Lover in the Rough (27 page)

“Is it safe?”

“No,” whispered Reba, “it’s not safe at all.”

“Then go get him out!”

Reba laughed despite the tears clinging to her dark lashes. “Just how should I manage that, Glory?” She turned on the older woman with sudden rage. “Don’t you understand? He doesn’t want me.
He’s keeping the China Queen!
”

There was nothing Glory could say to penetrate the shell Reba pulled around herself. She and Reba flew back to Los Angeles together. Reba spoke only once, to give directions to the China Queen. She refused to consider going to the Queen with Glory. Chance had chosen and there was no more to say. Eyes closed, body rigid, Reba sat on the plane and thought about the man who wanted the unyielding earth more than he wanted her.

After a few days Reba’s rage faded but the icy shell remained. Arranging for Jeremy’s collection to be shown at the del Coronado had kept her mind occupied during the days. During the nights she had sorted through photos of Jeremy’s collection, remembering Death Valley and the two men she loved in such different ways—and had lost just the same. Remembering was painful, but it was better than waking up screaming Chance’s name, trying to warn him about a voracious black kikituk with shattered pink crystal eyes.

She hadn’t seen Glory since they’d left the airplane together two weeks ago. She’d heard from Glory once, confirmation of what Reba had already guessed: Chance was in the China Queen, digging through darkness in search of Pala’s incomparable pink tourmaline. The thought of Chance alone in the endless subterranean night, vulnerable to the least twitch of the restless earth, made Reba’s skin move and tighten with fear for his life.

She had hoped coming to the Hotel del Coronado would provide relief from the emotions that seethed just beneath her calm exterior. Seeing Jeremy’s collection auctioned off would put
finis
to that part of her life,
finis
to grief and longing and wondering why only one kind old man had found her worthy of love. But nothing had touched her except fear for Chance, and fury. For long moments she sat without moving, nails gouging her palms as she thought of Death Valley and the China Queen and a man called Chance.

A knock on the door startled her. She blinked and looked around the room, disoriented for a moment. When she saw the spacious suite with its gold brocade wallpaper and old-fashioned furniture, she remembered where she was. Hotel del Coronado, San Diego. Jeremy’s collection. The auction. It had all been a huge success. The bids had been spectacular. Everything had been sold. Disappointed bidders had come to her with their want lists, assuring her enough work to make the Objet d’Art as profitable as Jeremy’s collection had been.

The knock came again. “Reba?” said Tim, “are you ready?”

No. But she couldn’t say that. She had to stand up and be calm and professional and controlled. She had to go downstairs and dance with strangers when the thought of being touched by any man but Chance made her want to cringe. He didn’t want to touch her, though. All he wanted was the China Queen. What could he hope to find in the Queen’s cold, unloving darkness to equal the living warmth of a woman’s love? Maybe he would be downstairs, waiting for her. Maybe the time he had spent in the Queen’s cold embrace would make him understand that Reba loved him.

Reba stood up and went to the door, unlocking it. Tim stepped into the room and stopped short, giving her an appreciative male whistle.

Her dress was diagonally cut silk the color and texture of gold dust. Its matte finish caught and held light in subtle swirls that followed the lines of her body. Elegant, sensuous, the silk bared her right shoulder and flowed down her left shoulder to the floor, rustling seductively with each tiny movement of her body. The dress had only one fastening, a slanting row of three teardrop diamonds set just below the left shoulder. A matching diamond glittered in each earlobe. Her thick, honey hair was piled in gleaming coils held by invisible gold combs.

“It’s a good thing I’m happily married,” sighed Tim. “You’re more spectacular than anything we’ve auctioned off tonight.”

Reba’s mouth turned up in a brief, sad smile. “Thanks.” She had wanted to wear the black silk that was the Objet d’Art’s trademark, but hadn’t wanted to be in funeral colors for Jeremy’s ball. She put her hand through Tim’s arm. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Hey, you’re going to a ball, not a burial.”

Reba didn’t say anything. Tonight was the last night Jeremy’s collection would ever be gathered in the same place. She had even put the Tiger God and Green Suite on display, complete with the silver-green diamond in the rough. For it was a diamond, beyond doubt or question, as she had known it would be. It gleamed subtly among the other varied greens, showing its quality in the way it transformed simple light into shimmering silver-green beauty, a crystal as unique as the man she loved.

The muted conversations of elegantly dressed people reached out from the del Coronado’s gracious lobby, wrapping around Reba’s silence. Tim escorted her into the George VII Ballroom, where the dance would be held. The room’s ceiling was thirty feet high, covered in hand-rubbed, tongue-in-groove pine. Brocade wallpaper and heavy gold drapes added to the Victorian ambience that was at the core of the del Coronado’s charm.

Normally a spacious dining area, tonight the room had been given over to the memory of Jeremy Sinclair. Arrayed in glass cases and velvet boxes, Jeremy’s collection coiled through one-third of the room like an enormous glittering necklace. Women in glorious dresses glided among the cases, escorted by men in dinner jackets and black ties. Well-dressed men circulated unobtrusively in the crowd, their weapons concealed by tailored black silk jackets.

Reba couldn’t help the depression that settled on her slender shoulders, dragging her down into darkness as she searched every part of the room for a man who had silver-green eyes and a tiger’s untamed grace. Chance must know she would be here, a last tribute to Jeremy Bouvier Sinclair. If Chance wanted to see her, he would be here tonight.

But there was no man among all the men who could have been Chance Walker.

“What the hell!” said Tim, looking toward Jeremy’s collection.

Reba glanced over and saw a huge redheaded man carrying an empty beveled glass case under one arm as though it were a lunch pail. Ignoring the curious looks from the crowd, the man set down the glass case and calmly opened it. Another man stood behind him, a sandy-haired man whose powerful shoulders and scarred hands proclaimed him to be a miner. The second man held a cardboard carton in his arms. A third man stood and watched the crowd with the assessing eyes of someone who had known a lot of trouble in his time.

The pressure of Tim’s hand on Reba’s arm wasn’t what drew her toward the three men. There was something about their toughness and self-assurance that reminded her of Chance. She realized that she had seen all three of them before. In fact, since she’d arrived at the del Coronado with Jeremy’s collection, she had seen them everywhere she turned. Not only had they covered the auction like a blanket, their room was just across the hall from hers.

“Want me to call a guard?” asked Tim softly.

Reba shook her head, compelled by the aura of tension and excitement that radiated out from the three men. The red-haired man opened the carton with thick, deft hands and reached inside.

“Wait,” said Reba quietly. “Let’s see what they—ohhh!”

Reba’s gasp was lost in the larger gasp of the surrounding people. Held in the man’s huge hands was a cluster of Pala tourmaline in a matrix of quartz crystals. The pink shafts had been fractured by the restless movements of the earth, yet the crystals were still intact, glorious in their resurrection and birth. Shafts of tourmaline as long as Reba’s hand, longer, a sunburst of fiery pink capped by vibrant green.

The China Queen had come to life beneath Chance’s hard and gentle hands.

The vision blurred and then resolved into tears burning Reba’s eyes. She could never compete with the tourmaline’s crystal mystery, its blazing glory. Chance had chosen well. The worst of it was that she couldn’t blame him. To see that tourmaline—that luminous perfection—was to know finally, irrevocably, why men risked death in the dark passages of the earth. Beauty, not wealth. Beauty of the gods.

Next to that she was nothing, nothing at all.

She looked up and saw the red-haired man watching her. His hand came up in a curious salute, then he picked up the empty carton and left the room without speaking to her. He didn’t have to. The tourmaline itself was the message. Chance had won. She had lost.

It was over.

Not until that moment did Reba realize that underneath her rage and fear she had been certain that her Tiger God would come back to claim her. So certain . . . and so wrong.

“There’s no owner’s name on it,” said Tim, returning to Reba’s side, “no identifying mark, just a small card in the corner that says ‘nfs.’ ”

“Not for sale,” murmured Reba. “As for an owner’s name”—her lips turned down sadly—“do you have any doubt?”

“Chance?”

“Who else could have done it?” she asked, her voice husky.
“Tiger God.”
No one listening to her would have known whether the words were endearment or epithet. At the moment, Reba herself wasn’t sure.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She would have given all but one specimen out of the Green Suite in order to be able to turn and walk out of the room, out of the hotel, out of her own skin. But that wasn’t possible. If nothing else, she owed it to Jeremy’s memory to drink champagne and dance and laugh at life and loss just as coolly as he had. And that was precisely what she would do for as long as her nerve held.

“Shall we open the ball?” she asked, turning to Tim, her back straight, her head erect, her cinnamon eyes brilliant with tears she refused to shed.

Tim lifted Reba’s hand to his lips, bowed and led her onto the dance floor. She faced the platform where the musicians waited, nodded to the leader and turned back to Tim. As soon as he took her into his arms, the music began, a waltz as sophisticated as Reba’s gown. For a few moments the dance floor belonged to them, then other couples appeared, called by rich music and the graceful movements of the woman in gold-dust silk.

At the end of the dance, Reba put her hand on Tim’s arm and allowed herself to be led away, as proud as any queen. He seated her at one of the tables lining the wall where windows gave a view of the hotel’s sweeping front lawn.

“Thank you, Tim. Go back to Gina now.” She smiled, making it sound more like an invitation and less like an order.

He hesitated. “Are you sure you want to be alone?”

“I’m sure. Find Gina and dance and enjoy.”

“What will you do?”

“Drink champagne,” she said, signaling a passing waiter.

“Reba—”

“Go,” she said softly.

Tim hesitated, then left, nearly bumping into the huge red-haired man as he turned. Reba looked at the man, realized he had been watching her and raised her dark honey eyebrows in silent query. He paused, then approached her.

“Red Day, ma’am. Glory’s husband. Would you like to dance?”

“I think not,” she said coolly, sipping her champagne, looking at the big man with distant curiosity. Though he must be fifty, he looked tough enough to bend sheet metal with his bare hands.

“Thank God,” sighed Red, settling into the chair across from her. “I can’t dance worth a handful of, er, dirt.”

Reba stared at him for a moment longer, wondering where she had heard his name before. Not as Glory’s husband, but in connection with tourmaline . . . Then she remembered the day when Chance had held a Chinese tear bottle in his hand, clear pink light pooling and shifting as he spoke in his deep voice about a Dowager Empress obsessed with Pala tourmaline.

“You’re a collector. Rubellite, if I remember correctly.”

“That’s right,” Red said, his blue eyes lighting with enthusiasm. “Do you—”

“Was that your tourmaline specimen?” she asked, cutting off whatever question he had been about to ask her.

“Wish it was. Bloody beauty, isn’t it?”

“Bloody right,” said Reba sardonically, saluting him with her champagne glass. She took another drink and grimaced. Tonight of all nights she wanted to get high,
numb
, and vintage champagne tasted like ashes. It was all she could do to swallow the stuff. “Maybe Chance will sell it to you.”

Red shook his head slowly. “I offered him heaven and earth, and then threatened him with hell.”

“If you need any help delivering on the threat,” Reba said, smiling just enough to show the serrations of her even white teeth, “I have a few suggestions.”

Red’s laugh was as big as the rest of him. “Where did Chance find you, little lady?”

“Death Valley. Then,” Reba added coolly, “a few weeks later he swapped me for a mine called the China Queen.”

Red looked startled. “But he said the mine wasn’t his.”

“He lied. He’s good at that.” She set down her champagne glass with a tiny snap that set the liquid to bubbling.

“Chance Walker doesn’t lie,” said Red, shifting his bulk in the small chair. “He doesn’t steal or cheat, either. After that”—Red grinned—“I’ll admit he’s used up his share of the Commandments.”

Reba had nothing to say to that except a silent
amen
. For a long time she and Red sat without speaking, listening to music as languid as moonlight on pearls, watching women held like precious, multi-colored gems in the dark settings of men’s arms.

“Would you care to dance?” asked a voice at her elbow.

Reba’s head snapped around. The man she saw standing at her elbow was even bigger than Red. At least six foot six inches, younger than Chance, built like Hercules and handsome as a god. She disliked the man on sight—not for what he was but for what he wasn’t. He wasn’t Chance.

“No,” said Red, “she wouldn’t like to dance.”

“Wrong,” snapped Reba, deciding instantly that she wanted to dance after all. “The lady would love to dance.”

Red looked from Reba’s angry face to the other man’s inviting male smile. “Let me put it this way,” said Red easily. “The lady will dance with you. Once. You listening, Melbourne?”