Zero-Degree Murder (A Search and Rescue Mystery) (12 page)

CHAPTER

G
RACIE
snapped fully awake with the comprehension that she was lying on her back with her cheek molded up against Rob’s scratchy, but deliciously warm neck. His arm was draped around her as naturally and comfortably as if they were longtime lovers.

Crap.

Gracie wormed away to scrutinize the man with whom she had just spent the night.

If Rob had awakened at that moment, he would have caught Gracie with her mouth hanging open like a large-mouthed bass. Even in the dim early-morning light within the orange plastic shelter, and beneath twenty-four-hours’ worth of beard and a disguise of grime and scratches, Rob Christian was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

In Gracie’s opinion, God’s biggest mistake was bestowing upon men eyelashes for which any red-blooded female would commit first-degree murder. Rob’s were so dark and thick and long, Elizabeth Taylor would have been snap-pea green with envy. Dark, heavy eyebrows slashed a straight, thick line across his forehead, then tapered downward at the temples. Straight nose sloped off at the tip. Lips curved upward at the corners like a cupid’s bow. Hair, which apparently had been dyed from blond to black for the movie, curled out from beneath her own forest-green fleece cap. The dirt-smudged hand that was visible looked strong, but expertly manicured and smooth, as if it hadn’t done anything more taxing lately than lift a glass of Beaujolais.

She wondered what color his eyes were. The night before it had been too dark to tell. Somewhere in a pocket of her parka was her notebook with notes of Rob’s physical description. And it was on the LPQ. That’s the kind of thing she should remember. Maybe she could—

What the
hell
was she doing?

He was a screen idol. He was supposed to be good looking. Plus he was nothing but a big baby. From the
city
. And he called her
woman.
What was that all about? Anyway, she was the rescuer. He was the victim. She was supposed to remain detached. Professional. Aloof.

Holding her breath, Gracie plucked at his sleeve with two fingers and moved his hand off her body.

That task accomplished, her breathing resumed. Her next thoughts were that she was warm, but stiff and sore from the previous evening’s foray into the canyon and sleeping on the ground in one position, followed by the realization that her bladder was fair to bursting.

Gracie lay contemplating the unpleasant proposition of leaving the warmth of the sleeping bag and, she was loathe to admit, the British Adonis who slept beside her and going outside into the chill of early morning.

Hmm, let’s see. Snuggling up to a hunky warm body? Or exposing my bare butt to the cold? Tough choice.

She stayed where she was, listening to Rob’s steady breathing and reveling in the warmth until she decided she’d better not stall any longer or by the time she actually exited the shelter it would be too late.

It took what seemed like infinity to unzip the sleeping bag one tooth at a time. Then millimeter by millimeter she wiggled her way out of the warm cocoon, no mean feat since every joint in her body felt as creaky as the tin man’s in need of a couple of good squirts of oil.

She crawled to the entrance, silently lifted her pack aside, and poked her head outside the shelter.

Oh. Shit.

An opaque veil of cloud enshrouded the entire mountainside, so thick that particles of moisture hung visibly in the air. Gracie could see nothing of the surrounding trees, boulders, or mountains. She could barely even see Cashman, still sleeping in his bivy sack a few yards away.

She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs and senses with the heady scent of wet evergreen, then exhaled a long, slow breath of white vapor.

A moan floated up behind her.

Gracie looked back over her shoulder at Rob, who was sitting up and scratching his cheek. Not a vision. Not a demigod. Just a normal man doing what men do when they wake up stiff and sore the morning after a nasty fall and a night sleeping on the hard ground.

Gracie sat back on her heels so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed by her Gore-Tex-covered bottom staring him in the face. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

In a voice slurred with sleep, Rob answered, “Like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet.”

“I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot avalanche probe,” Gracie said and was thoroughly charmed to see, even in the dim light, a blush creep up his cheeks.

“Line from one of my movies,” he said. “Bit of a habit, I’m afraid.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Actually I’m feeling better than I would have expected,” he added. “Still have a bugger of a headache though.”

“How’s the ankle?”

“Throbs a bit. Tolerable if I don’t move it.”

With an understandable amount of groaning punctuated with “sodding this” and “bleeding that,” he crawled over and plopped on his stomach beside Gracie to look outside.

“We’re in a bloody fog!”

“Actually it’s cloud,” she said, noting his eyes were large and bright and a dark brown so piercing and intense she felt as if they wouldn’t simply look at her, but see right through into her soul.

She scootched herself back inside the shelter to pull on her parka and boots.

CHAPTER

“D
AMMIT!”
Ralph checked his watch, then the Command Post clock, confirming it was 0627.

His search team hadn’t called in. He would expect this of Cashman, blundering baboon that he was. But Gracie was as reliable as Old Faithful.

Ralph could count on one hand the number of people currently on Timber Creek’s SAR team whom he considered truly competent. Grace Kinkaid was one of those people.

Steve Cashman was another story. The man was a screw-up with something to prove. That made him unpredictable. And dangerous.

Anything could happen with Cashman, and Ralph didn’t like it that Gracie was alone in the field with him and out of radio communication for so long.

The inside of Ralph’s eyelids felt like 40-grit sandpaper. The year-old chocolate-chip granola bar he had washed down with cold, bitter coffee still sat in his stomach as a lead brick in an acid bath. His patience had drained away along with the hours of the cold, solitary night and now stood at low tide. At the same time, his anxiety for Gracie had increased until now it felt like a pair of fists slowly twisting his gut. His surly mood had intensified when it had grown light enough for him to realize the entire mountain was enshrouded in cloud so thick he couldn’t see the motor home parked across the parking lot.

The weather translated to no aviation. Any injury to the MisPers would necessitate a litter carry-out. Relief personnel due at 0700 would arrive chomping at the bit to be deployed into the field.

Except Ralph had no idea where to send them.

“Come on, Cashman!” He glared at the radio as if it were an animate object intentionally withholding information. “Why the hell haven’t you radioed in?”

CHAPTER

I
T
took several seconds for Diana to realize that her eyes were open and that the reason she wasn’t seeing anything was because there was nothing to see. No trees towering overhead. No green, rounded bushes. No gargantuan boulders. Only an impenetrable wall of cloud.

There was no sound but that of her own breathing.

It was as if, sometime during the interminable night, she had been entombed in a shifting white sepulcher.

Her hips and shoulders felt bruised from lying on the hard ground. She had slept only in fits and starts and was exhausted to the marrow.

Her water bottle was empty. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, yet the thought of food nauseated her.

She considered trying to walk out again, but the thought of Milocek out there looking for her pinned her to the ground.

She would stay where she was, encapsulated within the cloud.

Eventually someone would come for her. Surely help would come.

CHAPTER

T
O
answer the call of nature, Gracie clambered over rocks and tree trunks to a reasonable distance between her and the shelter.

Baring her backside to the elements in below-freezing temperatures didn’t bother her. It was simply what one had to do if the urge was great enough. It was, however, a major pain to get up in the middle of the night and put on one’s boots to walk what hygiene, courtesy, and modesty, in that order, determined was a reasonable distance from the sleeping area to tend to normal body functions. Peeing in a strong wind or driving rain was the worst. Gracie envied the physical strength that most men seemed to take for granted, but peeing outside in inclement weather was the only time Gracie truly regretted not being male.

Back at the bivouac, with Cashman still snoring inside his bivy sack, Gracie crouched a few feet from the shelter and fired up her little Dragonfly stove to brew up a nice cup o’ tea for the British gentleman who, judging from the noises emanating from within the orange plastic, was due to make an appearance at any moment.

Moving around had worked the stiffness out of her joints, and, in spite of minimal sleep, Gracie felt well rested. While the threat from ghoulies and ghosties hadn’t totally vanished with the night, it had dissipated, pushing into the realm of the improbable that someone had been killed the day before, that Rob had been attacked, and that someone was actually out there intending them all harm. By the light of day, muted as it was, everything she had thought and felt the night before all seemed so melodramatic.

Gracie sat on the square of insulated foam, waiting for the water in her canteen cup to heat and anticipating with dread her next encounter with the Englishman.

Seized with a surge of self-consciousness, she yanked off her gloves and beanie and combed through her unruly hair with her fingers.

Her hair had always been thick and wavy and, as a result, totally unmanageable. It made women with thin, limp hair jealous and men want to run their fingers through it. But, ever since she could remember she had thought it a royal pain. She kept it long not because of its attraction to men, but in spite of it. By braiding her hair or clipping it up, it actually took her less time than with short hair to look halfway decent in general and not have “helmet head” after a search.

Gracie had only half completed a rough French braid when Rob appeared in the shelter doorway, looking around him, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth. “It’s cold.”

“It is that,” she said, tying off the braid with the elastic, although, in her estimation, the temperature wasn’t much lower than about forty-five degrees.

“May I?” He gestured to her trekking poles still clipped to the outside of her pack.

“Be my guest. You sure you want to be up and about?” she asked, eyes riveted on the little bubbles drifting up through the heated water to the surface. “I’d be happy to bring you a hot cup of tea. Water’s almost hot.”

“I have to piss like a racehorse.” When she looked over at him, he reddened. “Sorry.”

Gracie shrugged. “That’s a good thing. Means you’re not dehydrated anymore.”

“I don’t usually swear around women,” he said, fiddling with one of the trekking poles. “Somehow with you, though, it feels like one of the boys.”

“Ouch.”

“Hang on. That’s not what I meant. How does this thing work?”

“Untwist it, pull it out to length, then twist it back to tighten it. There are two joints.”

With more dexterity than Gracie had the first time she messed with the poles, Rob set the pole to maximum length.

“This strong enough to hold me?” he asked.

“It’s titanium.”

He shot her a look that said that wasn’t much of an answer, then used both hands on the pole to pull himself upright.

Gracie noticed that as Rob stood up, he was careful not to let even the big toe of his injured foot brush the ground. They were definitely not hiking out. “Would you like some privacy?” she asked.

“Stay put,” Rob said and hobbled around the side of the shelter, leaning heavily on the pole.

As Rob stood with his back to her and watered a large manzanita, Gracie openly admired his wide shoulders and narrow hips. On the previous night, she had seen in the blinding snapshot of his nakedness—which she knew would be forever embedded in her brain—that his long-limbed body was well-muscled without an ounce of fat. She wondered what he did to get a body like that. And what movies he had been in. For the first time in her life, she wished she had read some of those vacuous celebrity magazines in her dentist’s lobby. But who knew?

Rob turned around and limped toward her. Gracie noticed that, even injured, he moved with the fluidity of a big cat. A tiger. No, a panther. She swatted at her face to drive the thoughts away.

After some gentlemanly resistance, Rob accepted the proffered insulated pad. With much maneuvering to protect his ankle, he sat down on the ground not far from Gracie.

Even in the stark light of day, such as it was, the overall grime and the deep shadows beneath Rob’s eyes did nothing to diminish his excruciating good looks. If anything, the cold air rendered him even more handsome, giving his cheeks a ruddiness that, much to her chagrin, Gracie was finding enormously appealing.

She tractor-pulled herself back to reality. She dipped and redipped the two-year-old tea bag, concentrating on the burnt sienna tannin swirling into the steaming water, hyperaware of the man sitting silently a few feet away.

As if of their own volition, her eyes lifted and met Rob’s.

The actor sat with head tilted slightly, a quizzical look on his face, eyes focused directly on her, intent, studying.

Gracie’s hands trembled. Instantly she felt clumsy, awkward, every movement clunky, unnatural. In a flash, her nose was longer than Pinocchio’s. Her breasts were the size of hen’s eggs. Her bottom was a beach ball stuffed down the back of her pants. She found herself desperately wishing that, instead of all those new Search and Rescue toys, she had spent some of her carefully hoarded money on getting her teeth whitened or a decent haircut instead of hacking at it herself.

Defiance muscled the discomfiture aside and she lifted her chin. “What are you looking at?”

“You,” he said. His voice was calm, unaffected by the intimated challenge. “I’m not looking really. Rather . . . observing.”

The defiance dissolved as quickly as snowflakes in the sun. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Gracie said, dropping her eyes again.

“Why not? I thought women liked being looked at.”

“I don’t.” To cover up the abruptness of her remark and bridge the resulting silence, she announced, “Tea’s ready,” as gaily as if they were sitting in some snug little kitchen in the Cotswolds. She poured the tea into his cup and handed it to him, concentrating on holding the cup steady. “It’s really hot. You might want to let it cool a bit.”

Gracie moved over to a flat-topped boulder a safe distance away from Rob to enjoy her own spot of tea. As she blew on the hot liquid, she tried to imagine objectively what someone—what Rob—was seeing when he looked at her. Five-foot-eight. Reasonably slender, although not by fashion-runway standards. Any flagrant lumps and bulges blessedly disguised beneath layers of fleece and Gore-Tex. Dark auburn hair sloppily braided and topped off by the highly attractive fleece beanie with the flaps pulled down over her ears. Hazel eyes. A little mascara probably wouldn’t have hurt, but who the hell wore makeup on a search?

Imagining what Rob saw was easy. Knowing what he thought about it was an entirely different matter. Surely nothing noteworthy when compared to leading ladies of Hollywood or London. Her entire summation of her positive physical attributes had taken no more than ten seconds. She concluded that no way, even on a good day, could she measure up, much less after twelve hours in the field, including a night in a cramped makeshift shelter.

“Not only are you not in the playing field, sweet pea,” she whispered to herself, “you can’t even see the parking lot.” Her eyes flicked over to Rob, then back to the tea. “So what do people call you?” she asked. “What should I call you? Mr. Christian? Fletcher?” She faked a silent laugh. “I crack myself up.”

When he didn’t respond, she said, “That was supposed to be a joke. You know, a joke? Not that it even resembled one.”

She didn’t dare look at him. She knew he was still watching her.

When he did finally answer, his voice was mild. “I asked you to call me Rob.”

“Yah. Right.” Her cheeks felt hot, which meant they and her entire neck was bright red. “How could I have forgotten that?” Her voice trailed off.

“What do people call you?” Rob asked.

“Grace. My friends call me Gracie.”

“That’s a beautiful name. Grace.”

Gracie snorted.

“Why the snort?”

“One of the reasons my parents named me that was they were hoping I would turn into a clone of my sister. Life is full of disappointments.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Instead of gorgeous, smart, law degree, they got a tomboy with zero brakes for the brain-speech connection. When I was little, my mother washed my mouth out with soap so many times I became quite the connoisseur of brands.”

Rob’s mouth twitched.

“I always preferred the taste of Ivory to Dial.”He chuckled. “So what did you do to warrant such extreme retribution?”

She mentally sifted back through the myriad examples. “One of the most memorable occasions was when I was ten, I told my squirrelly faced teacher to kiss my ass.”

Rob’s face lit up like sunshine on aspen leaves, eyes bright, teeth white and perfect. He threw back his head and laughed out loud.

It was the first time Gracie had really seen him smile, much less laugh.

So this is what all the fuss was about.

Rob took a sip of tea. His face scrunched up as if he had bitten into a sour pickle. He spat out the mouthful and dumped the entire cup onto the ground.

Gracie sat up with indignation. “Hey!”

“What the hell was that?”

“It’s tea.”

“That’s supposed to be tea?”

“What the hell! This isn’t some Notting Hill café, you know. If you don’t want to drink it, then . . . too bad. It’s all you’re going to get.”

“Right then,” Rob said. Lips pursed, he looked around while nodding his head several times.

“The British and their friggin’ tea,” Gracie grumped under her breath.

Rob held his cup out toward Gracie. “Got any more of that delicious concoction? That . . . tea?”

She stood up, snatched the cup from him, refilled it with the steaming liquid, and handed it back to him.

He looked at the cup in his hand. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any milk around here.”

Gracie glowered at him.

“Didn’t think so.” He blew on the tea, then took a sip, this time swallowing it with visible effort. “The purtier the gal, the worse coffee she makes,” he muttered with an exaggerated drawl, then aloud he said, “Thank you for the tea. It’s excellent. Nectar of the gods.”

“Oh, shut up,” Gracie said.