The Trusting Game (Presents Plus)

by Penny Jordan

  Terrified, disjointed thoughts flashed through her brain as she was carried swiftly down the steep slope. Daniel telling her how dangerously unstable the shale could be. Daniel pointing out to her the steepness of the mountainside and the depth of the narrow ravine into which the mountain fell.

  Dust choked her nostrils and filled her eyes. The tiny pattering of the moving shale had become a low, menacing roar. She screamed as all the breath was driven abruptly out of her body as she collided with something solid.

  ‘Christa, Christa…’

  Dazed with shock and pain, she realised that her fall had been broken by a large boulder perched precariously on the edge of a narrow shelf of semi-solid slate jutting out of the mountainside.

  She was lying on her side and, while every part of her body ached and throbbed, unbelievably, nothing seemed to be broken.

  As she struggled to sit up she heard Daniel calling out urgently from above her.

  ‘No, Christa, don’t move…Just keep as still as you can.’ Keep as still as she could! Why? What was going to happen? The ledge she was on was very narrow. Below it she could see the steep fall of the mountainside before it disappeared into the ravine.

  She started to tremble violently, her imagination far too readily conjuring up images of what would happen to her if her frail sanctuary should collapse. Was it her imagination—when she moved, did the slate actually move as well?

  ‘I’m going to have to go and get help,’ she heard Daniel saying. ‘While I’m gone, you must try to keep as still as you can…’

  ‘No…’ Christa’s denial was a scream of pure terror. ‘No, Daniel. Don’t leave me here…please stay with me…’

  She was trembling and sobbing, filled with panic and fear at the thought of Daniel walking away from her, at the thought of being left alone here on this narrow, fragile piece of slate which could so easily give way beneath her…Daniel was doing this to punish her; he was going to walk away and leave her…leave her on her own to die…to die alone…He wasn’t going to get help at all. He was…

  ‘Christa, I have to go. I have to get help, but I promise you, if you just listen to me and do as I say, you will be safe. Listen to me, Christa…Trust me…’

  Trust him…A sob of pure hysteria bubbled in her throat. If she had trusted him in the first place she wouldn’t be here now. Trust him? How could she? How could she allow herself to be that vulnerable? How could she open herself to that kind of risk…that kind of pain?

  He could walk away from her right now and leave her here. No one would ever know. He could simply say that there’d been an accident…He could…

  ‘Christa, promise me that you’ll do as I say…that you won’t try to move…’

  How had he guessed that that was what she was already planning? She’d already decided that the moment he had gone she was going to try—she had no idea how—to somehow or other get herself back on firm ground…

  ‘Promise me…’

  Promise him. Trust him!

  She bit her lip to suppress a frantic sob…

  ‘I can’t,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I can’t…’

  ‘Then I can’t leave you,’ she heard Daniel saying above her. ‘And since I can’t rescue you without help, that only leaves us with one alternative…’

  Christa’s heart missed a beat. He was going to leave her. He was going to walk away and leave her here on her own.

  ‘I can’t save you, Christa…but at least I can die with you…’

  Die with her…Christa tilted her head and saw Daniel crouching down on the mountainside above her, starting to make his way down to her…

  ‘Daniel, no…’

  The sound was torn from her throat, an anguished protest that revealed her true feelings.

  He was prepared to die with her.

  ‘I’ll do what you say,’ she told him, tearfully. ‘I’ll stay here. I won’t move…I promise.’

  * * *

  ‘Christa?’

  Dizzily Christa lifted her head and opened her eyes. It seemed a lifetime since Daniel had left her to go for help. At first she had felt strong and brave, buoyed up by the emotional impact of knowing that he had been prepared to sacrifice himself to be with her, but gradually that euphoria had seeped away and in its place had come panic and fear, the temptation to move, to try something, anything to escape so strong that she had come dangerously close to giving in to it.

  But she had promised Daniel, given him her word. Tears clogged her throat. What if, after all, he had been lying to her throughout?

  ‘Christa…’ She tensed as she heard Daniel calling her name a second time.

  Drifting in and out of a state of semi-shock, at first when she heard Daniel calling her name she thought she must be imagining it, and doggedly refused to give in to the temptation to look upwards. A small flurry of displaced shale rattled past her, causing her to tense her body in panic.

  ‘Christa…’

  This time she knew she was not imagining it, even if the sound of Daniel’s voice was coming, not from above, but from behind her.

  Cautiously she turned her head and looked sideways, her heart flooding with joy and tremulous disbelief as she saw Daniel slowly and painstakingly making his way down the steep mountainside towards her, supported by a rope secured around his body, his downward progress agonisingly slow.

  Christa could see now why he had told her not to move. Each careful toe-hold he managed to gain in the shale disturbed its own small avalanche of loose flint, tiny trickles of moving mountainside running together into rivulets which were already gathering force, combining together, increasing in speed.

  Crouching tensely on her narrow ledge watching him, Christa wasn’t aware of the tears flowing down her face, making clean tracks in the dust coating her skin, until Daniel arrived alongside her and told her huskily,

  ‘It’s all right now, Christa…Don’t cry, my love. Everything’s going to be all right. The Air Sea Rescue people are sending a helicopter to pick us up… it should be here soon…’

  Carefully, he eased his way on to the ledge beside her.

  A helicopter…Automatically Christa glanced upwards along the route he had just descended and, although she didn’t say anything, Daniel obviously realised what she was thinking.

  ‘It’s too much of a risk,’ he told her gently.

  Too much of a risk…but he had taken that risk to be with her. Her heart turned over achingly, fresh tears squeezing from her eyes to run helplessly down her face.

  ‘It’s all right…it’s all right,’ Daniel repeated, moving closer to her, reaching out his arm to draw her closer to him.

  He felt warm and safe, the scent of his skin preciously familiar. There wasn’t room on the ledge for Christa to do what she wanted to do, which was to throw herself into his arms and beg him to hold her tightly. The ledge was barely wide enough for her body as it was, and Daniel was crouched half on and half off it, supporting himself partially on the metal spikes he had driven into the shale.

  ‘Trust me’, he had said, and, alone on the mountainside waiting for his return against all odds, somehow in the deepest part of herself she had known that she could, that he simply wasn’t the kind of man who would walk away and leave anyone suffering or in danger.

  And if she could trust him with her life, surely she could trust him with her heart…with her love?

  ‘You shouldn’t have come down here,’ she whispered shakily to him. ‘You shouldn’t have taken such a risk…’

  ‘I wanted to be with you,’ he told her simply, his hand reaching out for hers, his fingers interlocking warmly with her cold ones as he gave them a comforting squeeze. “This is hardly what I’d got planned for us for today,’ he told her wryly.

  ‘No?’ Christa responded, trying to match his attempt at lightheartedness. ‘And there I was thinking it was all part of your master plan to convince me of the efficiency of your courses: mutual trust, mutual dependency…’

  Fresh tears filled her e
yes.

  ‘And you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have taken such a risk. It’s all my fault…’

  ‘No, it’s mine,’ Daniel corrected her gravely. ‘I knew this morning that something was wrong, but I thought…’

  ‘That I was sulking because of last night…’

  A spasm of pain crossed her face, her skin losing all its colour, causing Daniel to demand anxiously, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Christa told him. ‘It’s just…’ She lifted her head and looked at him. ‘Oh, Daniel, if anything happens to us…to you…We’ve never even been lovers. I’ve never felt your skin next to mine. Never touched you and held you…I was thinking about that before you came back. Thinking about how stupid I’ve been…how much time I’ve wasted. You were right, I didn’t want to trust you. I was afraid.’

  Shakily she explained to him what had happened to her friend Laura. When she had finished, he was so quiet that at first she thought he was angry with her.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t have stereotyped you,’ she told him huskily. ‘And I know you were right when you said that my fear of trusting anyone probably goes back to losing my parents…Please don’t hate me, Daniel.’

  ‘Hate you?’

  His voice sounded rough, as though he had swallowed some of the dust raised by the shale.

  ‘Oh, my God, Christa. If I was going to hate anyone it wouldn’t be you; it would be myself…I should have given you more time…more understanding, instead of arrogantly demanding that you give me your trust…’ He stopped speaking, frowning and turning his head to look upwards.

  ‘Listen,’ he demanded. ‘That’s the helicopter. Can you hear it?’

  Christa could—just…

  ‘It will soon be over now,’ he promised her, ‘and when it is…’ The look he was giving her made Christa’s body tingle all the way up from her toes to the top of her head. ‘When it is, I’m going to make sure that you make good all those sweet, sexy promises you’ve made to me.

  ‘And there’s going to be interest on every single one of them!’ he warned her throatily, ‘At compound rates…’

  ‘Sounds as if I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in bed with you working off the debt,’ Christa responded, giddy not just with the relief of knowing they were going to be rescued but also with the unfamiliar weightless, light-hearted feeling which she recognised came from unburdening herself to him and, for the first time in her life, sharing with someone her most deep-seated fears.

  She felt almost drunk on the relief of it, euphoric, and so light-headed that she could almost have floated back up the mountainside.

  ‘Oh, Daniel…’ Her heart was overflowing with emotion as she reached out and gently touched his face.

  ‘Don’t,’ he groaned. ‘The helicopter will be here any minute and the last thing I need is to go down in history as the first man to get turned on by being trapped halfway down a mountainside. We all know that danger can be erotic, but not to this extent.’

  Christa tried to reply but the helicopter was virtually overhead now, the sound of its engines drowning out anything she might have tried to say.

  With the arrival of the helicopter and the rescue crew, things happened so quickly that in retrospect Christa could only remember them as a confused blur; the mixture of sickening fear and relief she felt when she was finally winched up into the safety of the helicopter combined with her anxiety for Daniel, who still waited below her, was certainly something she would never forget, nor was the small scrap of conversation she suspected she was not intended to overhear between Daniel and the winchman when they were finally both on board and the helicopter was heading back to its base.

  ‘Your directions were spot on,’ she heard the winchman saying to Daniel. ‘Just as well; there’s a heavy bank of cloud moving in from the coast pretty fast and if we’d had to waste time looking for you, you could have ended up spending the night out there. You’re damn lucky you weren’t any higher up; exposure kills more climbers than falls. And what the hell possessed you to go down there? You’re on one of the local search and rescue teams; I don’t need to tell you how bloody treacherous that shale is. The whole mountainside could have gone—it’s happened before.

  ‘It’s only a couple of years back that a whole party of experienced climbers, five of them, were all lost in a similar incident.

  ‘At least the girl was reasonably safe, although I wouldn’t have wanted to trust myself too long to that ledge, but you…If that shale had started to move…’

  ‘It was a calculated risk,’ Daniel responded quietly, so quietly that Christa had trouble straining to listen to what he was saying.

  ‘Rubbish,’ the winchman contradicted him graphically. ‘There are only two things that could make a man take that kind of risk…one of them is that he’s that kind of man, pure and simple…a risk-taker and, as far as we’re concerned, a pain in the neck…the type that gets off on playing at being a hero; and then there’s the other type…the type of man who’s never done a foolhardy thing in his life, who knows the risk but takes it anyway out of love.’ He paused, giving Daniel a thoughtful look as Christa felt the hot, healing tears flood her eyes.

  Daniel loved her, and she shouldn’t have needed to hear someone else say it to know that. No matter what happened between them in the future, no matter that Daniel, because of the sheer generosity of his nature, would forgive her for doubting him, a part of her would never forgive herself; a part of her would always regret that she had not had the courage, the faith to believe in him.

  * * *

  Reluctantly, Christa opened her eyes, her heart pounding with fright until she realised that she was not, after all, still on the mountainside but safe in bed in the farmhouse.

  Despite her protests that she felt fine, the hospital had insisted on giving her a thorough check before releasing her into Daniel’s care, with the strict injunction that she was to stay in bed.

  That milky drink he had given her had to have had something more in it than mere cocoa, she decided wryly now, as she registered the heavy lethargy of her body and brain.

  Daniel…

  As though she had actually called his name, the bedroom door opened and he came in, the sombreness leaving his mouth and eyes as he saw that she was awake.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her as he came over to the bed.

  ‘As if I’ve just gone ten rounds with a grizzly bear,’ she responded jokingly.

  ‘Try substituting ten tons of shale for the bear,’ Daniel suggested drily.

  He had insisted on remaining with her in Casualty after they had cut off her protective clothing.

  ‘They’re only surface abrasions, that’s all,’ the nurse had assured him comfortingly when she had seen his face. ‘They look worse than they actually are and they’ll soon heal.’

  Surface abrasions or not, there had been something about her bruised, lacerated skin that had made him want to take hold of her and wrap her protectively in his arms; Loat had mano him ache to take their pain into his own flesh in the same way that he already carried his guilt for what had happened.

  Trust me…Promise me, he had begged her, and yet he had known as he walked away from her that her safety lay far more in fate’s hands than his own. Who knew how far back into the precarious shale that small shelf of slate went? And yet he had also known that he had no option other than to leave her and go and get help.

  ‘What time is it?’ Christa asked him prosaically.

  ‘Almost six-thirty,’ he told her.

  ‘Six-thirty?’ Christa sat upright in bed and winced as her bruises made their presence felt. ‘That means I’ve been asleep for almost twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Actually, it’s closer to eighteen,’ Daniel told her, not adding that he had gone without sleep for almost an equal length of time, terrified of even closing his eyes in case she needed him.

  ‘Well, that’s still nine hours too long—by anyone’s reckoning,’ Christa replied spir
itedly, ‘and I’m getting up.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she added plaintively when she saw that Daniel was about to protest. ‘I didn’t get any dinner last night—nor the night before…’

  Silently they looked at one another, the look they were exchanging saying more than any words.

  ‘I don’t want to be here on my own, Daniel,’ Christa told him huskily. ‘I want to be with you. We came so close to losing one another…and I don’t just mean because of my fall…’

  ‘Don’t,’ Daniel groaned in protest, reaching out to cover her hand with his. His, Christa noticed, was trembling slightly. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.’

  ‘You must,’ Christa told him. ‘It was just as much my fault as yours. More…If I had only trusted you. I’ll never doubt you again, Daniel. Never, I promise…’

  She leaned towards him slightly, her glance dropping from his eyes to his mouth.

  ‘Oh, God, Christa.’

  Daniel kissed her with careful hesitancy, as though she was as fragile as a brittle piece of china, Christa recognised.

  As he released her she looked wistfully at his mouth. How did you tell a man that, despite your cuts and bruises, you ached so badly for him that you’d willingly add quite a few more to your collection just for the pleasure of being held in his arms and made love to with all the intensity and passion of his earlier verbal promises?

  Not easily, she recognised, as Daniel moved away from the bed.

  ‘I’ll leave you to get dressed. I’ve got a couple of telephone calls to make…’

  As he opened her bedroom door, Daniel cursed himself under his breath. No wonder Christa had been looking at him with that mixture of bewilderment and hurt in her lovely eyes. But if he had stayed with her a moment longer, bruises or not, there’d have been no way he could have stopped himself joining her in bed and giving thanks, not just for their safety, but for the resolution of the problems and barriers between them, by making love to her. Wasn’t that one of woman’s most heartfelt complaints against their men: that they persisted in showing their emotions through the physical act of sex? And yet to do so was one of the most basic and deeprooted of male drives and instincts.