Total Package. Cait London
out of her loose pants.
A woman with hair too short to be caught by the wind stood, her legs braced apart, a small curvy silhouette, but definitely a woman. Outlined by the moon peeking through the clouds, she seemed almost mystical, a goddess coming to court the night.
Then she raised her hands high and yelled angrily, “Dammit, what’s wrong with me? Look at me, will you, Chief? I’ve got everything any other woman has—maybe less in some places, but the basic equipment is there. So why did Ben marry some little fluff-cake and not me? Fluffy hasn’t got a brain in her head. So why did he pick her over me?”
A string of unladylike curses sailed through the night air, and Danya had the uneasy suspicion that the lady just might intend something drastic—like stepping off that cliff onto the jagged rocks below.
“Look. Basic thirty-year-old female equipment. Correction: prime equipment. We had sex. Sure, Ben never took that long, but then we didn’t have much time between jobs and that suited me. Look. Breasts. They have nipples and everything.”
The woman flung away a scrap of something, that just could have been a bra. She shimmied and tugged at her hips, and her foot kicked away another scrap. “Okay, Chief. You’re a man—or you were. What’s wrong with me?”
Absolutely nothing was wrong with her. The woman’s silhouette was all curves. Danya’s throat dried and something he thought had died started stirring. She was right: all the basic equipment was there. The impact shot right down his body and lodged into a hard tight knot.
“Okay, so I don’t do the helpless little Fluffy-no-brains act. That’s all fake anyway. Really, Chief. Tell me. Send some sign or something.”
Danya should leave her to grieve over her lost lover.
But she just might step over that cliff and that would be a shame.
Then, he thought as he weighed his options, there was the little matter of his own curiosity.
Danya moved silently through the shadows and circled down the rocky path leading to the grave site. When he’d gotten a distance down Strawberry Hill, he called loudly to the night, “I’ll be fine. Go on back down without me.”
Satisfied that would warn the woman of his coming, he began a slow upward walk to where he expected she would be rapidly dressing. From the corner of his eye, he noted a sleeping bag spread on the ground. His foot tangled in something and he reached down to collect a stretchy garment; it was a woman’s sports bra, which he’d seen other women wearing as they worked out. The rumpled white cotton briefs were still warm and fragrant from her body. That light floral scent of a female caused him to tense, suddenly aware that it had been a long, long time since he’d made love. He crushed the fabric possessively in his fist and forced himself to toss it carelessly to the sleeping bag. “Huh. Leftovers from a romantic night I guess,” he said loudly.
Danya walked slowly past the woman hidden by the night; rustling sounds said she still wasn’t finished dressing, and giving her more time, he walked to the edge of the cliff.
He could hear her breathing, and sensed her waiting behind him. Then she cleared her throat. “Um, mister. You’re not thinking of jumping, are you? Please don’t do that. I’ve had a really miserable day and you’d only make it worse.”
Sidney Blakely only wanted to escape the coy, perfumed, primping, light-brained mass of calendar models at the Amoteh Resort.
She did not want to witness a suicide, a cliff jumper determined to end his miserable life.
On the other hand, as a professional photographer, she could get a good shot of—Sidney discarded that thought. For once, she didn’t have a camera and she really didn’t want to see someone splattered all over the rocks below. If he fell onto the sand, that might be different, but still—
She paused just a heartbeat—the man looked really big, maybe six foot three or so, and powerful. If she came too close, he could easily take her five-foot-five-inch, 110-pound body right over the cliff with him.
She might be Ben’s sexual leftover, but she wasn’t ready to die.
Sidney hurried to finish pulling on her camouflage pants and tugged her sweatshirt down to her hips. Her boots were discarded and she had no time to put them on before she stopped the jumper. The rocks bruised her feet as she tried to both hurry and avoid pain. “Ooh, ouch…ooh…ouch. Hey, mister. Don’t do anything rash. Let’s talk this—ouch—out.”
Sidney came closer to stand a little behind the man—just out of reaching distance.
As a freelance photographer, she’d seen men, stunned by war, want to take their own lives. She’d seen them walk deliberately into enemy fire. She’d seen whole native villages taken out by floods and volcanoes; she’d captured the devastation of the western U.S. fires, flown above the scorching deserts, crossed desolate Arctic stretches to photograph reindeer herds. Well published in various magazines, she was an on-the-spot prime and well-paid photographer and she recognized people who were on the very edge of life, ready to throw it away.
This man was brooding, maybe contemplating death—she had to stay calm, work him down, make him see that life wasn’t all that bad…even though hers was in the toilet now that Ben had married Fluffy.
She eased into position a few feet to the side of the “jumper,” and studied him. The wind caught his hair, the salty mist swirling around him. Early thirties maybe, shaggy wavy hair, a rugged hard face and a jaw covered with stubble, from there on down, he was all power and broad shoulders and long lean legs in jeans that topped his work boots. The hand raised to push back his hair was big and wide and strong—he was a man who worked with his hands and those broad shoulders said he was probably a laborer, Sidney decided.
“I come up here to be alone,” he whispered in a deep gravely voice.
Sidney moved closer. She had to think of something to keep him from jumping. “Yeah? Want to tell me why?”
He turned to her and those deep-set eyes, only slivers of silver in the night, pinned her. Oh, no, Sidney thought wildly, the guy could be a serial killer waiting here every night for his victim, and she’d walked right into—
A strand of his hair drifted across his cheekbone, softening the hard edge. His voice came deep and wrapped in a Western drawl that seemed to hold humor: “Sometimes, life is just the pits.”
Sidney decided that serial killers probably weren’t the humorous kind of guys and reverted back to her “jumper” theory. “How well I know—er, ah…Now, it isn’t always the pits. Look at the bright side, guy. Why don’t we talk about this?”
“What’s ‘this’?”
“You know, how good life is. We’ll swap stories and you’ll feel better. All we need is a beer and some talk and you’ll see that life isn’t that bad.”
“You brought beer up here?”
He sounded interested in that, but then maybe he was an alcoholic, and already pretty well on his way—but then he smelled like fresh air, newly cut lumber, that wonderful just showered soap-and-male smell. “No beer. Just a buddy to listen to you in the night. We’ll swap stories. You’ll see that my life is no joy ride and you’ll feel better.”
“I doubt if you can top what I’m going through.”
“Oh, no, I can. Wait until I tell you about it—step back from the edge there and I’ll tell you about my miserable excuse for a life. If you think you’ve got problems, you should try my life.”
A human touch, that’s what the man needed at his lowest hour, to know that someone cared about him. Sidney eased closer. “Now don’t do anything rash, just take my hand.”
His frown directed toward her was suspicious. “Why should I? What do you mean, rash?”
He wasn’t playing his role well—she was supposed to be rescuing him and instead he was asking questions. “Because I