Kay Hooper - Enemy Mine  

DANGEROUS TERRITORY
Tyler St. James was courting disaster when she teamed up with wily Kane Pendleton to hunt for the gold chalice. But being alone in the Colombian wilderness with a sniper on her tail made even a shaky truce with her fiercest rival look good.
She and Kane had been competing for years, tracking rare art objects across the globe, delighting in their daredevil games of one-upmanship. Tyler made a living out of braving danger-and mastering it. But she couldn't control the desire, or the secret terror, Kane unleashed. Love posed a challenge too risky for the lady adventurer... until Kane showed her anything worth having was worth the dare.

"Pendleton! Oh, great, that's just great. It had to be you!"

"Nice seeing you again, too, Tyler. Damn it, will you get your foot off my"

Tyler found a bit of purchase against his upper thigh and managed to boost herself higher. "Go to hell!" she snapped, holding on to an all too narrow ledge .

"We're both likely to get there any minute now," he told her, a little winded but entirely his normal insouciant self. His left hand groped and discovered a murderously narrow crack in the rock about two feet below her shoulders; wedging his long fingers into that, he hung by one hand long enough to remove her foot from his thigh and place it on an almost nonexistent ledge she couldn't see.

Tyler would have choked thanking him, but she felt more secure.

Kane Pendleton worked his other hand into the crevice and pulled himself higher, the strain bunching powerful muscles beneath his khaki shirt and cording his forearms. Rock splintered a scant few inches from his shoulder, but he paid no attention even when the crack of the rifle echoed down the ravine.

His boots scrabbled for a foothold, discovering one finally, and he was hanging on to the same ledge, showing her white teeth as his tanned face split in a grin. "Fancy meeting you here," he said cheerfully.

Tyler ducked instinctively as another rifle shot chipped rock above her head, but her voice was as steady as it was fierce. "What're you doing here, Kane?"

"The same as you, I'd bet. Work your way along the ledge; the one you're standing on gets wider a couple of feet to your left. Come on, honey, movethat guy can't keep missing us forever."

"Don't call me honey!" she muttered, but began moving cautiously to her left. The ledge beneath her feet was soon wide enough to lend considerable security, and her tense fingers eased somewhat, no longer forced to bear most of her weight.

Since Kane was occupying himself in finding a more secure perch, she risked a glance at him. She didn't know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see that he had changed not at all in the several months since their last encounter. Only his face, throat and forearms were bared to her sight, and she could see no scars, no recent marks on his flesh.

He was, as always, darkly tanned, his big, broad-shouldered body unnervingly powerful, those beautiful long-fingered hands of his still filled with their amazing strength. He wore no hat despite the heat, and his thick, shining black hair was, as always, a little long and somewhat shaggy.

A black-maned lion, she had always thought, proud and strong in the summer of his life.

Annoyed with herself, Tyler returned her full attention to the task of moving along the ledge, seeking some shelter from the sporadic gunfire far below them. She sent mental advice to the part of her that wanted to look at him, reminding herself that nothing would be different this time, nothing at all.

They were after the same thingagainand neither would stop until the chalice was found and claimed. By one of them.

It had been a beaten gold necklace last time, she remembered, working her way along the ledge slowly and carefully. And before that What had it been before that? Oh, yes... An un-catalogued Rembrandt offered for sale by a private collector in France.

Three years since their first meeting under the burning sun of Egypt, where they had met and fought for a golden figurine. And during those years they had clashed a dozen times all over the world. Mexico, Budapest, Hamburg, Madrid, the Sudan, Athens, Venezuela, Madagascar. To date, she thought wryly, the honors were evenly split. In twelve face-to-face confrontations, she had come away with the prize six timesand so had Kane.

Tyler found it incredible that she and Kane worked for bitter rivals, two indecently wealthy men who thought nothing of sending their representatives halfway around the world in a hurried and often dangerous search for certain carefully chosen rare art objects, antiquities and artifacts. She still found it hard to believe that those two men enjoyed a mutual bitter delight in their games of one-upmanship, each spending vast amounts of money to get the objects each covetedand to get them first.

She could hardly complain that her own part in the games had not been both exciting , adventurous and profitableall three being reasons she had taken the job in the first place. Her employer had found her in a small antique store in London, where her reputation for possessing an unerring instinct for detecting genuine antiquities over faked ones had grown so that even some museums kept her on a retainer.

Robert Sayers had introduced himself, talked to her for less than an hour and then offered her a job. Tyler had been twenty-three and restless; she had spent most of her life in following her archaeologist father into some of the most remote parts of the world, and her settled life since his death had taught her nothing if not that the gypsy in her was still strong.

She had been ripe for Sayers's offer.

Her mind in the past, Tyler stepped off the ledge and into thin air. Her fingers scrabbled for a hold and she felt Kane's hard arm lock around her waist.

"I'd hate to lose you now," he remarked, his deep voice showing none of the strain he must have felt; he was leaning outward from the cliff face to support her, one hand jammed in a crevice above themand she was not a little woman.

She managed to regain her fingertip hold on the ledge and get her feet beneath her again. "You can't lose what you've never had!" she snapped, turning her head to glare at him. "And I thought you said the ledge widened."

His remarkably vivid green eyes were amused. Ignoring her second comment, he responded to the first. "Now that's a provocative thing to say. A challenge, no less." His arm tightened around her waist before releasing her. "One of these dayswhen we have timewe really should explore that. I wonder if I would lose you once I had you."

Tyler showed him a smile that was all teeth and no humor. "Don't hold your breath, pal," she advised.

Kane laughed softly. "Right. The ledge did widen by the way, and it widens again, on the other side of this spur. But we'll have to go around the tip."

She looked in the opposite direction and winced, grateful that he couldn't see her expression. Unnoticed by her, the ledge they'd traversed had swung outward to follow the spur that protruded into the ravine like some granite giant's elbow. They couldn't climb higher since the cliff face was sheet-smooth, and they certainly couldn't descend into the ravine where that gunman waited with his trusty rifle. They had to go on.

"Great," she muttered.

"Give me your hand," he instructed, "and stay pressed against the cliff. Try to stretch your foot around to the other side; the ledge should be within reach."

Tyler usually trusted Kane Pendleton about as far as she could throw a bull elephant, but she didn't hesitate to give him her hand and follow his orders. If she had learned nothing else of him during their past encounters, she had learned to trust him in times of danger. He might well pull every trick he could think of in order to beat her to whatever they both sought, but he would no more abandon a bitter enemy in trouble than he would his best friend.