Darkness (10 page)

“The people you’re with—you know them?”

There was no mistaking the mistrust in his voice.

“They’re college professors. Academics,” she replied with a noticeable lack of patience. In a way, though, she was almost glad of the distraction he presented. The knot in her stomach as she flicked the Bic on again, then touched the lighter to the cotton and watched tiny fingers of orange flame spring to life and begin to grow, was exactly what she’d expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Instead of getting caught up in horrific memories, it was far better that she concentrate on dealing with him.

“You know them?” he persisted.

Actually, she knew Arvid and Ray and Mary Dunleavy from UCLA and Jorge Tomasini from Princeton and Andrew Clark from Wash U. They’d attended several conferences together, and she and Arvid and Ray had collaborated on a grant proposal to fund a study of oil-eating microbes that was still pending. The others she’d met when they had arrived on Attu.

“Not all of them.” Tearing handfuls of dry tundra from a patch near her knees, she quickly added that to the growing fire. “But the ones I don’t know, I know of. I know who they are, their résumés.”

“Résumés.”

The skepticism in that made her frown.

He said it as if he thought the résumés might be bogus. As if he thought she and her fellow scientists might be bogus.

As if he suspected them of something.

“Who
are
you?” she demanded testily. “And who on earth do you think we are?”

He didn’t answer, and as they exchanged measuring looks, dozens of horrifying possibilities for who he was chased one another through her mind. Could he be a drug smuggler? A spy? A terrorist? A fugitive? A—

Stop it
, she ordered herself, and shot him a killing look. “Just so we’re clear, whatever it is that’s going on here, whatever’s up with you,
I don’t care
. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s nothing to do with my colleagues or what we’re doing here. And for the record, I’m damned tired of being menaced by a man whose life I’m doing my best to save.”

“Menaced?” The rasp in his voice made her think of a rusty file scraping across metal. He’d finished with the water. The empty bottle was on the ground beside him, and his hand had disappeared back beneath the Mylar. His eyes narrowed at her. “I haven’t
menaced
you.”

“Whatever you want to call it. The point is, I want it to stop. Right now. Or you can start saving your own ass.” She gave him a level look and, when he didn’t reply, got on with what needed to be done. Without any more fuel than was available within the small protected area, the fire wouldn’t last long, but she hoped that it would last long enough to at least heat the rocks that she’d been scooping up as they were speaking and that were now piled around the edges of the flames. She followed that by also positioning the collapsible metal pan, in which she eventually meant to place the rocks, near the blaze. A fire in a tent was an invitation to disaster, and she personally, along with an equally abiding fear of flying, had an abiding fear of being trapped in a fire. But heated rocks were a different thing. Used properly, in an enclosed space such as a tent, they equaled a primitive furnace. And while the fire was burning, its heat could do some additional good: it made the bitter cold in its general vicinity a few degrees less bitter.

“Can you get your clothes off?” she asked as she began assembling the tent. He was still in danger from hypothermia despite the space blanket, the hand warmers, the water, and the fire, which hissed and smoked as stray flurries reached it from the eddies of snow and sleet that rose and swirled in miniature whirlwinds around the outcropping. His face was too deep in shadow to read, but his eyes slid her way. He had, she thought, been warily probing the darkness beyond their sanctuary. She didn’t like to think about what—or who—he was looking for.

“As soon as the tent’s up,” she continued when he didn’t reply, snapping another support into place, which suddenly made the crumpled pile of weatherproof gray nylon that was the tent start to take on size and shape, “we’re getting in it, and you can’t go inside it like you are. You’ll get everything wet and we’ll freeze. You need to strip.”

“You want me . . . naked.” Something in his harsh voice brought her gaze whipping up to meet his.

Too dark to read his eyes. Didn’t matter.

Gina rocked back on her heels to point an I-mean-business index finger at him. “Take another step down that path, and I really will take my tent and find somewhere else to ride out the storm.”

It wasn’t her imagination: one corner of his mouth ticked upward in what might have been the slightest of smiles.

He held up a placating hand.

“Just clarifying,” he said innocently.

The look she gave him was ripe with warning. “I have a pair of dry sweatpants in my backpack you can put on.”

“Ah. Got it.”

She watched him narrowly as his hand disappeared beneath the Mylar to start on his shirt buttons, then returned her attention to the tent. Two more fiberglass ribs locked into place, and the thing was done. Long and low, it was a two-man tent with zippered entrances at both ends and a vestibule to keep the weather out as you crawled into it. On her hands and knees, she pushed it as close up against the outcropping as she could in hopes of protecting it from the worst of the weather. As she had suspected, the rocky, frozen ground made staking it impossible. Instead she lugged a quartet of large rocks from their resting places nearby and placed them atop the stake loops. Dragging her backpack behind her, she crawled partway inside, being careful to keep her wet and dirty boots out of the main part of the tent. Quickly she spread out and inflated the vinyl pad that formed a barrier between the sleeping bag and the floor of the tent. With that done, she unrolled and positioned the sleeping bag on top of it.

Finished, she surveyed the space, which was the approximate shape of a hot dog bun, just about tall enough for her to kneel in with an inch or so of clearance above her head, and wide enough for two people to sleep side by side. One of them—that would be him, because he was the one with no clothes and incipient hypothermia—would get the sleeping bag. The other would sleep in her outdoor gear. With the addition of her improvised furnace, the arrangements should be sufficient to get them through the storm alive.

Crawling out of the tent, she was fuzzy-headed with fatigue until a wayward gust blasted her in the face. The arctic coldness of it was enough to shock her back into wakefulness. Pelting down just a few feet beyond the edge of the tent, a wall of sleet reflected orange from the fire. She knew it was mostly sleet now because of the sharp pattering sound it made as it hit. The small fire looked pitifully inadequate against the raging, shrieking blizzard surrounding them. The heat it put out was a puny defense against the encroaching cold. The smell of smoke was strong; her senses hurriedly reached past it to latch onto other smells—dampness and the sea.

Beside the fire, draped in the Mylar blanket, the man was a hulking shape slumped against the rocks. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was looking out into the storm again. As if he was afraid someone might be out there.

Not liking the anxious feeling that thought gave her, she aimed her flashlight at him.

“Ready?” she asked as he blinked and looked her way. Teeth chattering, she moved toward him. The sweatpants and spare socks from her backpack were tucked beneath her parka, where, in theory at least, they were being warmed by her body heat. Her plan was to get him dried off fast with the hopefully not too bloodied turtleneck, get him into the sweatpants and socks and then the tent, and take care of whatever else needed doing—like, say, treating his injury—in there, where there was less chance of both of them expiring from exposure to the cold.

He didn’t reply.

She reached him and saw why: he was not naked. Not even close. Even with the Mylar blanket draped over him, she could see that he was still struggling with the buttons on his shirt. As far as she could tell, not one stitch of his clothing had been removed.

“Oh, my God,” she said, exasperation in every syllable. She was so tired she could barely move, aching all over, and cold to her bone marrow. The weather was growing worse by the minute and the fire that was warming the air was spitting and hissing in warning that the next influx of blowing snow that landed in it might well snuff it out. The only thing she wanted to do was curl up inside
her
sleeping bag in
her
tent and wait the storm out.

Instead she was going to be undressing this sinister stranger. Then giving him her sleeping bag and sharing her tent with him.

“My fingers don’t seem to be working,” he said gruffly. Without another word, she pulled off her gloves and thrust them into her pocket. Pushing the Mylar blanket aside, she plucked the hand warmers off him, shoved them into her pocket, too, and started unbuttoning his shirt for him.

His shirt was icy and stiff, almost frozen dry. She had to work to get the buttons through their buttonholes. As her increasingly chilled fingers brushed the glacial dampness of his skin beneath, she was reminded of what bad shape he was in. No surprise that he wasn’t able to undress himself. The wonder was that he was conscious and talking.

She unfastened the rest of his buttons as quickly as she could, noticing in the process that a wedge of curly black hair covered his chest and tapered down to a narrow trail that disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. She noticed, too, that his chest was wide and about as solid as a concrete wall, and beneath the cold and clammy skin he was all steely muscles and heavy bone.

The guy was seriously big, and seriously buff. Ordinarily she might have found that attractive. Okay, she did find it—him—attractive. Under the circumstances, however, alarm was the more appropriate response.

Once more she wondered who he was. She didn’t even know his name. Which, now that she thought about it, was ridiculous.

She looked up from unbuttoning his cuff. “Think you could tell me your name now? Seeing as how I’m taking off your clothes?”

His eyes were dark and unreadable as they met hers. “I thought—no suggestive comments.”

Gina moved on to the other cuff. “That wasn’t a suggestive comment. It was an illustrative one, designed to make the point that, under the circumstances, I should probably have something to call you besides,
hey, popsicle boy
. So, name?”

“Popsicle boy?” His lips twitched. For just a moment a flare of amusement lit his eyes. But still he seemed to hesitate. Why? God, she didn’t want to know. Gina had just flicked another, frowning glance at him when he said, “Cal.”

“Cal?” He didn’t respond. “Cal—what?”

“Let’s just stick with Cal.”

That was it. No last name forthcoming. Or maybe that
was
his last name. No, more likely it was a nickname.

Not that it made any real difference. Whatever his name was, whatever he was into, he’d become her responsibility. Or, to be more precise, she’d made him her responsibility, by fishing him out of the sea and dragging him up off the shore and, in general, saving his life. And that would be because, she realized with a not particularly welcome flash of insight, when she’d seen his plane crash, when she’d spotted him alive in the water, she had immediately, instinctively identified with him. As in, they were members of the same club.

Plane Crash Survivors Anonymous, anyone?

“Nice to meet you, Cal.” Her voice was dry.

“Likewise.” He paused, then added deliberately, “Gina.”

So he remembered her name. At the time she hadn’t even been sure it had registered with him.

She could feel him watching her as she quickly unbuttoned his other cuff and reached for his belt buckle, but she didn’t look up again.

Assuming that because they’d been through a similar experience they were somehow alike could prove to be an error of major proportions, she told herself. A
dangerous
error. Because she was growing more and more convinced that he was a dangerous man.

Meaning to wait to strip his shirt completely off at the same time as his pants so as not to leave any one part of him exposed to the frigid air for longer than was necessary, she moved on, unfastening his belt buckle with brisk efficiency even as she firmly ignored the muscular six-pack her fingers couldn’t help but brush, then undoing the button below it and reaching for his fly.

“I got this part,” he said. His hands were at his zipper, brushing hers aside.

Okay
. She so did not have a problem with that. At the sound of his zipper being lowered, she sank back a little.

Without the pressure of his hand holding it in place, the pad he’d been pressing to his side—her turtleneck—slid from his body to the ground.

She saw what was beneath it.

A round, dark hole the approximate size of a dime. On his far left side an inch or so above his hipbone. Sluggishly oozing blood. Bruising and dark smears all around it.

His injury. The one that had stained his shirt. The one that had been bleeding all along.

She’d assumed it was a gash of some sort, the result of the plane crash.

She’d assumed wrong.

That’s a bullet hole
.

Surprise widened her eyes. Before she could stop herself from looking up, she did, and her gaze collided with his.

Chapter Ten

H
e’d been shot.

The knowledge hung there in the air between them.

She knew, and he knew she knew. Neither of them had to say a word.

Gina felt her heart start to thump. She remained motionless, staring at him like a bird hypnotized by a cobra as his eyes bored into hers. They were about as expressive as the rock he leaned against.

It had to have happened right before the plane crashed—on the plane?—because the wound was clearly fresh, still bleeding, with no evidence of significant clotting or that it had received any kind of treatment. And besides the one on Attu, the next closest airport was almost seven hundred miles away.