by Kay Hooper
But she managed to. Barely. She didn’t know why he wanted her to wait outside the opening, but remained there and watched as he disappeared into the darkness of the cave. It was only when he came back out less than five minutes later that his absent comment told her why.
“I didn’t think he’d had time to rig anything, but it never hurts to be sure,” Drew murmured, taking her hand and leading her to the opening.
“Rig—you mean a booby trap?” As soon as the words were out, Spencer reminded herself yet again that he’d warned her from the beginning how dangerous this could be. Still, she was shaken—and not only by the threat of that. She had stood there, wrapped in sensual thoughts and feeling absolutely no sense of danger, and had calmly watched Drew walk into what might very well have been a deadly trap.
Before he could answer her question, she snapped, “Don’t do that again, dammit.”
Drew looked down at her in surprise. “Do what?”
“Just—just walk in when you know it could be a trap. What if it had been?”
“Worried about my hide?” he murmured, smiling a little.
Spencer felt herself flush, but met his eyes very steadily. “Yes.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his face curiously still, then smiled again. “Sweetheart, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for half my life. I’ve probably studied every kind of device ever used to defend anything of value, from the state-of-the-art technology smugglers use to guard their shipments to the traps the pharaohs’ engineers designed to protect their tombs. And I’m never careless.”
It reassured her—but only a little. Yes, he did know what he was doing; she didn’t doubt that. But she had sensed the depth of his loathing for Stanton, and she had a very strong feeling that the hatred was a mutual one. Enemies could be vicious. If Stanton knew who was tracking him . . .
Abruptly, she said, “Does he know? Does Stanton know it’s you who’s after him?”
Drew hesitated, then said, “Probably.” His hand squeezed hers gently and he pointed his flashlight ahead to show them the way as he led her into the cave.
As they went in and the thick stillness of immense weight above their heads closed about them, Spencer told herself with steely determination that she’d be alert to possible danger from now on and not just meekly expect Drew to do everything. Unlike him, she hadn’t been exposed to the kinds of danger that would have sharpened her instincts, but fear for him was a very strong and primitive spur to learn what she had to in a hurry.
The passage they walked through was wide enough for them to go side by side, with smooth stone curving above them several inches higher than the top of Drew’s head, and turned gently in a slow arc to the west of the point where they’d entered. Beneath them the floor was stone with a thin, grainy top coat. The air was heavy and very dry, with no circulation at all.
In a low voice that nonetheless echoed softly, Drew said, “Only one opening to the outside, and that was blocked off. This place was airtight until Stanton broke in. With no oxygen or moisture, it was a perfect place to hide something valuable. Spencer, if you start to feel dizzy, tell me. There hasn’t been time for much fresh air to get in here.”
“All right.” She kept her eyes fixed on the circle of his flashlight ahead of them, aware of the thickness of the air but not troubled by it. Not yet, at least. “I wonder how long Kurt searched before he found this place? When he sent those letters to his friend, I think he’d been in Innsbruck for a couple of months already.”
“I’ll bet it took him that long, at least,” Drew said.
Spencer opened her mouth to say something else, but whatever it was remained unsaid. The passage had taken a sharp left-hand turn and abruptly dead-ended, and in the glow of Drew’s flashlight a life-size figure of a man stood squarely before them with his back against the wall. He stood as if at attention, straight and proud, with both hands held out together at his waist, palms up. Lying on his hands was a lidless box made of the same grayish material he was constructed of, and it was empty.
Standing beside Drew in silence, Spencer watched him reach out and touch the statue, rubbing a thumb consideringly along the edge of the empty box. “A kind of plaster,” he said. “Heavy enough so it wouldn’t be easily moved. And it definitely dates from the early sixteen hundreds.”
“The box is the right size to hold the cross,” she said softly. “The Hapsburgs supposedly kept it in a carved wooden box a little smaller than that plaster one. All Stanton had to do was pry the wooden box out and carry it away.”
“Funny,” Drew mused, “that Kurt went to all this trouble when he intended to get the cross later. He could have just left the box on the floor here—why the statue?”
Spencer, who had been studying the face of the statue, was frowning to herself, and answered absently. “Maybe it was vanity. That’s him, Drew. It’s Kurt. In that book about the Hapsburgs, there was a painting of him, and the face of this statue looks just like . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“What?” Drew asked, looking at her in the dim backwash of light from his flashlight.
She was concentrating so hard on trying to figure out what was bothering her about the plaster face that Spencer was hardly aware of how difficult breathing had become. “I don’t know. It looks like Kurt Hapsburg, even to the little scar bisecting his left eyebrow, but it isn’t quite right.”
“Portraiture isn’t an exact art,” Drew reminded her. “Different artists interpret subjects in different ways.”
The comment seemed to ring in Spencer’s ears, and she thought with total clarity, That’s it. But she didn’t know why she thought that, or what it meant, and she had no idea why a little voice in her head kept insisting in an annoyingly repetitive way that there was something important she knew if she could only remember what it was.
“Spencer?” Drew reached out to her quickly, then swore softly and lifted her into his arms. He turned away from the statue and carried her back along the passageway, not pausing until be slipped through the narrow opening and out onto the sunny ledge.
She blinked at the bright light, vaguely surprised to find herself sitting on the ledge. Drew was supporting her as he knelt beside her, and as the dizziness began to recede she felt like an absolute fool. A lot of help she’d be in case of danger—she couldn’t even stay alert enough to know when she was running out of oxygen!
“Take deep breaths,” he urged.
Spencer obeyed, breathing slowly and deeply until the scenery stopped dancing, then looked up at him. “I’m sorry, I should have realized.”
“It usually creeps up on you the first couple of times,” he said in a reassuring tone, though his eyes remained watchful. “After that you learn to be wary. Better now?”
“Much better, thanks.”
Drew eased back onto his heels, but one hand remained on her thigh as he turned off the flashlight and clipped it to his belt. “Something was bothering you about the statue.”
She frowned. “Yes, but I can’t remember what it was.”
He half nodded. “You probably will eventually. If we have time, we can come back up here later on. Once the wind shifts, it should clear out all the bad air in the cave. In any case, it’s a pretty good bet the statue will end up in a museum as soon as the authorities know about it.”
The little voice Spencer had been hearing was only a whisper now, maddeningly indistinct, and she felt frustrated because she was sure there was something . . . She glanced down at Drew’s hand on her leg, and all thoughts of the statue faded away.
His hand, elegant and powerful, lay over her upper thigh in a light, casually possessive gesture. It was a very simple thing, but intimate as well, the unthinking, familiar touch of a lover. Vivid memories rose in her mind with suddenness that stole her breath, memories of how those strong hands had touched and caressed her, how they had held her beneath him. Her body responded to the mental images so instantly that she felt overwhelmed, and she could only look up at him in helpless l
onging.
Drew went very still, blue heat flaring in his topaz eyes. His hand tightened, then began to slowly stroke her thigh as if obeying a compulsion. “One of these days,” he said a bit thickly, “you’re going to look at me like that, and I won’t give a damn if we’re on a public sidewalk—or a narrow ledge on the side of a mountain.”
“I can’t help it,” she murmured, his rough voice sending an even stronger wave of desire through her.
He leaned over to kiss her with a hard brevity that made strained control obvious, then rose to his feet and grasped her hands to pull her gently up. “Just hold the thought long enough for us to get off this bloody mountain,” he told her.
Spencer followed him to the rim of the ledge, her hand held firmly in his, and she didn’t even look back at the cave. Nor did she hesitate to start down the cliff despite her fear of heights. All her attention, all her awareness, was focused on Drew. Everything else in her world had shrunk to a dim, distant unimportance.
Drew went first, staying close behind her as they picked their way slowly down the cliff face. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous climb since there were numerous solid handholds and sturdy granite outcroppings, but he’d seen the flicker of nervousness in her eyes before they’d gone up and knew that the trip down would test her courage even more.
It was a test he knew she would pass with flying colors. She had guts—and she didn’t even know it. She also had a trick of looking at him in a way that was so intensely erotic it sent a jolt of urgent, almost primal need through him.
If he had ever really believed that possessing her would be enough, he knew now he’d been wrong. He wanted her even more fiercely, despite a night of passion so incredibly fiery and satisfying he’d felt raw with the pleasure of it. The pleasure of her. Yet desire was like a tide inside him, ebbing with completion and then almost immediately surging again. She had only to look at him in that intimate way, her eyes soft and dreamy, lips slightly parted, and he could hardly think for wanting her.
He had been able to concentrate for a while today, his mind grappling with the potential danger of Stanton, his own determination to get the cross for Spencer and the surprising and unsettling things she’d told him in the night. But his concentration was shaky at best where she was concerned, and more than anything else he wished it could be just the two of them with no outside pressures.
Drew wanted time with Spencer. He’d hated leaving her in bed alone this morning. What he’d wanted was to keep her in bed, to wake her by making love to her slowly, to watch her body come alive under his touch, her eyes glow with desire. Looking down at her as she lay curled on her side sleeping, he had felt fascination and desire and an aching in his chest. She was such a delicate thing to hold so many varied emotions, from the muted pain of self-doubt to the astonishing force of her passion. She was so beautiful, and she’d worked her way under his skin a second time until he could barely think of anything but her.
He had wondered then if she loved him, because her response in bed was so sweetly wild and giving, and because she had softly agreed that she belonged to him. Belonged to him . . . What did that mean? She had loved him once—he believed that—and yet had run from him in a panic to marry a man she hadn’t loved, a man with whom she’d felt safer. That had been ten years ago, yes; she’d been a schoolgirl frightened of trying to live up to the image of him she’d fixed in her mind, and the image of herself she believed was in his mind. It was different now. Her self-confidence was tenuous, but she was no schoolgirl dreaming of princes and she wasn’t wary or nervous of him as she’d been then.
But love? She hadn’t said it, and he thought that if she had loved him she would have said it last night. It had been a night of honesty, after all, and she hadn’t flinched from showing him her vulnerability. He wondered if, between them, he and Reece Cabot had cured her of the desire to love anyone. One man had hidden his feelings so completely that she’d thought him remote, while the other had run off with her in a violent tempest of emotion that had barely outlasted the honeymoon.
Perhaps this time Spencer had opted for uncomplicated passion.
As for his own feelings, Drew avoided defining them. She was under his skin, yes, and his hunger for her seemed stronger with every passing hour, but he couldn’t forget what he’d felt when Allan had handed him the ring and told him Spencer had eloped with another man, even though it had been ten years ago. It had been like a hot knife in his gut, the pain so bad it had taken him months to stop hurting. He never wanted to feel that again, never wanted to be so vulnerable to someone else that the loss of them was devastating.
He wanted her, though, with a desire he couldn’t control. He needed her. In his bed, her mouth lifting for his kisses, her silky heat sheathing him. He wanted more of her slow smiles, her sensual gazes, her sweet passion.
Now, one hand on her hip guiding her as they climbed slowly down the cliff face, he watched her supple movements and every muscle in his body slowly tightened. He’d never have believed that climbing down a rocky cliff could be erotic, but he was coming apart just watching her, his attention so fixed on her that it must have been blind instinct that kept him from putting a foot wrong and falling. That look of hers before they’d started down had inflamed his senses, but he’d thought he could keep his hands off her at least until they returned to Innsbruck.
It would take a couple of hours, less time than had been needed to find the cave—but more time than he could stand. His control was splintering even now, his heart pounding, breath rasping in his throat, his body heavy with an ache that would only grow and grow until it became unbearable, until he had to lose himself in her or go mad.
Drew felt solid ground beneath his feet not a moment too soon, and put both his hands on Spencer’s hips to guide her the rest of the way. She took a step away from him, but he immediately pulled her back against him.
“The horses—” she began, then broke off with a gasp when she felt him behind her. “Drew?”
He wrapped his arms around her, his mouth nuzzling her hair aside to seek the warmth of her neck. “I want you,” he muttered in a thick, rasping voice.
Spencer went weak, all the strength draining out of her legs as if a dam had burst. Even through the barrier of their jeans she could feel the pulsing hardness of his arousal, and the hands that closed over her breasts were shaking a little, almost rough, urgent with need.
When he’d told her to hold the thought until they got off the mountain, she’d assumed he meant back to Innsbruck. He’d seemed perfectly in control, and though her own desire had been feverish it hadn’t occurred to her to suggest anything else. Even if she’d considered what making love out under the open sky with him would be like—which she hadn’t—her imagination would have balked at the idea of a man as calm and elegant as Drew so overcome by desire that he was unwilling to wait for the comfort of a bed or the privacy of a locked door. She would have shied away from the idea herself if she’d been given a moment to think.
He didn’t give her a moment. His hands and mouth seduced her, the hunger in him so strong and immediate that it kindled an instant, answering fire in her. She was trembling, breathless, aching with a desire so imperative she didn’t care where they were or anything else. She was barely aware of being turned and lifted into his arms, of being carried, because his mouth was hard and fierce on hers, and if he’d put her down on solid rock she wouldn’t have murmured a protest.
They were in a kind of valley, a relatively small area where several mountains shouldered against one another in a series of tumbling hills. Clumps of tall trees gave way to rocky outcroppings and patches of thick green grass. Drew put her down on one of the grassy places and immediately began stripping her clothing off.
If she’d been thinking at all by that point, she would have expected him to remove only as much as necessary, because his face was a primitive mask of passion and the look in his burning eyes was almost wild. But Drew wanted them both naked, and their clothing wa
s flung aside carelessly.
Spencer wasn’t aware of the faint chill of the mountain air. The summer sun warmed the ground beneath her and when his body covered hers she was conscious of nothing else. She was as frantic as he was, so desperate to feel him inside her that she was writhing and whimpering beneath him, her arms tight around his neck and her legs lifting to wrap around his hips. Wildfire was racing through her veins, searing her senses, and she moaned into his mouth when she felt the burning hardness of him sink deeply into her body.
Whether it was the primitive influence of the musty earth beneath them and the wide sky above or something equally ancient in them, this time they mated. It was hasty and a little rough, their bodies straining together in an almost silent conflict as old as the mountains that cradled them.
SPENCER WAS SO drained she didn’t want to move. The ground beneath her was hard, but surprisingly cushioned by the thick grass. Drew was heavy, but her body seemed perfectly designed to bear his weight without strain or discomfort, and this time the starkly intimate sensations caused her no shyness or embarrassment at all. She didn’t even think about the fact that they were lying naked on a sunny patch of grass in an area where the odd tourist might well ride or hike through.
She felt his mouth moving against her neck, and then he raised his head to gaze down at her. His forearms were under her shoulders, his fingers tangled in her hair, and there was an expression in his darkened eyes she’d never seen before, almost a look of awe.
“Spencer,” he murmured, and kissed her very gently.
Spencer felt blissfully happy. She wasn’t thinking beyond this moment, and for this moment there were no problems or doubts or questions. She nuzzled her face into his warm throat briefly, then smiled up at him. “We’d better move,” she said, “or you’re going to get sunburned in a very painful place.”