When the front door closed behind Mariah, she made a stifled sound and swayed, hugging herself against a cold that no amount of hope could banish. Slowly she sank to her knees, wishing she could cry, but even that release was beyond her.
It will be all right. It has to be. Somehow I'll make him believe me.
Slim chance, isn't that what you said? But it came true, Cash. It came true and now you won't believe in it. In my love. In me. And there's nothing I can do. Nothing!
Mariah swayed and caught her balance against the table that stood near the front door. A small, flat package slid off. Automatically she caught it before it hit the floor.
Slim chance.
Almost afraid to believe that hope was possible, Mariah stripped off paper and tape until Mad Jack's map fell into her hands. With it was a cover letter and a copy of the map. There was no blank area on the copy, no ancient stain, no blur, nothing but a web of dotted lines telling her that she and Cash had been looking at the wrong part of Devil's Peak.
Will you believe I love you if I give you Mad Jack's mine? Will that prove to you that I'm not after a free ride like your stepmother and your wife? Will you believe me if…
With hands that trembled Mariah refolded the copy and put it in her jeans. Silently, quickly, she went to the workroom cupboard and changed into her trail clothes. When she was ready to leave, she pulled out a sheet of notepaper and wrote swiftly:
I have nothing of value to give you, no way to make you believe. Except one. Mad Jack's mine. It's yours now. I give it to you. All of it.
I'll find the mine and I'll fill your hands with gold and then you'll have to believe I love you. When you believe that, you'll know the baby is yours. Slim chance. But it was the only chance Mariah had.
15
The memory of Mariah's lost, frightened expression rode Cash unmercifully as he worked over his Jeep. No matter how many times he told himself she was an accomplished little liar, her stricken face contradicted him, forcing him to think rather than to react from pain and rage.
And reason told Cash that no matter how good an actress Mariah was, she didn't have the ability to make her skin turn pale. She didn't have the ability to make the black center of her eyes dilate until all the gold was gone. She didn't have the ability… but those things had happened just the same, her skin pale and her eyes dark and watching him as though she expected him to destroy her world as thoroughly as she had destroyed his.
With a savage curse Cash slammed shut the Jeep's hood and went to the old house. The instant he went through the front door, he knew the house was empty. He could feel it.
"Mariah?"
No one answered his call. With growing unease, Cash walked through the living room. Shreds of wrapping paper and tape littered the floor. On the table near the door was a typed note and what looked like Mad Jack's faded old map. Cash read the note quickly, then once more.
There was no mistake. A copy of the map had been in the package, a clean copy that supposedly showed the way to Mad Jack's mine. Automatically Cash glanced out the window, assessing the weather. Slate-bottomed clouds were billowing over the high country.
Mariah wouldn't risk it just for money. She would count on Luke to support her even if I refused.
Yet even as the thought came, Cash discarded it. Mariah had been very careful to take nothing from Luke that she didn't earn by helping Carla with Logan and the demands of being a ranch wife. That was one of the things Cash had admired about Mariah, one of the things that had gotten through his defenses.
As he turned away from the small table, he saw another piece of paper that had fallen to the floor. He picked it up, read it, and felt as though he were being wrenched apart.
It can't be true. It… can't… be.
Cash ran to the workroom and wrenched open the cupboard that held Mariah's camping clothes. It was empty.
That little fool has gone after Mad Jack's mine.
Mariah didn't answer the phone. After ten rings Cash jammed the phone into his jacket pocket, zipped the pocket shut and ran to the corral.
Slim chance.
Ice crystallized in the pit of Cash's stomach, displacing the savagery that had driven him since the instant Mariah had told him she was pregnant.
In three hours it would be freezing up in the high country. Mariah didn't have any decent winter gear. She didn't even have enough experience in cold country to know how insidious hypothermia could be, how it drained the mind's ability to reason as surely as it drained the body's coordination, cold eating away at flesh until finally the person was defenseless.
Three hours. Too much time for the cold to work on Mariah's vulnerable body. Doubly vulnerable. Pregnant.
Slim chance.
Oh God, what if I was wrong?
Trying not to think at all, Cash caught and bridled two horses. He saddled only one. Leading one horse, riding the other, Cash headed out of the ranch yard at a dead run. Mariah's trail was clear in the damp earth and slanting autumn light. Holding his mount at a hard gallop, Cash followed the trail she had left, forcing himself to think of nothing but the task in front of him. After half an hour he stopped, switched his saddle to the spare horse and took off again at a fast gallop, leading his original mount.
Although the dark, wind-raked clouds rained only fitfully, the ground was glistening with cold moisture.
In the long afternoon shadows, puddles wore a rime of ice granules left by the passage of a recent hailstorm. The horses' breaths came out in great soft plumes, only to be torn away by the rising wind.
Except for the wind, it's not too cold.
Mariah's words haunted Cash. He tried not to think of how cold it was, how quickly wind stripped heat from even his big body. Even worse than the cold was the fitful rain. He would have preferred snow. In an emergency, dry snow could be used as insulation against the wind, but the only defense from rain was shelter. Otherwise wind simply sucked out all body heat through the damp clothes, leaving behind a chill that drained a person's strength so subtly yet so completely that most people didn't realize how close they were to death until it was too late; they thought they stopped shivering because their bodies had miraculously become warm again.
*
Mariah looked at the map once more, then at the dark lava slope to her right. There was a pile of rocks that looked rather like a lizard, but there was no lightning-killed tree nearby. Shrugging, she reminded herself that more than a century had passed since Mad Jack drew the map. In that amount of time, a dead tree could have fallen and been absorbed back into the land. Carefully Mariah reined her mount around until the lizard was at her back. The rest of the landmarks fit well enough.
Shivering against the chill wind, she urged her horse downhill, checking every so often in order to keep the pile of rocks at her back. The horse was eager to get off the exposed slope. It half trotted, half slid down the steep side of a ravine. The relief from the wind was immediate.
With a long sigh, Mariah gave the horse its head and tucked her hands into the huge pockets of her jacket. Once in the ravine, the only way to go was downhill, which was exactly the way Mad Jack had gone. Her fingers were so cold that she barely felt the hard weight of the cellular phone she had jammed into one of the oversize pockets and forgotten.
I'll count to one hundred. If I don't see any granite by then, I'll get out of the ravine and head for Black Springs. It can't be more than twenty minutes from here, just around the shoulder of the ridge. It will be warm there.
Mariah had counted to eighty-three when she saw a spur ravine open off to the right. The opening was too small and too choked with stones for the horse to negotiate. Almost afraid to breathe, much less to believe, she dismounted and hung on to the stirrup until circulation and balance returned to her cold-numbed body. Scrambling, falling, getting up again, she explored the rocky ravine.