Over the Edge (23 page)

The tunnel had such a steep cant, Callie was afraid she’d end up sliding down this tunnel on her backside, but she managed to stay upright.

They’d been walking for quite some time when Julia said, “Careful, here’s the hole.” Julia’s voice echoed back to Callie, who stopped dead in her tracks. Seth came up beside her. The tunnel widened out a bit, and Julia went to the side of the hole and stepped out on a ledge, then pulled back.

She took out a sheaf of papers. “I grabbed this stack of papers with the map already drawn.” She turned to Seth, her eyes gleaming with frustration. “I forgot to bring blank paper for sketching.” She looked between Callie and Seth. “I’ve got to run back and get it. Can you wait for me here?”

“No,” Seth said. “Catch up with us in the big room with the towers.”

“Towers? Down here?” Callie looked around the tunnel with the hole in the floor. Not much chance of any towers.

“Wait for me. I don’t want us to get separated.” Julia hesitated and gave Callie one of the most worried looks she’d ever gotten. Which made no sense. What was there to worry about?

“Fine then, go on.” Seth slid his arm around Callie. “But make it quick. I want to get to showing Callie around.”

Callie had the strangest feeling that she shouldn’t be alone with him. Alone with her husband. What could possibly be wrong with that?

“You’re okay?” Julia rested her hand on Seth’s arm. “You could come back with me.”

“I’m fine down here; you know that, Jules.” Seth shrugged her hand off as if she was hanging on too tight.

“I do know, but maybe not
right
here
.” Julia looked past them to the hole in the ground. “Maybe you should come back partway.”

Seth gave an impatient huff. “Get on with fetching your paper. We’re fine.”

“You’d better wait to hide the diamonds, too. I think several of us should know where they are. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Callie asked.

“I’ll wait.” Seth spoke over the top of Callie. “Hurry up and get your drawing paper. We don’t have that long.”

With one last uncertain look, Julia hurried away, her lantern fading in the distance. Seth set his on the rocky floor, took Callie’s and put it beside his, then pulled her into his arms.

Seth had been dying for a moment alone with his wife since he’d figured out he had one. He hadn’t managed to get too many such moments. He kissed her so thoroughly, and she responded so willingly that he wished maybe Julia would linger back at the cabin. But this was Julia; she’d be right back.

So Seth got on with holding his beautiful black-eyed wife with no hope he could do more than kiss her. He planned on enjoying it fully.

“Seth.” Callie slid her arms around his neck. He kissed her eyes and along her jaw. He slid his hands deep into her radiant black hair and felt the braid give way. He loved setting her riotous curls free. He remembered that. Her hair smelled faintly of the soap he had at his cabin, and it made her seem like she was truly his. The dank air of the tunnel cut with the acrid smell of burning kerosene faded as he concentrated on Callie.

“Did you remember me last night, when you were dreaming?”

Seth wished he’d kept her mouth fully occupied. He heard the hurt and confusion in her voice. “For a woman who can hold off four stage robbers, you sure do worry a lot.”

He covered her lips, but she turned her head aside. “That’s not an answer.”

Instead of kissing her, he held her close, hugging her, feeling how alive and warm she was. And he thought of his nightmares. They’d been driven back by memories of . . . “I did.”

He lifted his head to look down at her. She wasn’t a little woman. She had strength and curves. Her eyes were at the level of his mouth, and she was looking right at his lips. “If you want me to talk, you need to quit looking like you wish I was using my mouth to kiss you.”

A tiny smile curved her lips and her eyes closed. With a deep breath she opened them again and looked up into his eyes.

“That’s not helping.”

“What did you remember?”

Most of his dream was wiped away as soon as he was awake. But he still had a glimmer of it and he thought, he hoped, that was because it was a real memory, not a dream with all its twisted-upness.

“I remember . . . you taking something away from me. You snatched something out of my hands and I grabbed for it and we ended up sort of tangled up, falling down, and you got real mad at me.”

“It was a diary I kept.” Her voice gentled and he could see it pleased her that he remembered. He’d have to tell her every single time he had the least flash of remembering. “I wrote about my trip back East and how sick my brother was and it had a few things in it about you.”

Seth shook his head, wishing it’d rattle loose more buried memories and they’d float to the surface. “I can’t remember about the diary. I just remember you got mad and I sort of dragged you down onto the floor.”

“You wouldn’t stop and you still had stitches in your back. You could have broken them open.”

“I didn’t, though. I was fine.” More than fine. He’d felt great. Seth swallowed hard. “This was after we were married, right?” It’d sure better be.

“Yes, we were married.”

“And all that fire. Your eyes were blazing, and I wouldn’t quit my teasing. I threw the book and wouldn’t let you go get it. You took a swing at me.” Seth smiled to think of the way he’d caught that little flying fist and hung on. Everything about that wrestling match had gone wild.

“You were tickling me. You wouldn’t let up.”

“I remember that. You’re ticklish.” Seth dragged her back into his arms. “I can’t believe I managed to wait two weeks to marry you.”

“You spent most of that time out of your head with fever.”

“I reckon that slowed me down some.” When the next kiss ended, Seth knew he had to stop or . . . not stop. And with Julia coming back soon, he had to stop.

He relaxed his grip.

She ran one finger down his cheek in a way so sweet it hurt.

“You need to behave yourself.”

“I sure enough do.” Seth stole another kiss.

“We need to talk about something else.” Her finger continued on down to his neck and traced a path under his collar to caress his scars. “Tell me what we’re looking for down here. This is the cavern where you got those terrible burns, right?”

Her hands caressed his shoulders. Seth fought down the urge to apologize for how ugly he was. “Right here. Right at this spot.”

“Here?” Callie’s eyes widened, and she quit looking at him and looked around. “How’d you get burned down here?”

“I fell right there.” Seth tipped his head toward the hole in the tunnel floor.

“But what catches fire in a place made of pure stone?” Then Callie’s eyes went to the flickering light of the lantern.

“I fell in. When Rafe and Ethan came to pull me out, they almost fell. They almost died because of me. I’d run off, left them behind, then, look . . .” Seth put a hand on her arm, picked up his lantern, and guided her to the edge of the hole. He knelt beside it and she came along.

“See how the ground is broken away?” Seth lit up the jagged edges of the thin sheet of rock. It was easy to see where the old cave floor had been. “It wasn’t then. Rafe and Ethan and I had been down this tunnel lots of times. The ground was solid. But this time, it broke under my feet.”

“How does rock form a thin layer like that? I’ve never seen anything like this before.” She ran her hand along the edge of the hole.

Seth heard the quiet scratch of her hand on stone. “Neither have I, not in this cave, nor anywhere else. Julia studies things like that and she could probably explain it. I’ve got a picture in my head of boiling rock.”

“Rock doesn’t boil.”

“In a volcano it does. Julia says lava is molten rock.”

“Molten?” Callie asked.

“Yes, rock that’s so hot it boils. I can imagine it bubbling up just as it finally cools off enough to stop being liquid. And this is the top of a bubble. When I stepped on it, it cracked. First just one leg went through.”

“Oh, Seth, you must have been scared to death.”

“It was pitch-dark and I didn’t really know what had happened, but I’d been down this tunnel plenty of times and I knew there weren’t any drop-offs. I screamed to beat all for help, because my leg was in a hole. Then the whole floor just shattered and I fell down to the bottom.”

Seth looked at it with the most rational mind he’d ever used in this particular spot, and the hole didn’t look all that deep, except for one dark corner. It wasn’t the first time, though, that he’d thought if he just hadn’t screamed and brought Eth and Rafe coming at a run, he’d’ve been fine. It was all stupid panic that had made things turn from a simple fall that left him a little bruised into life-and-death danger that had destroyed his family.

“Eth and Rafe came running and they almost fell. The hole was still small, and the ground broke under Ethan. Rafe caught him before he fell, but Eth dropped his lantern and the kerosene splattered all over, including on me.”

“Oh, Seth.” Callie slid her arm around his waist.

He extended his lantern so it lit up the depths.

“That looks deep. How did you survive it? How did you ever get out?” Callie pointed to one side of the hole that dropped off into the pitch-dark.

“I didn’t fall there. I’d have died if I’d gone over that lower ledge. I only fell . . . look at that piece of lantern. That’s the lantern Ethan dropped. That’s close to where I landed.” Seth pointed to the rusted lantern base about twenty feet down. He was tempted to go and get it. The glass chimney was broken and long gone, but maybe the lantern would still work if they brushed it up, got the rust off.

But he didn’t go down. For all his exploring, he’d never gone down there.

“Thank God for that.”

A broken laugh bubbled from him like lava in a pit. “Thank God?” He set his lantern aside and turned to look at her. “Never for one second have I considered thanking God for what happened to me that day.”

“But it could have been so much worse.”

“Worse than burns all over my back that kept me in bed, feverish, for a month? Worse than the nightmares I’ve had ever since? Worst than making life so miserable for my family that Ma died and Pa ran off?”

“You could have died. That would have been worse.”

“It wouldn’t have been much of a loss.”

“Well, Connor would have missed you, seeing as how he’d’ve never been born.”

“True.” Seth managed a brief smile. “And he’s a fine boy.”

“You must hate this place.”

“Oh, no. I love it. I spent most of my growin’-up years exploring it. I don’t know if anyone will ever get it all the way explored, but I reckon I know it better than anyone.”

“But how can you stand it when you were hurt so badly down here?”

Seth looked at the lantern, then at Callie. He wanted to say more. How driven he was to search and search until he found—

“I’m so glad you didn’t die, Seth.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him.

Kneeling there, facing her, holding her, he forgot what he was going to say. Forgot everything but how nice it was to have a wife. “You’re really sweet, you know that?”

Callie snorted in a completely not-sweet way. “Ask the stagecoach robbers if I’m sweet.”

Seth rubbed the silk of her hair between his callused hands. “Your hair is out of its braid.”

She reached for her hair tie. “I need to fix it before Julia comes back. She’ll probably think that we are—are—”

“We are.” He kissed her again. “You’re so beautiful, Callie. I do remember you.”

She let the kissing go on a long time before turning her head aside. “Tell me more about that day, Seth. How did you ever get out of there? How sick were you from those burns? How long did the nightmares—?”

He kissed her quiet. “No more questions.” He wanted to kiss her, but more than that, he did not want to talk about that day. Bring the nightmares into the daytime.

“But, Seth . . .” She turned her head aside. “How did you—?”

He kissed her throat. She shuddered, and he rested a hand on her cheek and turned her mouth back to his.

There was no more talk of burns and floors that broke like glass. There was only Callie in his arms in the lamplight. Then Seth heard hurrying footsteps.

“Julia’s back.” He eased away from her, stood, and helped her up. Longing for more time alone with her.
Really
alone, back at his cabin. Then he thought of taking his energetic little son and his hostile new brother home with him and knew he was never going to be truly alone with his wife, not for the rest of his life. He turned, his arm around Callie. Her knees seemed a little wobbly, and he couldn’t help but enjoy that. He’d get her alone somehow for sure.

“I’m back.” Julia came into sight just as Seth picked up his lantern, then Callie’s, and handed it to her.

“Good. Let’s get going.”

“I’ll cross first.” Julia took one look at Callie’s unbound hair, quirked a knowing smile, and went straight for the hole.

Callie gasped. “Be careful.”

Seth took Callie’s hand. “It’s plenty wide enough.”

Julia walked along the ledge running the length of the broken floor.