Shaye released a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding when the earth beneath her stopped trembling. There was a pain in her left cheek, her reticule was an uncomfortable lump under her left arm.
A moment later, Alejandro rolled off her. She felt a rush of panic as she opened her eyes to utter blackness. She knew he was there, but she couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything.
“Rio?”
“I’m right here.”
His hand brushed her shoulder, slid down her arm, closed around her fingers.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I think so.” She sat up. Lifting one hand to her cheek, she felt a warm stickiness on her fingertips.
Alejandro helped her to her feet. “Guess I picked a bad day to show you the mine,” he muttered wryly.
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure help’s on the way.”
She nodded; then, realizing he couldn’t see her, said, “I hope so.” She clung to his hand, her heart pounding like a jackhammer. The mine had caved in. But maybe they weren’t in any danger. Alejandro had pulled her into an off-shoot of the main tunnel. Maybe it led to the outside.
She took a deep breath. “This leads outside, right?”
“No. It’s just a tunnel where the vein played out.”
She tried not to think of what would happen if this section of the mine collapsed, too, or if they ran out of air before someone came to rescue them. Buried alive…she clung tighter to Alejandro’s hand.
“Moose!” she exclaimed. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Moose!” Alejandro shouted. “Moose, can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
She didn’t want to think about Moose and the other men, buried beneath tons of dirt and rock, and she shook the thought away. She and Alejandro were still alive. Maybe Moose and the others were, too.
He gave a tug on her hand. “Come on, let’s see how far back this goes. Maybe it leads up to the next level.”
She followed him down the narrow passageway. The blind leading the blind, she thought. He was right in front of her, yet she couldn’t see a thing.
They hadn’t gone far when he swore under his breath.
“What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously.
“It’s a dead end.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t want to believe it. There had to be a way out, if they could just see it. Her camera! Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? Reaching into her reticule, she pulled out her camera. Easing to Alejandro’s left, she took a picture. In the light of the flash, she saw that he was right.
“Handy,” Alejandro remarked as she took another photo.
She shivered as she tucked the camera into her reticule again. She couldn’t help wondering if she going to die down here? Alejandro would probably survive, she thought, since history said he had been hanged on August twelfth, but what if her journey into the past changed history? If not for her, he wouldn’t be down here now. Today was the twenty-sixth of June. Had she robbed him of forty-seven days of life? If he died and she made it back to her own time, would Bodie’s history books now say he had died in a cave-in?
He turned and drew her into his arms. She was shivering uncontrollably. “It’ll be all right,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “Trust me. Hear that?”
She cocked her head to the side as she heard the faint wail of a siren from up above. “Yes.”
“They know what to do. They’ll have us out of here as soon as possible.”
She slipped her arms around his waist and held on tight. She couldn’t seem to stop shaking. “How long do you think it will take?”
“I don’t know, darlin’.”
“Maybe we could dig our way out.”
“With what? Our bare hands?”
The idea was ludicrous, but at the moment she was willing to try anything. “Maybe we could find a piece of wood. Or a…a, I don’t know, a rock.”
“They know we’re down here. They’ll come for us.” His lips brushed the top of her head; she felt it down to her toes. “We might as well sit down while we’re waiting,” he suggested. “It might take them awhile to dig us out.”
What if they didn’t know they were there? What if the man who let them down in the hoist didn’t remember them? What if… She pushed the morbid thoughts from her mind. Someone would find them. She had to believe that.
He sat down, and she sat close beside him, grateful for his arm around her shoulders.
“How long will the air last?”
“Long enough,” he said reassuringly.
“Do you think….do you think that Moose and the others are dead?”
She felt him shrug. “Damned if I know.”
Her gaze moved through the darkness, seeing nothing. She couldn’t remember ever being in total darkness before. It was oddly disorienting, and more than a little frightening.
They sat in silence for several minutes, the only sound that of dirt trickling down from overhead. She didn’t know what Alejandro was thinking about, but all she could think about was the fact that there were tons and tons of dirt overhead that could come crashing down on them at any second.
She couldn’t remember ever being so afraid, or so close to death. She wasn’t ready to die, she thought frantically. Not now. She took several deep breaths, willing herself to stay calm.
“You all right, darlin’?” he asked.
“I guess so. What did you do before you came to Bodie?” she asked. Maybe, if she could get him talking, it would take her mind off how afraid she was.
“Same thing I do here.”
“Gamble?”
“Seems to be my chosen profession. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
“So you’ve always been a gambler?”
“No, not always.”
He drew her closer. His nearness was warm and comforting.
“I worked on a ranch in Montana for awhile, breaking horses. It was steady work. Fair pay.” He laughed softly. “But the real money was gambling with the other hands on Saturday night. I made more playing poker in one night than I made in wages.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I took the foreman for three hundred dollars one night. He accused me of cheating, called me a couple of names a lady shouldn’t hear. I was young and hotheaded, and I laid into him. Broke his nose and a couple of ribs. I left before he could fire me.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you’ve been earning your living gambling ever since?”
“Yeah. I guess it ain’t much of a life, but I’ve seen a lot of country, and just about every boom town in the West. I reckon this one’ll go bust, too, sooner or later. They all do.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that by next year, only six mines would still be operating. Instead, she asked him if he had ever lived with his mother’s people. “I spent my summers in the Black Hills when I was young,” he said. “My old man had a small ranch near Deadwood. My mother and I went to see her people during the Sun Dance. Those were good days. I miss them.”
“I’ve read about the Sun Dance. It always seemed like such a barbaric custom. Did you ever…?”
“No. My mother died when I was nine. A Pawnee raiding party burned our house down the following year, and my old man packed us up and we moved back east to take care of his sister, who was ailing. I didn’t like city life, not after growing up wild. Seems like I was always in trouble of one kind or another. By the time I was sixteen, my old man and I were hardly speaking to each other. We had a big blow-up one night, and I left.”
He’d never had a place to call home since then. He had slept in the open when he was broke, in hotels when he was flush, gradually coming to the realization that it wasn’t the place that made a house a home, but the people in it. He wondered briefly what it would be like to be married to Shaye, then shrugged the idea aside. She was a lady through and through, far too good for the likes of him.
“What did you and your father fight about?” Shaye asked.
“Everything. I didn’t like school and I didn’t go much. I was keeping company with a pretty wild bunch. Drinking.” He grunted softly. “Gambling. Anyway, one thing led to another. We both said some things we shouldn’t have, but I was just as stubborn as he was, and I refused to back down.” He blew out a deep breath. “I never went back,” he said softly, and she heard the regret in his voice. “Two years later I got a letter from my aunt telling me he was dead.”
“I’m sorry, Rio.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Me, too, but it was a long time ago. Hell, that’s enough about me. What about you?”
“My life is much less exciting. I lived my whole life in the same house until I got married…”
“You’re married!”
“Not anymore.”
His hand squeezed her shoulder. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Shaye frowned, then realized he thought her husband was dead. “We’re divorced,” she said, and then wondered if being divorced was still as scandalous as it had once been.
“I’ve never met a divorced woman,” he remarked. “Can’t say I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out, though, cause if it had, you probably wouldn’t be here now, with me.” He laughed softly. “Of course, I don’t imagine you’re too happy about that at the moment, all things considered.”
She had to laugh at that. All things considered, she was still glad to be here, with him.
“Go on,” he urged.
“There’s really nothing to tell. I grew up, got a job, got married, got divorced.” Except for a couple of high profile news stories she had covered early in her career, being trapped in a mine in a ghost town that had been dead for over a hundred years was the most exciting, and frightening, experience she’d ever had. And Alejandro Valverde was definitely the most exciting man she had ever met. She shrugged. “That about sums it up.”
“I have a feeling there’s a lot more to you than that.”
“Well, I was just giving you the Reader’s Digest version.”
“What the deuce is that?”
She grinned. “It’s like a synopsis. The short version as opposed to the long, boring one.”
“I doubt if you could ever be boring, darlin’.”
Silence fell between them. The darkness seemed heavy, overpowering. She shifted her weight and the movement dislodged a trickle of dirt. She felt it against her cheek, reminding her that there were several tons of earth just overhead. She clenched her hands, shivering as fear crawled over her skin again. What if this tunnel collapsed, too? What if they were never found?
“Talk to me, Rio.”
“What about, darlin’?”
“Anything. Anything at all.” She needed the sound of his voice to distract her. He had a beautiful voice, soft and low and sexy, blatantly male. Blatantly intimate. Like black velvet.
Alejandro thought a minute. “I remember my grandmother telling me how light came into the world,” he began. “Long ago, in the time before time, the People lived in the underworld. There was no sun or moon or stars, no light at all, except the light cast by the eagle feathers that the People carried. After a time, the wise men of the tribe got together to see if they could find a way to make more light. One of the wise men decided they should make a sun and a moon, and so they found a piece of round hide and painted it yellow and placed it in the sky. This sun did not give much light, and the next day, they took it down and made it larger and brighter. Four times the sun rose and set and was made larger, until it was very large and very bright.
“There lived with the People a witch and a wizard who were angry with what the wise men had done, and they tried to destroy the sun and the moon. This frightened the sun and the moon, and they fled the underworld and escaped to the heavens.”
“That’s a wonderful story,” Shaye said. “How long do you think we’ve been down here?”
“I don’t know. A couple of hours, maybe more.”
It seemed like forever. How long would it take for the miners who were topside to dig them out? Hours? Days? She posed the question to Alejandro, dreading the answer.
“It’s hard to say,” he replied. “Depends on how much dirt they have to dig through to get to us, and whether the shaft is still clear.”
“It might be days then?”
“Shaye…”
“Tell me the truth.”
“It’s a possibility, but I wouldn’t worry about it. The miners have dealt with cave-ins before. They know what to do.”
Yes, she thought, shivering, but would they be able to do it in time?
“Shaye, it’ll be all right, trust me.”
“I can’t help it, I’m scared.”
Alejandro blew out a breath. He didn’t blame her for being scared. He was a mite unsettled himself. There had been cave-ins before; he’d seen the bodies carried out of the mines, heard the sobs of the widows and children.
“It’ll be all right,” he said again.
Shaye laughed softly. “Who are you trying to convince?”
He laughed, too, his arm tightening around her shoulders, and suddenly, neither of them was laughing.
“Shaye…”
She couldn’t see him in the darkness, but she could feel the heat of his body next to hers, his thigh pressed against her own. It was suddenly hard to breathe, hard to think of anything but the man beside her.
She wanted him, she thought, wanted him to hold her, to kiss her. To make love to her. Oh, but it was crazy. She hardly knew him, yet there was no denying the attraction that hummed between them whenever their eyes met. And in the back of her mind was the thought, what if? What if they were going to die here? Alejandro might live. Maybe her being here wouldn’t change his fate, but that didn’t mean she would get out alive…
She felt his breath on her face, and then his lips claimed hers and drove every other thought from her mind. Heat spiraled through her as his tongue caressed her lower lip, tasting her. He turned toward her and she melted into his embrace, all her fears forgotten. His arms were strong around her; surely he would keep her safe. His hand stroked her back, his touch light, sending shivers of pleasure down her spine. And his mouth…she closed her eyes, lost in the wonder of his kiss. Her hands clutched his shoulders, drifted down his arm, curving over his biceps to lightly knead the muscles there.
She fit in his arms so perfectly…was he aware of it, too?
She moaned softly, heard the sharp intake of his breath as she leaned into him, wanting to be closer, closer, cursing the voluminous skirt and petticoats that bunched between them.
He murmured her name, then kissed her again, and yet again. And somehow they were lying side by side in an intimate tangle of arms and legs. She didn’t know if it was the darkness or the man, but her every sense seemed heightened, her every nerve attuned to his nearness. Her skin came alive at his touch, tingling with need, burning with awareness. She tugged off her gloves, her fingertips moving over the face she could not see, tracing the shape of his nose, his jaw, lingering over his lips.
With a low growl, he opened his mouth, capturing her finger, sucking lightly.
Her breath escaped in a long, husky sigh. A kiss, a touch, and she was on fire for him, filled with a longing she had never known before.
“Shaye…”
She heard her own longing reflected in his voice.
He rained kisses over her face, his touch incredibly gentle, so filled with tenderness, it brought an ache to her heart and tears to her eyes. Since her divorce, it had been easy to keep men at arm’s length. Hurt and disillusioned, she had been certain she would never trust another man, never want another man in her life. But she wanted Alejandro Valverde with her whole heart and soul.
She was about to tell him so when she realized he had gone suddenly still.
“Listen!” he exclaimed softly. “Did you hear that?”
“What? I don’t hear any…”
And then she heard it, a man’s voice. “Hey! Anybody alive down there?”
Alejandro sat up. “Yes,” he shouted. “We’re here!”
“Sit tight. We’ll have you out of there in no time at all.”
They were, Shaye thought, the sweetest words she had ever heard. And even as the thought crossed her mind, she couldn’t help wishing their rescuers had waited another hour, or maybe two.
* * * * *
The man was as good as his word. A short time later, they could hear the sound of men digging, and in less than an hour, she was standing on solid ground again. Hundreds of people were gathered at the mine entrance. They cheered as Shaye and Alejandro emerged. Shaye took a deep breath, filling her lungs with fresh air. It was, she thought, almost like being reborn.
The doctor came forward to check them over. He examined the cut on Shaye’s cheek, applied some sort of antiseptic that hurt worse than the cut itself, and pronounced both her and Alejandro in good health.
Several women surged forward, offering them cake, sandwiches, coffee, and lemonade.
Lily and Addy Mae and a dark-eyed girl Shaye didn’t know hovered over Alejandro, touching his arm, his shoulder, his cheek, expressing their relief that he was all right.
“We were so worried,” Addy Mae said, and the other two girls nodded.
Alejandro looked at Shaye over their heads, and shrugged.
Shaye accepted a roast beef sandwich and a glass of lemonade from one of the townswomen. “Do they know if the others are all right?”
The woman shook her head. “No word yet. The cave-in wasn’t so bad where you were. From what my Harlan said, the worst of it was farther down the tunnel. They’re still digging down there.”
Shaye took a drink, trying not to think of Moose and the other men buried beneath tons of dirt.
Around her, men and women talked in subdued voices punctuated by the whine of the hoist as dirt was lifted from the mine.
“Too bad,” a grizzled veteran said.
“Bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Yup. Mining’s a dangerous business. Could just as easily have been a fire.”
“Or an explosion. Remember when the powder magazine blew up at the Old Rough and Ready? In all my born days, I never heard such an awful sound.”
“Terrible, just terrible. I thought the whole house was gonna come down around us.”
“Yeah, I recollect that. Thought we was havin’ an earthquake.”
“Blew the boardinghouse next to the mine to smithereens.”
“Yep. Danged explosion rained rocks down on Main Street. Lucky more folks weren’t hurt.”
“Killed seven men in the mine.”
“Heard tell folks felt the blast clear to Bridgeport.”
And on and on it went, with the bystanders recalling other misfortunes and catastrophes while a new tragedy was being played out in front of them.
Shaye had just finished her sandwich when Alejandro came for her. “You look all done in,” he said, taking her by the arm. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the hotel.”
“What about Moose and the others?”
“There’s nothing we can do for them. Come on, let’s go get cleaned up.”
She was too tired to argue. Alejandro had borrowed a buggy from one of the townspeople. He helped her in, then took his seat. Picking up the reins, he clucked to the team.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“I reckon.”
“What a horrible way to die.”
“There aren’t many good ways that I know of,” Alejandro replied.
“No, I guess not.”
And hanging had to be one of the worst, she thought, and wondered if there was some way to change his fate, and if there were, what the consequences would be.
When they reached the hotel, he helped her from the carriage. Inside, he asked the clerk to send some hot water up to the room right away. Shaye was all too conscious of the speculation in the clerk’s eyes as she followed Alejandro up the stairs. She could almost read his thoughts, knew he was wondering what their relationship was, but she was too drained, physically and emotionally, to worry about it.
She unlocked the door and Alejandro followed her inside. She stood there, too weary to move, to think, while he lit the lamp.
“Here, now.” He took her reticule and placed it on top of the dresser. “Sit down before you fall down.”
She sat down in the chair, startled when he dropped to his knees, lifted her skirt, and began to unlace her shoes. He removed them one by one, peeled off her long cotton stockings, and then he began to massage her foot.
“Rio…?”
He looked up at her, head cocked to one side. “Don’t you like it?”
She shrugged, keenly aware of his hands moving over her foot. His skin was very dark compared to her own. His touch made her skin tingle.
“Should I stop?”
She shook her head, felt her heart skip a beat as his hands moved up her leg, gently massaging her calf. No one had ever done such a thing for her before. She had never realized how sensual such a thing could be, to have a man kneeling at her feet, massaging her foot, her leg.
His gaze held hers as he lowered her foot, then cradled the other one in his lap. His hands were big and strong, yet so gentle.
She looked at him, and she wanted him. Even now, she could remember the taste of his kisses, the way her body had molded so perfectly to his. She had come so close, she thought, so close to surrendering her heart and soul into his keeping. Oh, yes, she wanted him desperately. Even now, covered with dirt and emotionally and physically exhausted, she wanted to feel his mouth on hers again, to hear his voice call her darlin’ as only he could, to feel his weight pressing her down…
And he wanted her. She could feel it in his touch, read it in the depths of his eyes, those dark dark eyes that seemed to know her better than she knew herself.
“Shaye?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, let herself love him. She didn’t belong here, didn’t know when she might find herself back in her own time. How could she hope to survive in the future if she left her heart in the past?
He didn’t argue, didn’t force the issue. Instead, he stood up. “I’m going back to the mine and see if I can help.”
“All right.”
“Good night, Shaye.”
“Good night. Alejandro? Be careful.”
He looked at her a moment; then, reaching down, he took hold of her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. And kissed her.
She was breathless when he let her go.
His knuckles skimmed her cheek. “Enjoy your bath,” he said, and left the room.
She stared after him, her fingertips pressed against her lips, and knew she had lost the battle, and her heart, as well.