Death is Forever

her.
    Cole glanced up from the desk in the living area of the suite. Transparent topographic and geological maps of Australia were spread across the hotel desk in front of him, along with maps showing the distribution of active and reserve mineral claims in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. On top of those maps lay transparencies of the Kimberley Plateau and of Western Australia. A compass, ruler, pencil, and a lined notepad were within reach. The pad was covered with cryptic notes.
    He didn’t really expect to find the answer to the Sleeping Dog Mines in the maps, but they gave him something to think about besides Erin’s warm tongue and husky voice approving of his taste. He looked at the sheets of paper she’d tossed aside.
    “Did you know that Chunder is Aussie slang for vomit?” he said.
    “Lovely,” she said. “Old Great-uncle Abe was a real literary light, wasn’t he?”
    A slight smile was Cole’s only response. Chunder was the most elegant of the slang contained in Abe’s doggerel. If Erin had any idea of the meaning of the words she’d been reading aloud, Cole suspected she would have blushed to the soles of her feet. Abe had been a randy bastard right up to the day he died.
    “What time is it?” she asked, yawning suddenly.
    “Same as it was the last time you asked—too soon to go to bed. You’d wake up a couple hours before dawn.”
    “Damn. I’m finally feeling sleepy.”
    “Fight it.”
    Muttering, she went and stood next to him, looking over his shoulder at the maps.
    “Help me stay awake. Explain some more of these maps to me.” She braced herself with a hand on his shoulder as she leaned closer. “This time I’ll try not to yawn in your ear.”
    “Sit down before you fall down,” he said, gently pulling her onto his lap.
    Instantly she tensed.
    Ignoring her rigid body, Cole began pointing out features on the nearest map.
    As he talked, Erin gradually began to relax, trusting her weight to the muscular support of his thighs and chest, feeling the heat of his body sink into hers.
    Though Cole savored each small softening of her body against his, he kept talking as though nothing but the maps mattered.
    “I understand topographic maps,” she said finally, “but what is this one?”
    As she leaned forward to point, she shifted in his lap. The pressure of her hips against his groin made his breathing thicken. With a silent curse at his unruly body, he concentrated on the transparency she was pointing to. The clear plastic was four feet by four feet, exactly the scale of the topographic map and covered by seemingly random patterns of rainbow colors.
    Deliberately Cole reached around Erin with both arms and slid the transparency over the topographic map. The motion also brushed his biceps against her breasts. The contact made her gasp. Her breath unraveled suddenly, but she didn’t withdraw. His arms moved again, caressing and freeing in the same motion. While he spoke, he traced lines with a calloused fingertip.
    “The blue lines are sandstone,” he said. “There’s a lot of it in the Kimberley. The brown crosshatches are limestone. The yellow diagonals are volcanic rocks. The pink dots are water deposits. The white dots are wind deposits. It makes a difference to us, because usually only water deposits contain diamonds.”
    As Erin grew accustomed to looking both at and through the transparency, she could see how the water deposits almost always coincided with rivers or beaches or low spots on the topographic map. But there were a few places where pink dots appeared without any sign of rivers or lakes or ocean.
    “Is this a water deposit?” she asked. “There’s no sign of water anywhere close.”
    Cole looked at the slender finger with its clean, unpolished nail. When he saw where she was pointing, he gave her full marks for quickness.
    “That’s what geologists call a paleo-floodplain, a place where a flooding river used to overflow and leave silt and stones behind. The river is long since gone, but the characteristic deposits of a floodplain are still there.”
    “Does that mean diamonds could be there?”
    “If the ancient river flowed through diamond-bearing rock, yes.”
    “Did it?”
    “Probably not. It didn’t flow through any volcanic rocks.”
    She frowned. “I didn’t know the Kimberley Plateau had volcanoes.”
    “It does, but they’re real ancient. They’ve been eroded flat and sometimes even down beyond that, to the magma chamber