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clench every time he looked at her, that made his wits scatter—that made it really dangerous for him to look at her at all. “Yeah—gofer this, gofer that,” he responded with an effort at lightness, hoping it wasn’t as obvious to Raathe as it was to him that his voice didn’t even sound close to normal. “Whatever we need, you fetch.”
    “Just mind what you’re doing,” Raathe added grimly. “If anybody yells ‘fire in the hole’ get the hell out of the way. It means something big and heavy is coming down fast.”
    Turning, he strode down the beam as if he was walking on the ground. The other man lifted the bucket and followed him a little more carefully. Rhea cautiously crouched down and finally sat on the beam, straddling it while she tried to decide whether to climb down the ladder again or stay where she was until she was told to fetch something. Her stomach was performing calisthenics from the height. She didn’t particularly want to stay in the air. The question was, was she more afraid of the height? Or the men on the ground below?
    There were guards, but she saw that they’d stationed themselves beyond the building perimeter. They’d activated an electronic field to cage the ‘animals’ in and sat down near the shuttles to entertain themselves. She supposed they must be using a different frequency to communicate. She could tell from looking at them that they were talking among themselves, but she couldn’t hear anything over the comm. unit.
    It made her belly go weightless all over again to lift her gaze from the ground, but she ignored it, scanning the terrain around the construction site. The Martian terrain didn’t have a lot of variation that made identifying landmarks easy, but she remembered there’d been a construction site near where she’d discovered the fissure. If she was right and this was the site she’d spotted before, the entrance to the cave system wasn’t much more than ten miles away.
    It might as well have been on the other side of the solar system. Even if she could somehow escape she doubted she could survive there.
    The fleeting sense of hopefulness she’d felt when they’d landed so near what she believed was the place she’d found abandoned her. Raathe distracted her from the depression that settled over her by sending her to fetch one of the tools he or the other man had dropped while connecting the beams that were being hoisted up to them via a crane. During the course of the day, they worked their way back toward her, bolting the structure together. On the other side from where they were working, other men were dragging metal sheeting across the beams that had already been set and bolted. They worked slowly but steadily throughout the day, pacing themselves she discovered, because they were only allowed a few brief rest periods.
    When darkness fell, they were allowed to climb down and herded into modules on the surface that did nothing more than protect them from the winds and the bitter cold that descended that could be felt even through the suits. Cots were stacked one on top of another almost to the ceiling and there still weren’t enough. She was wedged onto a cot barely wide enough for one with Raathe and they slept in their suits, and then they were roused out again to put in another full day’s work the following day.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Five
    Neither exhaustion from two days of hard labor with little rest and almost no sleep nor familiarity had done a hell of a lot to curb the unaccustomed barrage of emotions that hit Kyle any time he came within Rhea’s vicinity, particularly if he met her gaze. His stomach still went weightless every time he looked into her eyes and his brain went on holiday—images flashing into his mind that had no damned business there.
    The damned PEC should’ve helped tamp his wayward libido but didn’t. He couldn’t look at her without the image of her in the hanger flashing into his mind and even on the rare occasion