed her instead. "Then I'll show you a world you haven't seen before."

  Just before caution intruded once more, Kelsey let herself wonder if the world Dillon was going to show her extended far beyond the perimeters of the Rainbow Fire.

  Chapter 5

  ACCESS TO THE Rainbow Fire was by a series of vertical steel ladders. Each nine-foot section was hooked to the section above it and secured to the side of the meter-wide shaft. Kelsey had never seen a narrower ladder. She listened with little enthusiasm to the whine of the generator that would power the lights for her descent.

  "I'll carry a torch, too, just in case something goes wrong with the lights. We've been having problems with a short in the line somewhere. I'll go first." Dillon replaced his battered felt hat with a bright yellow hard hat. He threw one just like it to a doubtful-looking Kelsey. "This is Jake's. I reckon he won't mind you wearing it. You shouldn't go down without one, though nearly everybody does."

  Kelsey set the hat on her head. It was too large, but when she removed the hat to adjust it, she saw she was doomed. It couldn't be made any smaller. On her curls again, it tilted toward her nose, and she pushed it back, aware that that was how she was destined to spend the day.

  Dillon ignored her difficulty. After their moments of intimacy, Kelsey had given him a wide berth every time he had gotten within feet of her. He suspected it was just as well. This was no time for intimacy. Not with a murderer on the loose. Not with a police sergeant who wanted badly to convict him of causing Jake's accident. And not with Kelsey herself suspecting the worst. If Kelsey wanted a return to their former distance, perhaps she was the smarter of the two.

  "Tell me now if you're afraid of heights or closed-in places," he shouted over the noise of the generator.

  Kelsey had a more than healthy respect for both, but she wasn't going to tell Dillon. She knew fear well. It was the taste of copper when you fought an opponent with better speed and coordination than your own. It was watching the edge of a foot coming toward you and knowing you could do nothing but absorb the blow. Fear was something you lived with, and, in the end, you performed better because of it. She made a megaphone of her hands. "I'll be fine."

  "I take it that's your motto. Just promise me I won't have to carry you back up the ladder."

  "No one's ever had to carry me anywhere."

  Dillon thought that was a shame, but he didn't say so. Independence was a virtue, but pushed to an extreme it could be a handicap. He had known his share of old-timers, swagmen who had wandered their whole lives through the outback, living off the land and an occasional station job. Sadly, once, years before, he had also discovered the bones of one, picked clean by dingoes and crows, off on a trail where no one had been for months. Bones and a swag rolled around a fresh change of clothes that protected the tattered photograph of a woman. The man had lived an independent life. But Dillon knew he had died lonely.

  "There's not much I can tell you that will help," he said, pushing the thought away. "Put one foot under the other and hold on tight. I promise the bottom is there."

  She opened her mouth, but Dillon interrupted. "And yes, I know. You'll be fine." Without another word he stepped over the collar of corrugated iron surrounding the shaft and onto the ladder. In a moment he had disappeared.

  Kelsey didn't know how long it took to climb down a fifty-foot ladder, but she did know she was going to wait until Dillon signaled her. The last thing she wanted to do was put a foot on his head. She inhaled deeply, aware that this would be the last fresh air to fill her lungs until she came back out of the meter-wide hole in the earth. A noise from the road running into the field made her raise her head. A red truck, decidedly more battered than Dillon's, was arriving in a cloud of dust. She watched as the truck skirted the field, then pulled up to park near the mine.

  Through the dust-coated windshield Kelsey could see that the driver was Serge.

  Serge of the drunken groping and Jimmy Cagney accent. Serge, who she had felled with one well-aimed blow. Kelsey knew it was too late to start down the ladder. As she waited for him to get out of the truck, she planned her strategy.

  "H'lo, doll."

  "Good morning, Serge." He was still far away, but even from a distance she could see tha
t his eyes were narrowed slits.

  "Whatcha doing here?"

  "Half this mine belongs to my father." Kelsey watched Serge come closer until he was standing only a few yards away. "I'm going down to see it with Dillon Ward. You know Dillon?"

  "Yeah. You laid me out good last night, doll."

  "You were pretty drunk."

  His eyes narrowed further until they were hardly open. "You wanna try it again?"

  She shook her head. Kelsey knew she was on the line. If he thought she was afraid, he would probably come after her. If he thought she was cocky, he would probably come after her even faster. "I don't want to try anything," she said pleasantly. "You're a big, strong man, Serge. I got lucky last night. Of course, I could get lucky again, but I'd rather not take the chance. Neither one of us needs to get hurt over this, do we?"

  "I didn't get that kiss."

  "I'll just bet this town's full of women waiting to kiss you," she said soothingly.

  "Yeah." He watched her for a moment, then turned to walk back toward his truck. Kelsey saw more dust on the horizon, and in a minute Serge had been joined by another man, a beefy blonde wearing shorts and no shirt. Serge gestured toward her, but neither man moved.

  A voice from below interrupted her speculations. Over the noise of the generator she wasn't sure what Dillon had yelled, but she guessed it was the equivalent of "come on down."

  Holding tightly to the shaft rim, she levered herself onto the ladder. She had been up and down ladders before, but never one that was absolutely vertical and narrower than she was. She felt for the next rung. It was lower than she had expected it to be, and she felt her first pang of uncertainty. Still holding tight, she felt for the next rung. Then the next.

  There was no light below, and the light above was only about a yard-wide patch of blue sky. Kelsey kept her eyes focused on the spot of blue as she descended, watching it get smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than an iridescent halo.

  Why weren't the lights on? Kelsey knew if she were descending into light she wouldn't be as frightened. But now her palms were damp, sliding along the dust-slicked aluminum frame as if they were oiled. She didn't dare dry her hands on her jeans for fear she would slip. Nothing stood between her and a quick descent except forty feet of steps.

  From somewhere far below her she heard a curse. She wanted to call down to Dillon for reassurance, but her pride stopped her. Moments ago in the sunlight she had let her emotions rule. Now darkness and fear pulled her back to reality. Dillon was the man accused of trying to murder her father. His charm was worth nothing, and her vulnerability had been inexcusable.

  Her foot slipped on the next rung, and for a moment she hung suspended with nothing but her hands to break her fall. Her wet palms slid down the frame and she slipped several feet before her toe caught another rung. With her whole body trembling, she clung to the ladder, biting her lip. The circle of sky overhead was no larger than a silver dollar, the void below a bottomless pit.

  There was nothing to do but continue down. She could not give in to her fear, could not let Dillon win this round. She had only her courage to see her through. And it was only courage that might help her father.

  Still trembling, she found another rung, then another. She began to count, visualizing the hypnotic series of kicks and punches that began each training session in her karate dojo. Clearing her mind of anything else, she put one foot below the other and descended into nothingness.

  The last step was the longest, and the most difficult. She gasped when her foot dangled in mid-air, finally touching earth. In a split second she felt the press of Dillon's body.

  "Kelsey?" For a moment Dillon's arms closed around her as if to make sure it was her.

  "You were expecting someone else?" She didn't like the sound of her voice. Her struggle for courage was in it.

  He uttered a string of words that taught her Australian cursing was very close to American. "I wasn't expecting anyone," he finished up. "I yelled up to you to stay above."

  "I'm sorry." And she was. Desperately sorry that for no good reason she had just undergone an experience destined to live in her memory forever.

  "The bloody lights went out when I'd gotten about halfway. That short in the cord, I reckon."

  "You've got a flashlight, don't you?"

  Her answer was a thin stream of light playing along mottled rust-colored walls that closed along the narrow passageway. "Turns out the battery's a bit weak. I'm trying to conserve it. I've got candles to light in another chamber." He flicked off the light and returned the mine to darkness.

  Kelsey's reaction was to grab his arm. "Can't you keep it on?"

  "Not while we're standing here. If I do, it won't get me to the chamber where the candles are." Unerringly he touched her cheek in reassurance. "I'm sorry. No one knows what black is until they're at the bottom of a mine."

  She was unwilling to lose that bit of human warmth. She gripped his arm tighter. "No."

  Dillon felt the fine tremors in her hand, the clamminess of her skin. And he remembered the first time he had descended into an unending void. It took little effort or thought to pull her close.

  Kelsey's resistance lasted only a moment. Then, gratefully, she leaned against him. For that instant she was just a woman who needed time to recover. Dillon was strong, yet he held her as if she were precious opal. She felt the rough caress of cotton against her cheek and smelled the fragrance of sunshine. She shut her eyes so she could pretend that when she opened them she would be standing on the good earth instead of inside it. "I'll be all right in a minute."

  "I know." And he knew something else. Few women—few men, either—would have climbed down a fifty-foot ladder into unrelieved darkness, knowing that danger might wait for them at the bottom. Her courage, added to this momentary vulnerability, made her unbelievably attractive.

  It was only a matter of seconds before he felt her body change from pure acquiescence to resistance. The process fascinated him. One moment she was curled against him like the cat who lived on his front porch, the next she was rigidity itself. "Kelsey Donovan," he murmured. "One part warm woman, one part warrior."

  She tried to pull away, but there was no place to go. She had felt comfort change to something else, and she wasn't even sure if the change had radiated from her or from Dillon. "Let's find those candles."

  "Is there anyone you'd trust enough to hold you when you're scared?"

  "You've held me more than any man." Kelsey put her hands against Dillon's chest as a warning. "And I trust you less."

  If her words were true, she'd never had a lover. An unwelcome surge of desire was quickly followed by an even stronger surge of chagrin. Innocence had tantalized the nineteenth-century man. Dillon lived in a nineteenth-century town, but he was a modern man. What throwback part of him was even interested? Under the circumstances, Kelsey was as off-limits as his neighbor's mine.

  "You have reason not to trust me," he said quietly. "I'm not sure I trust myself."

  Kelsey felt the ladder pressing into her back. "Dillon," she warned.

  He forced himself to release her. He stepped back, wishing he could put even more room between them. But there was a small matter of claystone walls keeping them in touching distance. "I'm going to turn on the torch. You can follow me to get the candles or stay here. Because of the shaft it's not as dark here as in the rest of the mine. I can't guarantee the torch will last the whole way."

  She was nerves waiting to jangle. And not just from the darkness and frightening climb. "Why didn't you put in fresh batteries?"

  He smiled a little at her tone. "Because I can find my way around the Rainbow Fire in the dark, and it doesn't frighten me."

  She wanted emotional distance between them, since physical distance was out of the question. "Maybe you wanted to frighten me."

  "If I wanted to frighten you, Kelsey, there would be better ways to do it." He flicked on the light and started along the main drive. "Come on, if you're coming."


  Kelsey watched the weak beam of light bob along the mottled walls. Indecision ripped at her. Then she was following close behind him.

  Dillon decided to act as if nothing had happened. "We keep our equipment stored over this way, in a drive that duffered out. We'll get the candles, then maybe I can find out what's wrong with the lights."

  "That would be nice."

  He chuckled at the understatement. Several feet ahead something caught his eye, and he bent to examine it. Kelsey plowed into him, and he had all he could do to keep from sprawling forward.

  Kelsey was immediately contrite. "I'm sorry." She listened to the hollow sound of her voice bouncing off the walls. "I'm too close, I guess."

  "I'll warn you next time I stop." Dillon straightened and held the object in his hand. It was a comb, and he had never seen it before in his life. He pocketed it to consider later. The beam from his torch wavered sadly. "We'd better get going," he advised, "before we're in the dark."

  "There aren't any beams holding this mine up."

  "The rock holds it up. We don't need timbers. Do you see how cool it is down here? This is why we live underground."

  Somewhere between the ladder and the supply area, Kelsey realized just how defenseless she would be if the flashlight went out, Dillon disappeared into the resulting void, and she was left with nothing and no one to guide her back to the ladder. Even the mine shaft could be blocked to smother all traces of sunlight.

  "I saw Serge before I came down," she said, forcing herself to speak nonchalantly.

  "Serge is a good bloke to stay away from."

  "The town seems filled with people like that."

  "You don't want to stay away from me. I stand between you and total darkness."