kidding aside, he had no intention of taking her anywhere near Everest. Not damn likely. Nothing Chelsea Tedman could come up with would change his stance on that. The bones of his guiding career had been picked clean since the accident. He had nothing left to offer as far as that was concerned.
Besides, turning up at Base Camp with Atlanta’s sister in tow would only add grist to the rumor mill.
He turned a corner and headed up the slope that would take him from one terrace to another. The Peaks Hotel was on the highest terrace looking down on Namche Bazaar, but then that’s what five-star accommodation was all about.
“Hey, Kurt…Kurt Jellic.”
Kurt spun around. He recognized Basie Serfontien and stopped to let him catch up.
“Where have you been hiding, man? There is this woman, a bit of all right. She wants to recover the Chaplins’ bodies for burial, God help her. I told her you were the only mountain guide who wouldn’t be booked solid.”
And I bet you told her why.
“’S okay, mate. She found me.”
Smiling, Basie slapped him on the shoulder. “Good news, man. You need to get back on the horse.”
Kurt shook his head. “Not if it’s likely to take me for a ride. I’m still thinking about it.”
“Ach, you’ll be mad if you don’t, man. She’s easy on the eye, that one. And money is no object for the Tedman woman.”
Kurt shook his head. He couldn’t be like Basie. If a client had money but no experience, the man would just add a couple of extra Sherpas into the equation to drag the wanna-be climber up to the summit. “I’ll probably see you up at Base Camp, either way. Someone has to do more than just leave the Chaplins lying there.”
He waved Serfontien off and carried on his way. The South African’s easy-on-the-eye comment sent his thoughts wandering back to the restless night he’d spent. Hours of half-remembered dreams where Chelsea fitted over or under him, skin to skin, pounding heart to pounding heart in earth-shattering sex.
Kurt let rip a heartfelt groan. It earned him a surprised look from a guy he was about to pass. “What’s up, mate?”
Tourist. Australian. One look was enough to distinguish the climbers from the wanna-bes. Some of them actually climbed as far as Base Camp, using up much-needed space on the rocky lower reaches of Everest, including adding to the horrendous pollution when they left their rubbish behind.
Kurt shook his head. “’S all right, mate. No worries.” He saluted him and walked on. The sight of these pseudoclimbers was so common that the Aussie’s presence evaporated from Kurt’s mind before he’d taken another two strides.
Back to Chelsea.
If only she hadn’t mentioned that one of her pleasures was horseback riding. The vision that had conjured up had played in some of the more erotic fantasies he’d had in the night. Yet he wasn’t so blinded by lust that he couldn’t recognize his dreams were just visions distorted by a bad case of desire. And all of it brought about by wishful thinking.
In other words, it wouldn’t happen in a million years.
For one thing, he dared not let it.
If he felt the rumors about his part in the accident were bad now, no matter what Basie Serfontien thought, getting involved with Chelsea would be like throwing gasoline on a fire to put it out.
At first sight Chelsea had christened her hotel the Raffles of Nepal. The all-white interior, combined with punkah fans that adorned the ceilings of the first-floor rooms as well as the bedrooms, reminded her of a trip she had once taken to Singapore. Everyone ought to experience Raffles Hotel at least once.
But unless the weather improved, she wouldn’t be switching on the fan in her bedroom. She imagined July and August really heated up, but early May was still reliving the crisp spring days of April.
Even so, she’d heard that on Everest it was easy to get sunburned by the reflected rays piercing the thin air. At least, she’d read it in one of the Everest books she’d brought to read on the plane.
“And you’re still a long way from there, bébé,” she mused.
Paris felt like a lifetime ago. Maybe it was? Sooner or later everything was bound to change. Her job at IBIS looked likely to be the first casualty now that her responsibilities to Tedman Foods and its employees had increased ten thousandfold.
A server dressed in a short white jacket appeared in her peripheral vision. “Can I bring you something, lady? A cocktail? Some tea?”
She looked up at the steward. He was very young and no doubt glad of work that didn’t entail carting seventy-five pounds or more up a mountain, strapped to his back with a strip of webbing across his forehead to balance the weight.
“No, thank you. I’m going inside for lunch as soon as my friend arrives.”
The chairs of the veranda weren’t the high-backed cane found at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, but the seating did provide Chelsea with a comfortable spot to formulate her plan of attack while she watched for Kurt to arrive.
What had she just called him? Her friend? She wasn’t certain they could ever be friends. Lovers or enemies? Only time would tell. Her brain said be wary, but her body had a mind of its own.
She rested her head on the back of her chair and let the peace soak into her. The veranda was fairly deserted. Tourists didn’t pay the fortune it cost to get here to waste their time watching Everest from afar. An idea about that had occurred to her that morning over breakfast, but would Kurt go along with it?
Kurt Jellic. Now, there was a man of contrasts. He looked rough, hard-bitten with his unshaven face and dark, almost black Gypsy eyes. Not what she had expected when Atlanta had said in her letter that he was a New Zealander. She tried to picture Kurt, with sun-bleached hair and light blue irises, sliding down a wave on a surfboard, her former stereotypical idea of a New Zealander.
It didn’t take, but she couldn’t discard the impressions that came from being held against his long, lean-limbed body, while her life trembled on the edge of the knife blade in his hand.
Color and heat rushed to her face and scorched her insides with a sudden rush of arousal. He’d certainly proved he was human…and the attraction was mutual.
Would it be an underhanded trick to use that attraction against him? Despite his initially forbidding appearance, Kurt had turned out to be a nice guy. Hadn’t he listened to her without complaining while she provided him with proof positive she had been the kind of spoiled teenage witch he probably hated?
A teenage witch who had fought against losing the closest thing to a mom she had ever known.
Her eyes welled with unshed tears. Damn, Atlanta’s death had made Chelsea’s intentions of saying, “I’m sorry, sis—I didn’t mean it” an impossibility. There was only one thing she could do for her now. One last thing.
Her tear ducts overflowed before she could prevent it.
They had been doing a lot of that lately. Chelsea opened her eyes wide to halt
