She folded her arms on her chest and shook her head. “Oh, no-no way. I watch the Olympics. I’ve seen the people that do this sort of thing. I thought they were crazy. And they were wearing helmets. No way, Jose.”
“All right, suit yourself.” He got up, dusted off his pants and bent down to pick up the sled’s pull rope. As he started walking toward the gate, he heard ski boots clomp down the wooden steps behind him.
“All right, since you’ve got me out here…Hey, wait, hold up a minute, okay?”
Wearing what he hoped was a look of long-suffering and not a reflection of the satisfaction he felt, he paused and waited for her to catch up. “I want to see the castle,” she said, breathing hard, cold-reddened lips making charming vapor puffs in the frosty air. “You did say you’d show it to me.”
“Ah. So I did.” He made a great show of thinking it over. “All right, here’s the deal. I’ll take you up and show you the castle, if you agree to come down-” he tugged on the sled’s rope, lifting it a few inches off the snow “-on this.”
She cocked her head, bit down on her lower lip and looked at him for a moment, then answered, “Deal,” so readily he knew she was already thinking of ways to get out of it.
The hike up the mountain to the castle ruins was less strenuous than Lucia had expected. For one thing, for someone accustomed to California’s Sierra Nevada, it wasn’t much of a mountain-more of a hill, really. And then the path, which was wide enough in most places to be called a road, wound upward in a gentle spiral that afforded them everwidening views of the snowy hills and woods that surrounded them, and the valley and villages far below. As they trudged unhurried along the path, making new footprints in the undisturbed snow, Corbett had plenty of time to fill her in on the area’s history and geography, some of which she already knew from her own research. By mutual, though unspoken, agreement, they didn’t mention their own complex pasts, or the consequences affecting their immediate future. The Lazlo Group, Cassandra DuMont, her son Troy, Adam Sinclair and Paris-those things seemed far away, though not at all out of mind, like a bank of thunderclouds piled up on distant mountains.
The castle, Corbett told her, most likely dated from the Turkish Wars, sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It was thought to have been a relatively minor military outpost and not worth the effort to excavate or restore.
“If it had been,” Corbett said, “I doubt the Hungarian powers that be would have been willing to let it pass into private hands. So, naturally, I’m quite satisfied with it as it is.”
They had emerged from the last small stand of forest onto the edge of the rocky, windswept summit.
“There’s not much to see,” Lucia said, trying to hide her disappointment.
He snorted as he plodded past her, towing the sled. “Not if you were expecting Disneyland. All these rocks you see-” he waved one arm in a wide sweep “-were once part of the walls and battlements. Most of the part that’s still standing is over here, on the lee side of the hill-maybe because it’s a bit more protected from the wind and weather. Over the centuries nature’s taken a much greater toll than the Turks ever did. Here, I’ll show you.”
He half turned and held out his hand, and she gasped and caught at a breath as if a gust of wind had snatched it from her. Seeing him there, tall against a backdrop of scudding clouds, his eyes vivid mirrors of the patches of blue sky, jaws dark with stubble and cheeks reddened by the cold, wind riffling the fur on his hat and collar, she felt a wave of desire so intense and raw it rocked her like an unexpected blow. Stunned her, so that she reached blindly and let him take her hand and pull her, unprotesting, against his side.
“See there?” he said, pointing, and through the haze of her passion-fogged senses she could see the definite outline of a rough square in the snow. “That’s the foundation of one of the towers. And over there is another one.”
She drew an unsteady breath and gulped. “Oh, wow.”
Having recovered most of her wits, she pulled away from him and went slipping and sliding down a short embankment to where a tumble of squareish blocks ended in an upright section of wall. As she came closer to the yard-thick wall she saw that it stood a good bit higher than her head, except for one squared-off section about chin height that could only have been a window. She was trying without success to hoist herself onto the ledge when Corbett came to join her.
“Determined to break your neck, are you?”
Still trembling inside, she smiled winningly at him over one shoulder. “Come on-give me a leg up. I’ll bet the view is amazing from up here.”
“Hmm, rather intrepid for someone who doesn’t do sports.” But she caught a thrilling glimpse of a grin before he laced his gloved fingers together and bent down to offer them as a foothold.
She placed the toe of her boot in the cradle of his hands and one hand on his shoulders, held her breath…and a moment later, gave a small squawk of surprise as she found herself perched in the opening of the ancient wall.
“Oh, man…” She rose unsteadily to her feet, bracing against a wave of vertigo with one hand on each side of the opening. “This really is cool. You should see…” She leaned to see more, but pulled back at a strangled sound from Corbett. “What?”
He was shaking his head and staring resolutely at the ground. “Nothing. Do go on.”
“Well, you can see Kati and Josef’s cottage from here, did you know that? It’s directly below us. I guess that means-” she turned in the opening and pointed back toward the ruins “-the chimney must come out somewhere over there.”
“It would, if it went up in a straight line, like a man-made chimney.” He held up his arms and made a beckoning gesture. “However, since it was made by Mother Nature, and nature, as they say, abhors straight lines-”
“A vacuum.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nature abhors a vacuum. I suppose she could also have a thing against straight lines, although I’ve-”
“Oh, do shut up,” Corbett said cheerfully. “I’ll be happy to show you where it comes out, if you insist. But first, please come down from there before you hurt yourself. There’s a good-”
His last word was lost-fortunately for him, as far as Lucia was concerned-in a grunt of mixed surprise and pain as she dropped from the window ledge straight into his arms.
She murmured, gazing into his eyes with deep concern, “I forgot about your ribs. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“I’ll survive,” he said, without benefit of breath. Although, the longer he stood there holding her and looking down into her eyes, the less aware he was of either the pain in his ribs or the lack of air in the lungs beneath them. It took willpower he didn’t know he had to drag himself back from the brink of insanity. “I have just one question, though. Why this obsessive interest in ancient geothermal rock formations?”
She drew back-as he’d hoped and prayed she would, since he lacked the moral strength to push her away-and stared at him with a look of puzzlement. “I’m interested, yes. You told me about it, and I found it fascinating. I want to see it. I’m curious-wouldn’t you be?”
He stared at her a moment longer, then conceded stiffly, “All right, yes, I suppose I would be.” He turned around and pointed. “See there, that curved wall, that’s an old cistern.” He started walking toward it and she fell in beside him, listening intently.
Too intently? Why?
He gave himself a mental shake and went on with his lecture.
“Built to collect rainwater, probably sometime later than the castle itself. I imagine the original inhabitants of the castle were in the process of digging themselves a cistern when they broke through to the cave underneath. They wouldn’t have bothered to finish building the thing, since now they had a ready source of both water and escape. Later on, though, this cave, and the others in the region, were used by all sorts of people-smugglers, rebels, refugees-who might have had good reasons to want to hide the entrance to the tunnel. So-” he paused at the edge of the crumbling rock wall that surrounded what appeared to be a shallow, hand-dug well about ten feet deep “-they built the cistern around it. As I said, though, the tunnel, or chimney, or whatever you want to call it, hasn’t been used in years. I don’t know if it’s even passable. And,” he quickly added, as Lucia leaned to peer over the side, “I don’t intend to start exploring it now, in case you were thinking of weaseling out of our deal and hoping to get home that way.”
She looked up at him and said quickly, “I wasn’t thinking any such thing. I’m not completely crazy.” She backed away from the ruined wall, brushing snow from her gloved hands, and he noticed she’d began to shiver.
“You’re cold,” he said gently, smiling a little, both at her automatic glare of denial and his equally reflexive urge to pull her close and warm her. “Are you ready to go home?”
Lucia tucked her hands into the pockets of her borrowed ski jacket and glared at him with dark foreboding. While it was true that most of her objection to the sled had been a put-on, merely a way of taunting Corbett, there
