LITMIR.BIZ

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      Letting his arms slip lower without losing their hold, he picked her up. The softest landing place in the room was the bed. No sooner thought than done—he hefted her up and released her onto the mattress.

      He could hear her pushing herself backward to the head of the bed, her heels catching on the covers. “Keep away from me. I know karate. No way I’m going to let you rape me.”

      “Pity you never got past lesson one, where they taught you to stamp on your opponent’s feet. And while we’re on the subject, who snuck into whose room? Believe me, you couldn’t be safer. I’ve no urge to have sex with a shrew.”

      “You should be so lucky.”

      “Hold it! Hold it right there. Not another word. If I’m going to be accused of sexual assault, and believe me, I’ve been accused of a lot worse recently, then for a change I want to look my accuser in the eye.” This time the matches sprang to his hold in the first pocket he searched. He lit one, but it didn’t pierce far into the gloom, and the shape on the bed could have been man or woman. But having touched her, he knew better.

      “Actually, no one mentioned sexual assault, only…”

      He froze, still as a statue, the match flaring in his fingers, as faint and tiny as the light at the end of the tunnel called his future. “Only what?”

      “Whatever they say about men like you.”

      “Men like me don’t go in for rape either.”

      He could tell she’d heard the rumors, but he hadn’t expected her to back down. That made her either a coward or a woman who desperately wanted something he had. And she’d already let him know it wasn’t his body. He blew out the match, then took his ire out on the full backpack he’d left on the floor, kicking it in front of the door to make her escape harder.

      The annoyance didn’t go away. Striking another match, he murmured under his breath, “The woman wriggles around against a guy as if she’s giving him a lap dance and she wonders why he gets a hard-on.”

      Kurt had done a lot of talking to himself lately. Especially since people he’d once counted as friends had appeared to be avoiding his company. As if they would become guilty by association.

      So she’d been asking around, had heard the stories that got worse as they went from mouth to mouth. He could have told her about rumors—that if they won’t go away, you have to learn to live with them.

      Without turning his back to her, he lit the first couple of yak-butter oil lamps. Their glow was enough to illuminate long jean-clad legs. The third brought out the curve of her hips. He knew, to his cost, they were softly rounded where his were lean. The lilac anorak was a fashion statement no mountaineer worth his or her salt would wear. Its quilted folds hid the full breasts his palm had lighted on by mistake. He smiled softly as he picked up the next tiny copper bowl filled with oil.

      Her hair was black, short, spiky, a match for the dark clumps of eyelashes framing her huge gray eyes. Eyes wide and staring at him as if he were the devil incarnate. As if she too thought him responsible for Bill’s and Atlanta’s deaths.

      Sometimes he wondered if maybe he was.

      While her expression nagged at his conscience, something in him acknowledged that contempt wasn’t the emotion he wanted to draw from the woman sprawled across his bed. But he wasn’t willing to go deeper into his motives.

      With the final lamp lit, a gas cartridge one, the last of the gloom receded to the edges of the attic. Kurt walked up to the bed and looked down at his unexpected guest. Her eyes flashed a warning and her hands bunched up fists of the top cover as if it were the only thing preventing her from leaping at his throat.

      “Hi, I’m Kurt Jellic. And you’d be…?”

      “One moment you’re threatening to slice my neck, and the next you’re making an introduction as if we’d just met at a garden party,” Chelsea sniped, taking advantage of what seemed to be a truce to push herself into a more dignified sitting position.

      “Sorry,” he said. “I’m all out of cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea, but I can offer you a whiskey. They do say it’s good for shock. Perhaps it would make you remember your name.”

      Taking a good look at him in the lamplight, she was left in no doubt that this guy could have killed her if necessary. She’d watched him move from lamp to lamp with lethal grace. Gradually each small increment of light had revealed the man Atlanta and Bill had trusted to get them safely to the summit of Everest and back again.

      Why hadn’t that happened?

      Oh, yeah, they had fallen. And she’d heard the word accident flung around with abandon. Kurt Jellic had been with them, and like a few other people she wondered how he had survived.

      He threw her a grin, quirking his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?” His teeth were a slash of white in a face brushed with the kind of dark stubble film stars affected, as if it made them unrecognizable. His slightly gaunt features were dominated by dark unreadable eyes under black eyebrows, both sitting above an uncompromising straight slide of a nose.

      “I’ve no trouble recalling my name. It’s Chelsea Tedman.”

      She waited for a reaction, but wasn’t overwhelmed with surprise when she didn’t get one. Why would Atlanta have mentioned an estranged sister she hadn’t seen since before Chelsea entered high school?

      He stepped around a heap of red and yellow ropes on the floor in front of a huge old-fashioned chest, then lifted a bottle. The reflection from a butter-oil lamp glimmered through the amber liquid sloshing near the bottom. The bottle had been well and truly broached. Hell, she hoped he wasn’t an alcoholic.

      That was all she needed.

      “Okay, now the formalities have been taken care of, how do you take your whiskey—straight or straight?”

      “I take it in a glass.”

      The bottle made a hollow clunk as he set it back down and picked up the glass sitting next to it. He peered into its depths and didn’t look particularly happy with what he saw.

      Chelsea almost choked on a breath as he pulled out the tail of his tan-and-brown-checked shirt and proceeded to wipe the glass with it. His glance caught Chelsea’s horrified expression. Kurt’s embarrassed smile was almost boyish, if anyone with bristles could be likened to a boy. “What did you expect? This isn’t the Ritz. No room service. It’s either use what you have to hand or put up with a layer of dust floating on your whiskey.”

      Apparently satisfied with his efforts, he poured some liquid into the glass, then opened the top drawer of the chest. He withdrew a blue plastic mug and emptied the rest of the bottle’s contents into it.

      Chelsea’s innate fastidiousness made her hesitate to take the tumbler, even considering that alcohol was an antiseptic.

      “Will it help if I tell you I put this shirt on clean not more than two hours ago?” He lifted the blue mug as if toasting her. “And you were the one who insisted on a glass.”

      She took the tumbler, lifting it by the rim, wary of touching any part of this man whose sexual heat had burned through her as if he hadn’t held a knife against the tender skin of her throat.

      He hadn’t actually said she was acting like a wimp, but she certainly felt like one. How had it come to this? Atlanta had been the delicate flowerlike child, while she had been the tomboy. Her sister had gone the ballet-and-piano-lessons route, while she had ridden horses and played basketball. Even at thirteen she’d been two inches taller than her elder sister and had made an ungainly, sulky bridesmaid at Atlanta’s wedding, letting everyone know she was doing it under protest.

      When had their roles reversed? Atlanta roughing it on a mountain in boots and anorak, while Chelsea swanned off to watch the ballet in Paris dressed in the latest fashion as if she were a changeling.

      And she was. She fluttered around Paris like a dilettante,

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