alone. The makeshift ladder attached to the mine wall was metal and had been checked and reinforced just last year, had held his weight just fine then.
Travis hoped to hell he caught her somewhere on the horizontal shaft at the twenty-foot level.
He sure didn’t want to have to go any farther and allowed himself to mutter some more about stupid legends, ancient curses and women.
He climbed down the shaft, then stood on the horizontal shaft as it opened up both left and right.
Did she know she wasn’t alone by now? Had she heard him? She didn’t have that much of a head start, and he would hope she was being more careful and moving more slowly than he was, since she hadn’t been here before.
At least, he didn’t think she’d been here.
Travis stood there, listening, finally hearing a clank and then a muffled curse in the shaft to the left. He hoped she was at least as frustrated as he was and liked the idea that he might scare her half to death, coming upon her this way in an abandoned mine.
If he did, maybe she wouldn’t do anything this stupid again.
He crept along, the light out now, going by the feel of the cool, rock wall against his right hand. He caught a glimpse of light, then of what she was studying.
One of the petroglyphs.
An eagle.
He could see it in the light from her helmet, but had only a vague impression of her, sturdy boots, baggy coveralls and a helmet, her nose practically pressed against the rock onto which someone maybe as long as five thousand years ago had carved an eagle.
He was sure she’d come after the diamond.
So why was she studying the drawings?
Travis backed out of the shaft quietly, slowly, wanting to know what she’d do next.
Finally, she started making her way back to the center of the twenty-foot level. From there, it was either explore the passage to the right or descend again.
This time to a hundred feet.
He thought it was downright creepy being that far underground under solid rock.
Surely she wasn’t going to do that.
He waited just down the right-hand passageway, peered around the edge of the wall and there she was, checking out the vertical shaft that descended to the next level.
“God almighty!” he muttered, then walked over there and grabbed her around her waist and picked her up as she knelt on the ground peering into a hole, seemingly comfortable as could be, with an eighty-foot drop beneath her.
She screamed so loud he thought she might bring the walls down around them, and he lifted her up in the air and held her there, her body curled up in a ball, mad as hell. She kicked out with her feet and got some leverage against the opposite wall, sent him tumbling back and hitting the wall behind him none too gently.
He held on, one arm around her waist and one managing to get a grip that flattened both arms against her body.
When she finally stopped screaming, he muttered into her ear, “Hush. There’s no place to run, and I’m sure as hell not letting you climb down any farther into this mine.”
She stopped struggling, finally. She had lost her helmet at some point and its light was now shining down the passageway to the right, so he couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see him.
He could feel her breathing hard, and didn’t feel in the least bit guilty about manhandling her this way, at least not until she calmed down. He wasn’t going to let her flounder around and hurt herself or get lost, or God forbid, fall down the eighty-foot vertical shaft in the dark.
“You scared me half to death!” she told him finally, still breathing hard and spitting mad.
Travis eased back just enough to turn her around in his arms, her back against the opposite wall of the mine, then held her there with his own body pressed hard against hers.
“Yeah?” he said, his face so close to hers he could feel the breath coming out of her body. “And you scared me. Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to come into a place like this alone?”
“I know what I’m doing. I’m a grad student in geology at the university,” she claimed.
“Do you also know you’re trespassing on private property?” he tried, looming over her in the dark, determined to have his say.
“Well…yes,” she conceded, finally.
He eased back, still holding her there with his body, but not up in her face, the way he had been.
She was a tiny thing, he’d realized when he’d had her plastered against him just now, slender as could be. Young, too, if she really was a student, like she said.
He didn’t think she was going to try to get away any longer, so staying that close to her was more of a distraction than a help at the moment. And he was quickly discovering she had all the necessary attributes to be very distracting to a man.
Travis fought to put those kind of thoughts completely out of his head as he backed away just enough so that he wasn’t touching her anymore but could still grab hold of her quickly if he needed to.
“You know if I haul you out of here and call the sheriff, he’d treat you to at least a night in jail,” he said.
She sighed. “You don’t really want to do that. Do you?”
“If it kept you from trying some damned fool stunt like this again, yeah, I do.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I just—”
“Have to find that stupid diamond? Yeah. I’ve heard it before—”
“Do you have any idea what kind of an opportunity this is?”
“Oh, yeah. Millions of dollars at stake, and you think all you have to do is find it.”
“No. Not the money,” she claimed. “Finding it. If the Santa Magdalena Diamond is really somewhere on this ranch, it’s the find of a lifetime. Scientists spend their whole lives studying and searching, and most of them will never discover anything like this. It’s amazing! How could anyone who’s serious about a career in science pass up that opportunity?”
Travis frowned, hearing the honest enthusiasm in her voice. Same as with those archaeology students and their supervisors who were on the ranch last summer studying the petroglyphs.
He didn’t really understand getting that excited or being so fascinated with those drawings, but he’d seen that kind of enthusiasm and pure joy of discovery before in them.
So she took stupid risks, but that yearning to explore, to discover, he at least understood better than those fools out to make millions by simply getting lucky and stumbling upon a treasure. He believed in hard work much more than luck, so he could understand a bit of what drove her and wasn’t quite as annoyed as he was before.
And
