Stranded With A Stranger

Chelsea would never forget the moment when she hung in midair on Mount Everest,

nothing between her and death as she anxiously searched for Kurt against the icy cliff.

When she’d heard him yell her name, she’d been sure he’d fallen. Immediately, she had been stung by pain and guilt. If Kurt died, it would be her fault. She was the one who had hounded him to bring her back to the place where her sister had plunged to her death.

Her heart had rolled over. A useless lump of lead in her chest that refused to beat without knowing Kurt was safe. The moment her eyes had latched on to his red anorak against the gray-blue sky above her, it went into overdrive.

From now on, no matter what Kurt said, or how much he protested that he was no good for her, she knew in her heart she could never love anyone else as much as him.

The difficult task would be convincing him.

Stranded with a Stranger

Frances Housden

MILLS & BOON

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I’d like to dedicate this book to my original editor at Silhouette, Leslie Wainger, with thanks.

And also to Sir Edmund Hillary, my inspiration for this book, who proved that although Kiwis can’t fly, they can still reach the top of the world.

FRANCES HOUSDEN

has always been a voracious reader, but she never thought of being a writer until a teacher gave her the encouragement she needed to put pen to paper. As a result, Frances was a finalist in the 1998 Clendon Award and won the award in 1999, which led to the sale of her first book for Silhouette, The Man for Maggie.

Frances’s marriage to a navy man took her from her birthplace in Scotland all the way to the ends of the earth in New Zealand. Now that he’s a landlubber, they try to do most of their traveling together. They live on a ten-acre bush block in the heart of Auckland’s Wine District. She has two large sons, two small grandsons and a tiny granddaughter who can twist her around her finger, as well as a wheaten terrier who thinks she’s boss. Thanks to one teacher’s dedication, Frances now gets to write about the kind of heroes a woman would travel to the ends of the earth for. Frances loves to hear from readers. Get in touch with Frances through her Web site at www.franceshousden.com.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Prologue

Mount Everest

April 20

Dear Chelsea,

I can imagine your astonishment as you open this. I can almost hear you gasp, “A letter from Atlanta!”

How many years has it been? I move around so much I’ve lost count. Far, far too many, though. My fault. As eldest, I shouldn’t have let a childish rift go on for so long. I just hope I haven’t left it too late to set matters right.

What’s it all about?

Well, for a start, I’m worried.

Oh, not over making the climb of Everest I’ll be doing soon. I lost all fear of heights years ago, when I swapped my ballet slippers for climbing boots. It was only to be expected marrying an adventurous man like Bill Chaplin. And when you love someone the way I love Bill, wherever he goes, you follow.

That’s right, I used the L word. No matter what you thought of the arrangement back then, our father never forced me into this marriage. I’ve had fifteen blissful years. Not many people can claim that. You were far too young to understand back then, barely thirteen. I hope time has achieved what I couldn’t, and that you understand at last what it is to truly love another person heart and soul.

But I’m getting off track. It’s not myself I’m worried for—it’s you. Though chances are we might both be in danger, not many people can reach me up here, so I reckon I’m pretty safe. It takes a special kind of man to climb Everest, and I’m certain Arlon Rowles isn’t one of them.

Yes, I’m talking about our cousin Arlon. It seems making him CEO of the business father left us, in order for us to avoid facing each other across a boardroom table, was a huge mistake.

I received a letter yesterday from Madeline Coulter. You remember Maddie? She worked for Father. According to her, Arlon has been siphoning money out of the business for the past five years and salting it away in a Swiss bank account.

Five years. My God, he must have started soon after Father’s death. She says that she has the proof locked away in a safety deposit box. This is the number: 44578—Bank of America, Jamestown. Don’t lose it. It’s in both our names.

Along with the letter, she sent me a key. I’ve decided it will be safer on my person for now. I’m wearing it on a chain around my neck.

But this is where it gets down and dirty. I called Maddie by satellite phone and her sister answered. I couldn’t have been more shocked. Dear old Maddie was shot and killed, in an apparent mugging. It happened not long after she mailed the letter. Coincidence? I don’t think so. She was found in an alley, and the shopping she’d done on her way home from work was scattered all around her, yet they don’t live in a dangerous neighborhood. And if someone was desperate enough to kill her for money, why leave her purse and the shopping behind?

I don’t want to scare you, but I’ve had a dreadful feeling ever since her letter arrived that this situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. So watch your back, sister dearest. I mean it. Watch your back and don’t go out alone at night.

I expect you’re wondering why I’m not coming straight home to help you deal with this. Bill would insist on it. That’s why I haven’t told him. For years he’s wanted to climb Everest. We’ve trained for this moment in Switzerland and in South America, where we met our guide Kurt Jellic, then in New Zealand, where Kurt comes from. Besides, by the time this reaches you, I’ll probably be back from the summit and on my way to the States. It took Maddie’s letter three weeks to reach me. Why should this one be any different?

You’re probably wondering how I found your address. I’ve always made sure I knew where you were. And yes, maybe I should have phoned you, as well. But after all these years of silence I couldn’t be certain you would take my call. Please accept this olive branch and try to forgive me for deserting you. I know you always found Father hard to deal with—and with me gone? Well, enough said for now. Maybe once this is over we can meet up in Paris, now that you’ve made your home there.

Darn, reading back over this I know it sounds slightly paranoid. All I can say is, you’ll probably feel as I do after reading it.

Speaking of paranoid, ever since we climbed back down to Base Camp, even before Maddie’s letter arrived, I’ve felt that someone is watching me. Stupid, huh? I couldn’t be farther from cousin Arlon’s idea of civilization if I tried, but I can’t shake the sensation of being watched.

Tomorrow we go back up. The weather looks good to reach the summit, and we’ve spent a lot of time climbing back and forth between Camps One, Two and Three, acclimatizing to the thin atmosphere. Yet, in a way, I’ll be glad to get back up there.

Everest has a way of making our human troubles appear puny, insignificant. And I really need that right now.

I know I’m thrusting a heck of a lot of responsibility on you, but if we can’t stop Arlon and the company goes belly-up, thousands of people will lose their jobs.

Father must be turning in his grave. Not that you’ll give a damn about that. But if there was one thing that mattered to him, it was the business he built up from nothing. What he really wanted was sons, not daughters.

I’ll call as soon as I make the descent. We can go fetch the papers together and make sure they get to the proper authorities. Or maybe we ought to contact them first and get some protection before we open the safety deposit box.

Take care, and I really do mean watch your back. Maddie was shot from behind.

Your loving sister,

Atlanta

Chapter 1

Namche Bazaar

May

Chelsea watched the guide’s pale blue gaze shift away as if he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Sorry, Ms. Tedman, I can’t help you. Kurt Jellic from Aoraki Expeditions is the one you want to ask. He is the only one who knows exactly where the bodies are hidden…in a manner of speaking.”

Basie Serfontien’s smirk faltered as if the big South African’s harsh-voiced faux pas had just dawned on him.

“Thanks for your help.”

Chelsea began turning away, wanting out of there before Serfontien, the last guide on her list, could get a full view of her trembling lips. Failure. Again.

She wouldn’t cry in front of these hulking great men—not if she could help it—but now she was down to her last and also her best hope, Kurt Jellic. Her mouth twisted in a wry semblance of a smile as she forced herself to turn back. Trust her to forget the most important question. “I don’t suppose any of you know where Jellic is? No one I’ve asked has seen him for days.”

The guide and his team all shook their heads.

It was the fifth time she’d asked someone to guide her up Everest. She had heard rumors about Jellic, and some of the suggestions to look for the man had an if-you-dare quality about them, as if they knew something she didn’t. Too bad. The man could be Frankenstein’s long-lost brother for all she cared, as long as he took her to where the last member of her immediate family—her sister, Atlanta Chaplin—had been killed.

The accident had happened just a few days after she’d received Atlanta’s letter. They had not reached the top as planned. And though that did not seem to matter now, she wished Atlanta and Bill could at least have had their wish before they died.

Atlanta’s letter was tucked in Chelsea’s breast pocket, as if somehow keeping it close to her heart would change the past.

The night when she had caught the news on CNN of another two climbers being lost to Everest had turned her life upside down. She had looked at the screen, taken in the names, but refused to believe. Atlanta and Bill Chaplin?

No, it had to be a mistake. The bodies hadn’t been recovered. She’d held her breath, waiting for better news, even as she had made her arrangements to travel to Namche Bazaar.

Then she’d arrived in Nepal, walked from Lukla to Namche Bazaar, and hope was no longer an option. She touched the letter through her anorak. Its paper had lost its crispness and stopped crackling.

She was sick of getting the same answer to her question. “I’m sorry about Bill and Atlanta. They were a nice couple. But we can’t take our other clients off the beaten track to help you look for their bodies. You want to talk to Kurt Jellic.”

The invisible man. She had begun feeling she was being given the runaround. Chelsea swiveled on her heel, disappointment weighing on her shoulders. Before she could stride off in the direction of her hotel, a hand touched her elbow. “Excuse please, lady.” She turned and the hand dropped away. Its owner, embarrassed and blushing, lowered her dark eyes. The young woman was almost breathtakingly beautiful, the skin of her round face smooth and lustrous. Such a pity that life in the mountains and the wear and tear of this harsh landscape would show on those perfect features before too many years had passed.

“Namaste,” the girl lisped in her delightful accent.

“Namaste.” Chelsea repeated the greeting she had already learned meant “I salute all the divine qualities in you.”

The Sherpa girl fitted the mountain village scene much better than Chelsea did in her pseudomountaineering gear bought in Paris. She’d never been up a mountain in her life.

No matter—she was determined to climb the biggest of them all, or part of it, at least. Leave the summit for those who needed that sort of buzz. She just wanted to find her sister.

“I am Kora. I know where Kurt S’ab is. I saw him yesterday.”

“You did?” Chelsea gasped. Hope at last.

The girl nodded a couple of times from the waist up, her many layers of clothing swaying with her in a rainbow of rusts, browns and blues. “My brother, Sherpa Rei, works for him.”

Chelsea couldn’t restrain her smile. “Good. What is he like? What kind of man is he?”

“Kurt Sa’b is very big man, very big.” Kora drew in the air with her hands, but Chelsea wasn’t sure what to take from that. Was it his stature or large ego that impressed Kora the most?

Yet her heart beat with excitement as she asked, “And where does Kurt Sa’b live? Is it far? Can you take me to him?”

“He lives now in a tavern over in the old town.”

The old town? Chelsea looked around her. Although they were standing on the outskirts of a street market dangerously close to the edge of the terrace, none of the buildings built into the other side looked terribly old. She supposed Namche Bazaar had once been a small, quiet mountain terrace village hanging on the side of a hill. Then hordes of foreigners had disrupted its peace, determined to pit their skills against Everest. Once Sir Edmund Hillary had “knocked the bastard off,” as he had put it, nearly every man and his dog had declared open season on the mountain as if it was some sort of macho ritual. Why else had Bill Chaplin dragged Atlanta up there? Not to get himself and Atlanta killed, that’s for sure.

The girl nodded. “Kora can show you the way.”

“Great, wonderful. Can we go now?”

“Sure ting.” Laughter tinkled out as Kora’s smooth golden face creased into dimples. “Follow me, lady. This way.”

Marketplaces like the one they were walking through were always a good indicator of the culture of a country, the food in particular. The scents here were so different from Paris, where the aroma of freshly baked bread frequently led her by the nose.

They passed a stall, and for all her urgency, Chelsea’s taste buds were stirred by the spicy tang of barbecued meat. Her mouth watered. How long since she’d eaten? Breakfast, at least. She’d been far too busy chasing after mountain guides.

On any day but this she would have let the sounds of the market and unfamiliar accents soak into her mind. She always did this in a new place. Sounds and smells were her way of storing the memory so she wouldn’t lose it.

But the little Nepalese girl was swift on her feet, weaving with ease through the multinational crowd, a mix of locals and tourists, and Chelsea needed to keep up with her. She let the murmur of voices slip past her, although the wind chimes ringing on every stall to keep evil spirits away were a different proposition, as were the birds that sang their hearts out in cages. The sound was lovely. It reminded her of a canary Atlanta had bought her for her fifth birthday.

Oh, God, why couldn’t she have waited for me?

All her life her sister had taken off to places where Chelsea couldn’t possibly follow.

The street opened out onto a small square dominated by a Buddhist temple. Prayer flags flapped overhead in a breeze perfumed with food and incense, and brown hands turned prayer wheels as they passed by. Did those wheels and flags work, or were they just another pretty superstition to ward away evil?

Chelsea wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they were as redundant as her own prayers. She’d said some for Maddie after her sister’s letter arrived. Maddie had been a friend since childhood, a woman who would never have intentionally hurt a soul. She hadn’t deserved to die. Chelsea had called the detective in charge of the case, but had gained no helpful information. Didn’t a woman’s death matter anymore?

Spinning a prayer wheel was probably as useless as the entreaties she had sent upward that Atlanta was really safe. All her hopes of them coming together again, her chance to correct past mistakes, had died on the mountain.

But no prayers would be as profound if she couldn’t find her sister and that key. Too many huge American firms had toppled recently, brought down by creative accounting, and this could be another instance. If only she could be sure what was in the safety deposit box.

Last quarter’s financials had been down again, but if Maddie was correct, she needed to find the proof.

That was the only way to stop cousin Arlon.

Kurt squinted at the figures written in his small accounts book. Not that he thought scrunching his eyes would change the fact that if he didn’t score some work soon, his business would be in the red. It had cost him $65,000 to use the fixed lines and aluminum bridges put out by the Sherpas’ association at the beginning of the season. If he didn’t get more work soon…

The up-front payment he’d received from the Chaplins had been eaten up and then some. And he wasn’t such a boor that he would claim from the estate of a couple of friends who’d been killed on his watch.

“Aargh.” He cleared his throat as if that would get rid of the rumors that had been circulating since he’d come back down the mountain without Bill and Atlanta.

The local magistrate had more or less cleared him. That is to say, nothing could be proved one way or another. All they had was his word. But in a close-knit society, once a rumor took hold it was hard to contradict it.

Bad news always traveled faster than good.

If he could get his hands on the bastard who had started them, he’d kick him to hell and gone. His family knew only too well how rumor and innuendo could ruin a life. But when his father had died it had been Kurt and his brothers and sister who’d been left to deal with the mess. Were still dealing with it.

He looked up from the lined page and realized he should blame the poor light for the problem with his eyes. At five-thirty in the evening his attic room always flooded with gray watery light as the sun dropped behind the Himalayas. He shut the book with a snap. The sound was like a thunderclap in the quiet room.

Though he had taken lodgings on the top floor of a tavern, the old stone walls were two feet thick and swallowed up the noise from the barroom, keeping it to a low murmur he barely noticed.

Kurt scrubbed his hands over his face and combed his untidy hair with his fingers. He needed a shave. His stubble was four days old and as black as his hair. What was the point? He had no one to impress. Clients were staying away in droves.

He pushed up from his cross-legged position on the floor. The wooden boards were ten times more comfortable than any flat spot on Everest. He stretched, his fingers brushing a large beam. The slope of the roof made it necessary to stoop at the far side of the room by his bed, and he had to take care not to knock his head for the first couple of steps after he emerged from the attic.

Running his hands over his pockets, he felt for his matches. Time to light the lamps before he started falling over the furniture and his bags.

A wooden stair cracked outside. The sound of it ricocheted through the silence like a bullet bouncing off the walls. He recognized the sound. That particular step was five from the top.

His hand slid to the knife on his belt. He unsheathed it as he crossed to the door in his sock-cushioned feet and listened for the creak of the step one down from the landing outside his door.

He’d been robbed twice in the short time he’d lived here. The door didn’t have a lock, but then anything of true value he carried on him.

Whoever was climbing the stairs must have been taking them two at a time. The next noise he’d been waiting for didn’t arrive before a gentle tap on the door started it swinging open. Not only did the heavy wooden slab not have a lock, its catch didn’t work worth a damn, losing its grip at the slightest pressure.

There was no announcement. No “Hello, is anyone there?” Only the door moving closer to his shoulder as it was pushed wide. The footsteps were light, as was to be expected in a country where most of the inhabitants were head and shoulders shorter than him.

He let the intruder take no more than two steps into the room, then, knife poised in one hand ready to strike, he wrapped his other arm around the thief from behind. “Don’t move. I have a knife and it’s pointed at your throat.”

The intruder let out a squawk that nearly deafened him. He almost dropped the knife as a padded elbow dug into his ribs. If the aim of the elbow hadn’t warned him his target was taller than he’d imagined, the handful of fluid feminine breast told him he was definitely below the mark by eight inches or more.

It had been so long since he’d touched a woman, touched anything that filled his hand with such soft fullness, that his palm burned through the contact, even through several layers of clothing. Stunned by the unexpected rush to his groin, he grabbed a breath and smelled a floral perfume that clouded his reason and made him squeeze, just once.

As the heel of her boot stomped down painfully on the bony arch of his foot hard enough to make him wince, a second mistake leaped to mind. Her struggles had brought her dangerously close to the blade of his knife. Kurt flung it from him before its sharp edge could slice something a lot more fragile than nylon rope. Before the clatter of metal on wood reached his ears he’d bundled the squirming mass of female body tightly in both arms. “Take it easy, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“All right for you to say now I’ve knocked your knife out of your hand,” she boasted.

Well, at least he now knew she was an American.

She wriggled some more, her butt rubbing against his groin. It reacted accordingly.

“I threw it away,” he growled, unable to stifle his indignation that the woman had laid claim to his act of chivalry.

“So you say now.”

He felt the muscles in her butt tighten against him as she lifted a knee, but he was too busy spreading his legs to avoid her heel to enjoy the sensation. As her foot jarred against the floor its echo went straight from her to him. It was about then she appeared to recognize what was happening behind her, and she squawked once more. “Let me go, you…you lecher.”

The bands of his arms tightened, quelling her renewed struggles. This was getting out of hand. Didn’t she realize this situation was as painful to his ego as it was to her sensibilities? Only one thing for it, he decided.

Letting his arms slip lower without losing their hold, he picked her up. The softest landing place in the room was the bed. No sooner thought than done—he hefted her up and released her onto the mattress.

He could hear her pushing herself backward to the head of the bed, her heels catching on the covers. “Keep away from me. I know karate. No way I’m going to let you rape me.”

“Pity you never got past lesson one, where they taught you to stamp on your opponent’s feet. And while we’re on the subject, who snuck into whose room? Believe me, you couldn’t be safer. I’ve no urge to have sex with a shrew.”

“You should be so lucky.”

“Hold it! Hold it right there. Not another word. If I’m going to be accused of sexual assault, and believe me, I’ve been accused of a lot worse recently, then for a change I want to look my accuser in the eye.” This time the matches sprang to his hold in the first pocket he searched. He lit one, but it didn’t pierce far into the gloom, and the shape on the bed could have been man or woman. But having touched her, he knew better.