A Game of Chance Read online

  “Sunny,” he said in a cajoling tone.

  “Don’t ‘Sunny’ me,” she warned, fighting her way into her clothes. Since they barely had room to move, he began dodging elbows and knees, and his hands slipped over some very interesting places. “Stop it! I mean it, Chance! I’m too sore for any more monkey business.”

  More to tease her than anything else, he zeroed in on an interesting place that had her squealing. She shot out of the tent, and he collapsed on his back, laughing—until she raised the tent flap and dashed some cold water on him.

  “There,” she said, hugely satisfied by his yelp. “One cold shower, just what you needed.” Then she ran.

  If she thought the fact that he was naked would hamper his pursuit, she found out differently. He snatched up a bottle of water as he passed by their cache of supplies and caught her before she had gone fifty yards. She was laughing like a maniac, otherwise she might have gotten away. He held her with one arm and poured the water over her head. It was ice-cold from having been left out all night, and she shrieked and sputtered and giggled, clinging to him when her legs went weak from so much laughter.

  “Too sore to walk, huh?” he demanded.

  “I w-wasn’t walking,” she said, giggling as she pushed her wet hair out of her face. Cold droplets splattered on him, and he shivered.

  “Damn, it’s cold,” he said. The sun was barely up, so the temperature was probably in the forties.

  She slapped his butt. “Then get some clothes on. What do you think this is, a nudist colony?”

  He draped his arm around her shoulders, and they walked back to the camp. Her playfulness delighted him; hell, everything about her delighted him, from her wit to her willingness to laugh. And the sex—God, the sex was unbelievable. He didn’t doubt she was sore, because he was. Last night had been a night to remember.

  When she awakened yesterday afternoon she had been naturally melancholy, the normal aftermath of intense emotions. He hadn’t talked much, letting her relax. She went with him to check the traps, which were still empty, and they had bathed together. After a quiet supper of rabbit and cactus they went to bed, and he had devoted the rest of the night to raising her spirits. His efforts had worked.

  “How are your hands?” he asked. If she could pull his chest hairs and slap his butt, the antibiotic cream must have worked wonders.

  She held them out, palms up, so he could see. The redness from the burns was gone, and her raw fingertips looked slick and shiny. “I’ll wrap Band-Aids around them before I get started,” she said.

  “Get started doing what?”

  She gave him a startled look. “Cutting handholds in the rock, of course.”

  He was stunned. He stared at her, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’re not climbing back on that damn wall!” he snapped.

  Her eyebrows rose in what he now recognized as her “the-hell-you-say” look. “Yes, I am.”

  He ground his teeth. He couldn’t tell her they would be “rescued” today, but no way was he letting her wear herself out hacking holes in rock or put herself at that kind of risk.

  “I’ll do it,” he growled.

  “I’m smaller,” she immediately objected. “It’s safer for me.”

  She was trying to protect him again. He felt like beating his head against a rock in frustration.

  “No, it isn’t,” he barked. “Look, there’s no way you can cut enough handholds for us to climb out of here in the next two days. You got, what, twelve feet yesterday? If you managed twelve feet a day—and you wouldn’t get that much done today, with your hands the way they are—it would take you over a week to reach the top. That’s if—if—you didn’t fall and kill yourself.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she shot back. “Just give up?”

  “Today you aren’t going to do a damn thing. You’re going to let your hands heal if I have to tie you to a rock, is that clear?”

  She looked as if she wanted to argue, but he was a lot bigger than she was, and maybe she could tell by his expression that he meant exactly what he said. “All right,” she muttered. “Just for today.”

  He hoped she would keep her word, because he would have to leave her alone while he went to the spot where he signaled Zane. He would just have to risk it, but there would be hell to pay if he came back to find her on that rock.

  He quickly dressed, shivering, and they ate another cold breakfast of water and nutrition bar, since there wasn’t anything left of the rabbit from the night before. Tomorrow morning, he promised himself, breakfast would be bacon and eggs, with a mountain of hash browns and a pot of hot coffee.

  “I’m going to check the traps,” he said, though he knew there wouldn’t be anything in them. When he’d checked them the afternoon before, knowing they would be leaving here today, he had quietly released them so they couldn’t be sprung. “Just tend to the fire and keep it smoking. You take it easy today, and I’ll wash our clothes this afternoon.” That was a safe promise to make.

  “It’s a deal,” she said, but he could tell she was thinking about Margreta.

  He left her sitting by the fire. It was a good ten-minute walk to the designated spot, but he hurried, unwilling to leave her to her own devices for so long. Taking the laser light from his pocket, he aimed it toward the rock on the rim and began flashing the pickup signal. Immediately Zane flashed back asking for confirmation, to make certain there wasn’t an error. After all, they hadn’t expected this to happen so fast. Chance flashed the signal again and this time received an okay.

  He dropped the light back in his pocket. He didn’t know how long it would take for Zane to arrange the pickup, but probably not long. Knowing Zane, everything was already in place.

  He was walking back to the camp when the small twin-engine plane flew over. A grin spread across his face. That was Zane for you!

  He began running, knowing Sunny would be beside herself. He heard her shrieking before he could see her; then she came into view, jumping in her glee as she came to meet him. “He saw me!” she screamed, laughing and crying at the same time. “He waggled the wings! He’ll come back for us, won’t he?”

  He caught her as she hurled herself into his arms and couldn’t stop himself from planting a long, hard kiss on that laughing mouth. “He’ll come back,” he said. “Unless he thought you were just waving hello at him.” The opportunity to tease her was too great to resist, considering she had pulled his chest hair and poured cold water on him. He’d retaliated for the cold water; this was for the hair-pulling.

  She looked stricken, the laughter wiped from her face as if it had never been. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  He didn’t have the heart to keep up the pretense. “Of course he’ll come back,” he chided. “Waggling the wings was the signal that he saw you and would send help.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, blinking back tears.

  “I promise.”

  “I’ll get you for this.”

  He had to kiss her again, and he didn’t stop until she had melted against him, her arms locked around his neck. He hadn’t thought he would be interested in sex for quite a while, not after last night, but she proved him wrong.

  He huffed out a breath and released her. “Stop man-handling me, you hussy. We have to get packed.”

  The smile she gave him was brilliant, like the sun rising, and it warmed him all the way through.

  They gathered their belongings. Chance returned her pistol to her, and watched her break it down and store the pieces in their hiding places. Then they walked back to the plane and waited.

  Rescue came in the form of a helicopter, the blades beating a thumping rhythm in the desert air, the canyon echoing with the sound. It hovered briefly over them, then lowered itself like a giant mosquito. Sand whipped into their air, stinging them, and Sunny hid her face against his shirt.

  A sixtyish man with a friendly face and graying beard hopped out of the bird. “You folks need some help?” he called.