Darkness (11 page)

Remembering the rapid descent of the plane before it exploded, Gina suddenly had a radical new vision of what was happening in those last few minutes on board.

He’d said there were three others on the plane with him. That they were dead.

Now she found herself wondering whether it was the crash that had killed them.

At the one other glaring possibility that presented itself to her, the hair stood up on the back of her neck.

Is he a killer?

Her heart thumped at the prospect.

His eyes narrowed as they held hers. His mouth thinned. From that, Gina took that he was getting a pretty accurate reading as to the gist of her thoughts. That he wasn’t happy about her speculation. About her knowledge.

The hardening of his face left her in no doubt whatsoever about one thing: the man was definitely dangerous.

While the storm raged she had no way to escape from him, nowhere to go. To run off into it would be suicidal.

The only thing she could do was stay put and play out the hand she’d dealt herself.

Her pulse raced. Her stomach fluttered. Her lungs ached with the need to expel the breath she’d been holding.

She let it out slowly. Carefully. Panic was her enemy.

Something her father had said to her once when they were in one of his all-too-frequent tight spots came back to her: when your head is in the mouth of the bear, the only thing to do is say,
nice bear
.

“I have a first aid kit in my backpack,” she said matter-of-factly, as if finding bullet holes in scary men she was trapped with were something that happened to her every day. “Once you’re in the tent I can bandage that up for you.”

As she spoke, she deliberately refocused her gaze on his chiseled abs and tugged his pants down his lean hips. It said a lot about her state of agitation that she didn’t even really see a single ripped inch of him.

He pulled the Mylar blanket across his lap.

That caught her attention, made her blink.

Not a creep, then
, she thought, then followed that with a sardonic,
Oh, yay. Like the fact that the threatening guy with the bullet hole in him doesn’t seem to be a perv makes this all better
.

That’s when it hit her: if he had a bullet hole in him, then somebody might really be hunting him.

Through the storm. On Attu.

Her stomach knotted. Her breathing quickened. She had her fingers hooked in his shorts—soggy, icy boxer briefs—as well as his pants and was pulling both off him at the same time. Her cold fingers clenched in a death grip around the freezing wet cloth as she darted a nervous glance out past their small circle of light, at the gusting, swirling fog of snow and ice. The near-whiteout conditions partially reassured her: it was inconceivable that anyone would be hunting him in this. Besides, if the three who’d been on the plane with him were dead, who was left to track him down?

Good question. With, she realized with a sharp increase in her anxiety level, nothing but bad answers. Because clearly he was convinced someone was.

“I’m not going to hurt you, you know,” he said. She’d ducked her face to try to keep her thoughts hidden as she dragged his pants down long, hard-muscled legs. His words were so unexpected that she looked up, and thus inadvertently met his gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, and heavy-lidded with what she thought was a combination of exhaustion and pain and the effects of too much cold and too much sea. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”

Great
. Clearly her efforts to keep her thoughts hidden from him had failed, and just as clearly he was trying to reassure her. His gaze was calm and steady. But she thought she detected a stillness behind it, a predatory stillness, as though a part of him were crouched and waiting.

To see what she was going to do.

And God help her if she did the wrong thing.

Should she believe him, trust in the truth of what he was telling her? Trust that he wouldn’t hurt her, that she didn’t need to be afraid of him?

Only if she were dumb as a box of rocks.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she lied. One thing she’d learned over the years was that showing fear to a predator was never a good idea. “I never thought you’d hurt me. Why would you? I’ve done nothing but help you. And without me, you’re toast.” With that less than subtle reminder, she pulled his pants the rest of the way off. “Can you get your shirt off?”

“Yeah.” He struggled to do so while she yanked his socks off and hastily dried his feet and legs with the bloodstained turtleneck and thought frantic thoughts that she did her best to marshal into some sort of a cohesive plan.

Shoving dry socks onto his icy, blue-with-cold feet—he made a sound under his breath that she thought denoted pleasure at the sudden warmth—she tried to come up with some way to communicate with Arvid and the others but couldn’t think of one. Wrestling her size-six but fortunately spandex sweatpants up his legs, she pondered the chances of making it back to camp in the storm but concluded that they were so small as to be nonexistent.

“Wait,” he said as she got the pants about halfway up his thighs, which were thick with muscle and a real test of the cloth’s capacity to expand. She paused, in action and thought, to look at him. He’d managed to get his shirt off and was reaching down beneath the Mylar that was still tucked around him to grab onto the waistband. She glimpsed brawny arms and one wide bare shoulder and then they were both wrestling with the pants.

“You’re going to have to lift your butt,” she told him, slightly breathless with effort.

He managed it, awkwardly, and together they got the sweats up. The Mylar blanket was dislodged in the process, and she was afforded an up-close-and-personal view of some pretty impressive male equipment that she really would rather have not seen. When the job was done and she sank back, almost warm now despite the occasional arctic blast that made it through the fire’s small circle of heat and the driving wall of sleet and snow pounding down mere feet away, she saw that the black sweats that were roomy on her fit him like too-small tights. The waist hit him inches below his navel and the legs ended halfway up his calves. His every muscle and sinew was revealed by the snug-fitting cloth, along with an impressive package that she was already more familiar with than she wanted to be. A glance up his torso found that he was as totally built as she’d thought: narrow hips, flat belly, wide chest, broad shoulders, heavy on the muscle with not an ounce of fat that she could see.

She was human. She was female. She was alive. And he was smoking hot. She couldn’t help the tingle of sexual awareness that pulsed to life inside her.

If it hadn’t been for the bullet wound in his side and the whole I-just-might-kill-you-in-your-sleep vibe he gave off, she would have been wildly attracted to him.

The good news was, all the activity had calmed her jumbled thoughts enough to have enabled her to come up with a plan: she would do what she had to do to allay any suspicions he might be harboring about her while they rode out the storm together in the tent. Then when the storm had passed she would leave him in the tent, hike to camp, tell the others what had happened, alert the authorities to the plane crash, his gunshot wound, and everything else via satellite phone, and, acting under the guiding principle that there was safety in numbers, bring her fellow scientists back with her to both rescue him and keep him under guard until the authorities arrived.

In the meantime, she was going full
nice bear
on his ass.

“Here.” Gina wrapped the Mylar blanket back around his shoulders and handed him the crumpled turtleneck, which she might have considered trying to work him into to replace his shirt except for the obvious-at-a-glance fact that the trim-fitting garment had no chance in hell of stretching enough to accommodate his heavy shoulders, to say nothing of his arms and chest. “Put this back on that.”

Nodding, she indicated the bullet hole, which still seeped blood. While he did as directed she pulled her gloves back on her cold hands and turned toward the fire. Grabbing one heat-resistant handle, she began to pull the pan away from the flames.

“You have any—” he began.

He was interrupted by Gina’s cry of dismay as a miniavalanche of snow that almost certainly had been blown off the top of the rocks by the howling wind dropped directly on the fire.

And put it out.

“Crap.” Gina stared with horror at the mound of snow that was already melting into the smoking, hissing remains of the fire, ruining nearly all the material that had gone into making it that hadn’t already burned. Galvanized by the need to save at least the core of her makeshift furnace, she frantically started wielding the pan and a piece of scorched stick to scrape the rocks away from the sizzling mess. Moments later she had the rocks scooped up in the pan and was speed-crawling for the tent with them. She could feel the precious heat wafting off them as she went.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Getting us some heat,” she told him over her shoulder as she entered the tent.

She’d left the sleeping bag unzipped for easier access. Running the pan of rocks along the inside of it as a kind of makeshift bed warmer, she then set the pan down in the back corner, where it would heat the small tent while still being safely out of the way. Even if the rocks were to somehow spill, though, the worst that would happen is that they would melt a hole through whatever they landed on. There was no possibility of anything catching on fire.

As an afterthought, she tucked the hand warmers down inside the sleeping bag to serve as an extra source of heat.

The only thing left to do was get him inside.

When she crawled back out, he was already on his hands and knees and almost at the door of the tent. Without the fire, the darkness was interrupted only by the narrow, focused beam of the flashlight in her hand. As it hit him, she could see that his face was drawn with effort and his mouth was tense. The air near the tent already felt ten degrees colder. The shriek of the wind howling past and the drumming of the sleet on the rocks underlined the extremity of their situation. Without the shelter the tent provided, they almost certainly wouldn’t live through the night.

“I was coming to help you,” she said in a scolding tone, to which he responded with a grunt. On all fours, he was a large, dark shadow the approximate size and shape of a grizzly. A grizzly with a rattling Mylar superman cape and her turtleneck tied around his waist, which made for an irresistible mental image that would have made her smile under better circumstances. If there were such a thing as limp-crawling, he was doing it. If she’d had to help him—well, there really was no way to support someone who was crawling. And dragging him inside the tent would have been impossible.

Turning to set the flashlight down inside so that he wouldn’t have to find his way to the sleeping bag and avoid the makeshift furnace in complete darkness, she scooted out of the way as he reached the tent and pulled the flap aside for him.

“The sleeping bag’s unzipped. Get in it. Be careful of the pan of rocks at the far end.”

He didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure he had the energy to speak. He was breathing hard enough so that she could hear it even over the noise of the storm. As he crawled past her, she saw that he was carrying his discarded clothes with him.

“Wait! Stop! You can’t take those in there.” She caught a trailing pant leg, tugged. “They’ll get everything wet.”

He stopped, looking over his shoulder at her. “I’ll need them. Tomorrow.”

His tone told her that he was determined.

“They won’t dry,” she said.

“They’ll dry some.”

Stalemate, and it was too cold and she was too tired to argue. “Fine. Leave them right where you are and I’ll hang them up in the vestibule.”

He made a sound that she thought signified agreement, dropped the bundle of clothes, and proceeded on his way. The door of the tent was small, and he had to maneuver his way through carefully. He made it inside, and she heard the crackling of the space blanket, then a soft sound as, presumably, he collapsed onto the sleeping bag. Following him in, she closed up the outer flap, hung up his wet clothes as best she could in the vestibule, then took off her boots and left them in there, too.

Crawling into the main part of the tent, she sealed the doorway up behind her, first with a zipper and then with a Velcro flap. The sounds of the storm were suddenly muffled, like the rush of traffic on a distant freeway. Except for the flashlight’s narrow column of light, the tent was dark. The corners, the ceiling, the sides of the tube encircling her were thick with shadows. She heard his breathing, harsh in that enclosed space, smelled the salty-sea scent of him, and felt her shoulders tighten. She’d never been one to suffer from claustrophobia, but for a moment the flimsy nylon of the walls and ceiling seemed to shrink around her. If she and the big, scary guy with the bullet wound had been in a space capsule on their way to Mars, their isolation couldn’t have been more complete.

Stay calm
.

On her knees, she turned, picked up the flashlight, and played it over the cramped, tunnel-like interior, over her backpack, over the smoking rocks in the makeshift furnace a few feet away, over the arched ceiling and the sealed flap at the far end of the tent. The Mylar blanket lay crumpled in the maybe eighteen inches of space between the edge of the sleeping bag and the curving wall. It glittered as the flashlight beam caught it.

“Glad you came prepared,” he said. He lay on his uninjured side in the sleeping bag with his head cradled on his bent arm, still breathing heavily from his recent exertion. The bag was the same dark gray as the tent and the pad beneath it. It had a side zip and the top could be adjusted so that it closed around the head like a hood. At the moment that top part lay flat beneath his head and arm.

“What can I say? I was a Girl Scout.” Maybe her tone was a little tart under the circumstances. Surprise: being sealed up in a virtual wind sock with him was making her nervous. The flashlight beam caught him in the process of stretching his long legs down inside the sleeping bag while pulling the loose corners of it close around his bare shoulders. At his height, she saw that he was barely going to fit. He was shivering again, which she took as a good sign. It had been a while since she’d seen him shiver. Hypothermia in reverse? She didn’t know if that happened. But he was shivering.