Heartbreak Hero

by Frances Housden

  The plastic rustled in her hand as she said, “I thought you’d still be asleep….”

  He looked at her with the frown she’d come to know well. It crossed his face every time she did something mad. Like rushing out of the hotel at 6:00 a.m. to buy condoms. She shrugged, not wanting to go into detail. “We’d run out and as I was awake I thought…”

  The explanation faltered as she stared past him. “Where on earth did you get the wheels, Kel?”

  He rewarded her with a brief grin, a lopsided curve of his lips that deepened the dimple on his chin. She’d been right to make the cab trip; the way he smiled always got to her.

  Suddenly her memory flashed back more than a year as she noticed he had on the same kind of anorak he’d worn when she’d seen him on TV. It was just before he set off on his last Everest expedition. The one that had taken the lives of two of his companions and almost cost him his own.

  It hurt to think the photographic memory she’d been so proud of had let her down the one time it would have done her the most good. “You’re Kurt Jellic.”

  A frown deepened the creases that had yet to form on Kel’s face. “Guilty as charged. You must know my brother well to catch on so fast.”

  “You could say that.” And then again you might not. She compressed her lips on a howl as he held out his hand.

  It would have been rude not to take it. His hand had the calluses of a man who lived his life in the open, a man who drove steel spikes into rock and ice and knew what it was like to hang on the end of a rope and wait for death.

  The way she did.

  “I’m Kel’s twin. Is he nearby?”

  “No. I’m afraid he’s at the hotel, and sorry, I must go…cab waiting, but I’ll tell him I met you.”

  “Yes, do that. And you can tell him I approve.”

  Ngaire all but ran back to the cab, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. She just sat behind the driver with a hole in her heart you could drive a fist through and a lump in her throat that used to be the part that kept it beating.

  He was Kel Jellic, not Kelvin Johnman as he’d introduced himself that first night on the way to their Australian hotel.

  He’d lied to her. Used her.

  It hurt now to realize she’d been correct when she’d asked Kel if he was following her. She could only have one thing he wanted.

  Te Ruahiki.

  She only hoped the mere was still in her day pack on the floor. She’d just stuffed some money into her jacket and dashed from the room, so pleased with herself and her brilliant idea.

  An idea that could have cost her life.

  Chapter 15

  C areful not to disturb Kel, Ngaire slipped back into the dim mugginess of a room that smelled of him, herself, and the gyrations that had gone on during the long night hours.

  The reminder hit a body blow to her fragile ego.

  Get over it! It was just sex.

  Great sex!

  She’d watched the sun rise on a new day during the short ride back to the hotel. But how many were left to her if Kel had his way?

  The bastard!

  Pushing the door shut, she waited for the slam to excise her anger. The slightly louder swoosh as it settled its width into the frame didn’t cut it, did nothing to ease the temper rippling under her skin the way the first flickers of distant lightning intimate a thunderstorm.

  It hurt to think she had fallen for one of Savage’s lackeys. Had opened herself up to him in all the ways that counted—heart, body and soul. Kel had certainly fooled her.

  She threw the bag with its doughnuts and condoms on top of the pile of souvenirs she’d bought the day before. Nervous energy quickened her pace as she strode to the desk where carelessly, trustingly, she’d left Te Ruahiki for him to find.

  Her angst flew out on the sigh she’d held tight, as her day pack’s weight told her he hadn’t gotten hold of the mere. Yet.

  Clothes hangers scraped along the rod as she peeled the few tops and slacks she’d hung up. Was it only yesterday? She had to get out of there fast, away from Kel, as soon as she could pack.

  Nightstand next, she opened the drawer in case she’d dumped change or keys inside, the way she did at home. The Gideon’s Bible caught her eye. She stared at it considering its weight, then down at Kel’s head on the pillow, sizing them both up.

  Don’t!

  His tousled hair stood up like a kid’s, and his body was sprawled, relaxed, taking most of the bed. At the other end, his feet hung over the bed like a teenager’s during a growth spurt. But there was nothing childlike in the way he’d deceived her.

  Hurt her.

  He must have known who she was all along.

  The bastard! She’d never thought the name Kelvin Johnman suited him, and now she knew why.

  For an undercover thief, he could do with a few lessons in technique. Look at the way he’d muffed the job in Tahiti. But maybe not. Maybe he’d set that up as a way to gain her trust. And nearly blown it. But…

  God, it was confusing! Who was it who’d jumped them last night?

  Tahiti she could understand, but surely the attempts to steal Te Ruahiki in the cave and at Rotorua were over the top when Kel Jellic was traveling with her. Damn, had Savage advertised a reward for the mere on the World Wide Web? She shoved the drawer closed. It glided shut on smooth runners. The sound of the Bible thumping against the inside was slightly more satisfying than the result with their room door.

  “Hey,” Kel rolled, taking the twisted sheet with him. It did nothing to hide the width of his shoulders, or the hair-roughened chest that tapered down to his waist. She watched the rolled edge of percale cotton sheeting keep time with his breathing. White cotton caressed his early-morning erection the way her hands had done last night. What had she been thinking?

  “What you doing up already?”

  The sultry heat in his dark eyes pinned her gaze, an acknowledgement of memories equally as explicit as her own.

  The bastard!

  He leaned up on his elbow and reached out, fingers seductive, beckoning. “Come back to bed, doll. I’m hungry for something more exciting than breakfast.”

  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  She bit back her anger, swallowed it in one piece. Lambasting Kel with the words he deserved would give her new-found knowledge away. Best keep her secret until she’d formed a plan. Until she knew how to handle him in ways that weren’t associated with bed. “No time to fool around. We have to be downstairs in an hour.”

  “I can do fast. I do my best work under pressure.”

  “I’ve seen your best and you are too controlled to do fast. Now, get up. I’ve had my shower so the bathroom is all yours.” His scattered clothes bore witness to the urgency that had driven them, socks and shoes near the door, shirt in the middle of the carpet and, lastly, khakis in a pile by the bed. She kicked them and walked away as they hit the nightstand with a thud that made her wonder what he carried in his wallet. “You need to pick up. This room is a mess and most of it’s yours. I’m going to pack.”

  “Boy, did you get out on the wrong side of the bed.”

  Not only the wrong side, the wrong bed.

  She pretended to ignore him, her attention once more on the pile of shopping yet to be packed. Dragging the bags off the top of her case, she noticed the good-luck sign looking frayed around the edges, and took it as an omen.

  She was feeling slightly frayed as well, but if she put her mind to the problem, she might find a solution before they reached Christchurch and he expected to climb into her bed again.

  Hearing his khakis thump against the nightstand gave Kel a moment’s panic in which he spent cursing his stupidity. Thankfully his luck held and Ngaire didn’t pay attention to the bump of his Smith & Wesson as it hit the nightstand wrapped in khaki.

  He rolled out of bed, giving himself a lecture on the idiocy of allowing his libido to lead him by the nose, among other body parts. He blamed too much sex too many times on the
trot. Great sex.

  Being inside Ngaire was becoming addictive. And made him no wiser than the addicts he wanted to save from the kind of creeps behind kiss-and-tell.

  Not once in this lifetime had a woman responded to him the way Ngaire did. Her pleasure became his, heightening his senses to the extreme. The control she mentioned so easily balanced unsteadily on the edge of a precipice of mutual gratification.

  Damn, he needed to get his mind on something else or his arousal would never let up. Slipping into his shorts gave him a measure of protection against her knowing gaze as he picked up after himself. Since she wouldn’t remedy his problem he’d have to depend on a cold shower to do the trick.

  Last night, before they’d left the hotel in search of dinner, he’d hung some clean clothes in the closet alongside hers. Quick as he could, he collected them and left her to her packing.

  She was finished when he came out of the ensuite, head bent as she chased something in the bottom of a plastic bag. He looked pointedly at his watch. “I told you we had plenty of time.”

  “Good, that means we can have breakfast. I’m starving. I need food and coffee, and more coffee. Lots of hot black coffee.”

  “That sounds like a hangover remedy to me.”

  “It’s a remedy of sorts…but not a solution,” she answered cryptically.

  When he returned, lugging his suit carrier and laptop, a snack appeared to have superceded breakfast. Red case sitting by her feet, she tucked into a doughnut. The half-eaten remains filled one hand and she clasped a package with at least two missing in the other. “Jelly doughnuts, my favorite. Where’d you get those?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out. And I’m not sharing,” she informed him. “You’ll have to find your own.”

  “I didn’t ask you to share.”

  “No, but I saw you looking.” He’d never seen her so hyper before. Her snippy expression would give a terrier scared of losing a bone a run for its money. If it hadn’t looked cowardly, he might have dodged backward a step or two until she finished eating. Instead he asked, “What happened to you? Someone sneak in overnight and give you an attitude transplant?”

  She blasted him with a look that said You should know. And made him relieved that her explanation was so simple.

  “Energy. I’ve been deprived of doughnuts for almost two weeks and I just now realized how much I missed them.” She wiped the powdered sugar off her lips with a tissue.

  He wanted to say that licking was his job, but didn’t fancy his chances with the mood she was in this morning. His ex-wife’s excuse for highs and lows had always been PMS, but then she’d never equaled Ngaire’s sunny personality, not even before they were married. In retrospect he couldn’t remember why he’d wanted to marry her in the first place.

  Liar! The word screamed inside his head, making him acknowledge the truth. You were looking for a family with a regular mom, dad and 2.4 kids to replace the one you never really had.

  Never would have now.

  Why?

  Because as much as he hated to admit it, even to himself, he’d never find another woman like Ngaire. But she was all wrong for him for all the right reasons. “Better check the room before you leave, doll. We won’t be back this way again.”

  “You check, I want to wash my hands.”

  He found the empty box under the sheets on the floor. As he shook the box Leena had given her, it was difficult to hide his smile as he remembered the fun he’d had emptying it. “You can toss that away.”

  He waited for a comment about replacing it, but none was forthcoming. All he got was “Do you think the shop in the foyer will be open? I need some chocolate.”

  That was the last piece of information she volunteered until they reached Mount Cook and stopped at the Hermitage Hotel for the morning tea promised on the schedule, as well as a chance to see New Zealand’s highest mountain.

  From the amount of Hershey’s Kisses Ngaire’d popped on the way there, he doubted she’d want anything more to eat. Of course, he’d been known to be wrong.

  The view from the restaurant was as good as any in the world. But she wanted to see it from outside. He followed her and her camera to photograph the mountains. He was relieved when her enthusiasm got the better of her mood, or all the chocolate she’d eaten sweetened it enough to remember he was there. “Sheesh, the air’s chilly at this level. Though as long as there’s still snow on the mountains I don’t mind much. I was afraid it would have melted farther north.”

  “They’re pretty much snowcapped all year round.” He moved closer but kept her in front, feeling an urge to guard her back.

  Unlike him, she appeared to have pushed last night’s bad guys out of her mind. He couldn’t, not with everything that had happened imprinted on his synapses as clear as if they were playing on a big screen. No, he wasn’t likely to forget a thing from the moment they were accosted, until she fell asleep exhausted in his arms.

  Crescents of long dark lashes had fluttered above her cheek as she slept. He’d watched, the puzzle that was Ngaire spinning in ever-widening circles in his mind, a still unsolved mystery when he gave up, pulled the pillow over his head and ordered his brain to shut up and sleep. It had either been sleep or take her again and again.

  “This is where Sir Edmund Hillary trained for his ascent of Everest, though Mount Cook can’t be nearly as high.”

  He’d become so attuned to her in the last few days, and the tension in her body sang to him, the way her unspoken question leapt out of the statement to prickle the hairs on his neck.

  “Where did you hear that?” he asked tersely, senses alert to the nuances of body language. He ignored the need to look in her eyes, shoving hands fisted like mallets down deep in his pockets to stop from turning her round. Was his imagination running on more fumes than fuel?

  Hell, was it knowing they were in the area his brother Kurt had chosen to build his lodge that made him see problems where none existed? This was the place Kurt had chosen to hide from the media and everyone else, Kel included.

  The tension he’d sensed in his brother had eased lately, as if he was coming to terms with the accident, and the investigation that followed. The open-ended result had been worse than if, as leader of the expedition, they’d found him guilty of negligence.

  Instead, his friends’ deaths hung around his twin’s neck like a rotting albatross he was unable to shake loose. Thank God Kurt seemed to be putting the whole inflammatory business behind him.

  Kel’s mind leapt back to the present when Ngaire waved a colored leaflet under his nose. “It says so in this brochure I got inside the hotel. Though, I actually knew all that when I arrived in New Zealand. Because of my connection, I made a point of learning all I could about the country, long before I got the chance to win my trip. For instance, did you know the mountain was named Aoraki, Maori for the ‘cloud piercer,’ eons before Captain Cook landed on these shores?”

  He wanted to remind her he’d been born in New Zealand, and unlike her he wasn’t just an accidental tourist. Damn, she’d got him acting as if he believed her story, instead of it being a convenient front for the dangerous game they were playing. He wanted to growl that he didn’t give a damn for trivial pursuits, but settled for “Seems all that trivia you squirrel away has paid off.”

  “Well hey, you were paying attention.” She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Easy, isn’t it?”

  She angled her head to look in his eyes, her lashes dark moths fluttering against her cheek. His body tightened. Those eyes of hers were so blue, so innocent, so dangerous. Damn, he’d a feeling he was about to be taken for a ride. Time to jump before she bucked him off and trampled all over him.

  “Since you’re so smart, how ’bout putting your mind to the Chinese puzzle we were sent last night.”

  “Sorry. That one I don’t have an answer for, Mr. Johnman.” Her eyes never blinked. “But, would you say this is the same place Kurt Jellic trained for his Everest expedition? Yo
u’ve heard of him, haven’t you? His name’s spelled J-e-l-l-i-c. There was a whole lot of footage about him on TV when the tragedy was in the news. Hardly surprising when he’d lost one of the richest men in the U.S.A., not to mention his beautiful wife, over a ravine.”

  She’d won that round, tossed him onto his ass, and the fall was every bit as hard as he’d imagined, for he couldn’t deny it. He hadn’t needed a big-screen TV to live through it vicariously; his brother’s problems had followed him day and night.

  Kurt’s pain was his pain and vice versa.

  “So, where did you meet my brother?”

  Ngaire hadn’t expected it to be this easy, and it brushed at the rough edges of her chagrin. “So, you admit your name is Kelvin Jellic?”

  His jaw squared. Damn! He wasn’t happy about being caught, but it looked like he intended toughing it out. “No, actually it’s Kelman Jellic.”

  “Kelman. It suits you. So tell me, Kelman Jellic, what exactly do you want from me?” For the whole of their journey to the Hermitage, she’d meditated in an attempt to find her ki, to feel centered again, focused.

  For once it hadn’t worked.

  Inside, contained anger threatened to break out from behind the placid mask she’d assumed. Instead, she circled with Kel, two opponents parrying on a mat made of words with hidden nuances.

  The next point was Kel’s. “What do I want?” A flame, cold as ice, lit his eyes. She felt it in the slow burn of his perusal touching her body. Felt it deep inside, in the places he’d taken as his own. “Seems to me, I’ve had it all, but you know what I’m like, doll, always greedy for seconds.”

  With one look, he’d added a sexual slant to her question, and it was humiliating how easily it had been achieved. She shifted her stance, gave herself a little space, ultra aware of the softly clinging cotton knit against her breasts. And the way her pants brushed against her skin from hip to thigh. It felt like his palms had, sweeping over and over, driving her mad with wanting.