Darkness (13 page)

“You mean besides the fact that I’m trapped in a tent in a blizzard with a complete stranger? Not a thing,” she lied. She was still pushing the memories away, still locking the specter of sexual attraction out of her mind, still resisting the urge to zip her parka back up again and run screaming out into the storm, when he handed the half-full bottle of water back to her.

The prosaic action, the feel of the cool, slick bottle in her hand, steadied her as no amount of self-talk could have done.

“Save that,” he said, and subsided back down into the depths of the sleeping bag, hitching it higher around his neck. “In case the storm lasts a while.”

The suggestion was unsettling. But, like the water bottle in her hand, it gave her something concrete to focus on. She figuratively grabbed hold with both hands. “Storms on Attu usually blow over in a few hours.”

“Thus I said, in case.”

“Okay.” Hating to entertain the thought but knowing he was right, she ate the last of her protein bar, took one more sip of water, screwed the cap back on, and set it aside.

“You say something about bandaging me up earlier?” He nodded at the first aid kit, which was on the floor beside the backpack.

“Yes.” She was still rattled, but she did her best to shrug it off. Mentally squaring her shoulders, she picked up the first aid kit and shifted around until she was kneeling next to his midsection so she could get a closer look. “The one good thing is, being immersed in the sea probably helped to clean it out. And the cold probably kept the injury from bleeding as much as it otherwise would have done.”

He lay on his back now with that one arm tucked beneath his head. His armpit was tufted with black hair. The arm itself was chiseled and strong-looking, heavy with muscle. Aggressively masculine, just like the rest of him. It also sported a large, darkening bruise just above his elbow. She fastened her gaze on that with a feeling very close to relief.

He said, “Kept the
bullet wound
from bleeding, you mean?”

The tent instantly seemed to shrink around her. His expression was concealed by shadows. Her eyes jumped to his, to discover that they were fixed on her face.

So that he could weigh her response to his words? Her pulse speeded up and her stomach tightened at the thought, along with its corollary:
He doesn’t trust me
.

She was hit by a sudden wave of apprehension that felt like a million tiny bugs skittering over her skin.

Thanks to her, he had shelter, warmth, food. Which in a perfect world should mean that he was grateful, right? Down in the real world where she lived, what it really meant was that he no longer needed her to survive.

He said he wouldn’t hurt me
.

Her chin came up. She met his eyes steadily. “Unless you have another injury I don’t know about.”

“Bruises and scrapes. At least, as far as I can tell.”

“You’re lucky,” she said, remembering the violence of the plane’s explosion.

“Yeah.” There was a dryness to that that told her he didn’t think so.

Convince him that he still does need you. Tend his wound, tend the furnace. Then, when the storm passes, when morning comes, run like hell
.

SHE PUSHED
back the sleeping bag to find that fresh blood darkened the white cotton of his makeshift bandage. Gina frowned. Clearly the wound was still bleeding. At a guess, the only reason it had bled so sluggishly up until this point was because his circulation had slowed down as he’d gotten colder and colder. Now that he was warming up, the bleeding was worsening.

The sleeves of the turtleneck were knotted around his waist to keep it in place. Untying them, she pulled it off him, picked up the flashlight, and trained it on the wound, which was several inches above where the waistband of her sweatpants bisected his muscled abdomen.

The taut skin just below his waist was marred by a bruise about the size of the rim of a teacup. In the center of the bruise was some swelling, and in the center of the swelling was a puckered hole. A dark crust around the edge of the hole told her that it had begun to clot before something—probably everything he’d done since he’d fallen out of the boat onto the beach, at a guess—had broken open the developing scab. Fortunately, the bright red blood that welled up as she watched seeped rather than poured from the hole.

She didn’t know much about bullet wounds. But she did know that a small entry wound, assuming this was the entry wound, was usually accompanied by a larger exit wound. As in, he should have a bigger, gorier hole in his back.

Since the turtleneck had already done its unsterile worst, she picked it up and used it to wipe away the blood that was starting to trickle down his side. Then she tackled the blood welling from the wound itself so she could get a better look.

“Ouch,” he said as she dabbed at it.

“Can you roll on your side a little? I need to see your back.”

His brows twitched together. “Why?”

“Because if you have a hole like this in your front, you probably have a bigger one in your back.”

He shook his head. “Bullet’s still in there.”

He didn’t sound nearly as worried by that as she thought he should.

“Are you sure?” Gina looked at him with dismay. He nodded. If the bullet was still in him—her chest tightened—it undoubtedly needed to come out.

The idea that she was going to have to dig a bullet out of him—with what, the tweezers in the first aid kit?—filled her with dread. A pregnant moment in which she imagined herself shoving the tweezers into that oozing hole and probing around inside his body in a sweaty, panicky, and probably futile attempt to hit metal while his blood gushed around her fingers made her feel a little woozy. It couldn’t be done. Or at least, she couldn’t do it. Not even to show him how much he still needed her.

The mere thought made her queasy.

“I’m not even going to try to dig a bullet out of you,” she told him, sinking back on her heels.

Something glimmered in his eyes. Amusement? She couldn’t be sure.

“I thought you said you’re a doctor.”

“PhD,” she gritted.

He actually smiled at that, a quick there-and-gone smile, but a smile nonetheless. He was, she noticed sourly, way handsome when he smiled.

He said, “Then I guess you’ll just have to slap a bandage on it and leave it.”

She frowned at him. That was exactly what she meant to do, but . . . he sounded surprisingly okay with it.

“Don’t look so worried. Amateur surgery by flashlight is way more likely to kill me than leaving the bullet in there. Besides, if it had hit anything vital I’d be dead already.”

“Good point.” Seeing as how he wasn’t dead, seemed in no real danger of dying now that they had shelter and he was warming up, and they both agreed that her digging around inside him for the bullet was a bad idea, stopping the bleeding and then covering the wound seemed like the way to go. She positioned the flashlight on top of the backpack so that it would provide the maximum amount of light where she needed it. “One of our group—Keith Hertzinger from the University of Chicago—is a physician. He can look at it tomorrow.”

“A physician, huh? I thought you were here to watch birds.”

“
Study
birds. He also has a PhD with a specialty in environmental analytic chemistry. As isolated as Attu is, the organizers thought it would be good to include a physician in the group.” Removing an alcohol wipe from the first aid kit, she tore it open and warned, “This is probably going to sting.”

“Who are the organizers?”

“Of the trip? There are several. The National Audubon Society. The Nature Conservancy. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Why?” As she spoke she cleaned the wound and surrounding area, being careful not to dislodge the crust that had formed around the hole. The already taut muscles of his abdomen contracted still more as she swabbed them with alcohol. The wound was a little higher than his navel, which was an innie, and not much more than an inch from the edge of his body. She couldn’t help but notice the narrow trail of black hair that traced down from his navel to disappear beneath the stretched-out waistband of her sweatpants. Or how firm his abdomen felt beneath her fingers. Or how faithfully the cotton-spandex hugged his package.

Annoyed at herself, she glanced away.

“Who paid?” he asked, ignoring her question, and apparently, thankfully, missing where her gaze had last rested. “For your group to come here,” he added when, recovering, she gave him a questioning look.

“We’re being funded by a grant from the EPA.” By this time he was wincing at what she was doing to him. “I told you it might sting,” she added as an aside, in response to his expression.

“Sting? It hurts like a mother.”

“Probably because you’re warming up. And because you’ve almost certainly had an adrenaline rush going and it’s wearing off. Anyway, at a guess, I’d say getting shot tends to hurt.” As she spoke, she liberally applied antibiotic ointment to the wound then placed a small pile of gauze pads over it and used her palm to press down firmly.

He yelped.

Lifting her palm, she said, “Sorry. I was applying direct pressure to stop the bleeding.”

“No, go ahead,” he said through his teeth. “Direct pressure all the way.”

With a frowning look at him she lowered her palm to the wound again. His breathing escalated a little as she pressed, but the underlying rhythm of it was not nearly as harsh as it had been when she’d followed him into the tent. He was no longer shivering, and the sleek skin she was touching was borderline warm.

When she cautiously lifted her hand again to study the gauze pad beneath it—she didn’t want to lift the pad to look at the wound itself in case lifting the pad caused more bleeding—she was relieved to see that only a small spot of blood had leaked through to the top layer.

“I think the bleeding’s slowed,” she said as she tore open an extralarge Band-Aid. “You probably need to stay as still as possible for a while. When I finish with this, you can just lie there and go to sleep.”

And if he was still asleep when the sun came up, then getting away from him and going for help just got that much easier.

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving, isn’t it?” His question was seemingly out of the blue. She nodded, and he continued, “Pretty big holiday, stateside. Why aren’t you home celebrating with your family?”

Lots of reasons. None of which she cared to share. “Because I chose to come here instead.”

“You got a husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, in the group you’re with?”

She stopped smoothing the edges of the Band-Aid into his skin to sit up straight and frown at him. “Are you really asking me about my love life?”

“I’m just having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that you—a whole group of you—would spend a major holiday here in the frozen North looking at birds.”

“Nobody’s asking you to wrap your mind around it.” Having finished with the Band-Aid, she opened another one and clapped it down crosswise over the first. Smoothing it out with a lot less care than before, she shot him an exasperated look. “It’s a government-funded research project. We’re here over Thanksgiving because we’re college professors and that’s when we get time off.”

“I see.” The skepticism in the look he gave her was unmistakable even through his pained grimace at her Band-Aid smoothing.

Tight-lipped at the seeming futility of trying to convince him that she was, in fact, precisely what she said she was, she finished with the Band-Aid, flipped the edge of the sleeping bag back over him, cleaned her hands with another of the alcohol wipes, and returned the first aid kit to the backpack.

“You’re American, too,” she stated, in the spirit of taking the battle to the enemy. “Why aren’t you home for Thanksgiving?”

His expression lightened marginally. “Not a big fan of turkey.”

A deliberate nonanswer answer that didn’t tell her anything at all. He didn’t even admit his nationality. Well, she was as certain he was American as it was possible to be, and, anyway, she didn’t really care.

A muffled peal of thunder accompanied by the rattling of the tent reminded her of the storm raging outside and made her suddenly extremely thankful for the protection of their cozy cocoon.

Cozy, that is, except for the man in it with her.

She shot him a disgruntled look. She was tired of pussyfooting around with him, tired of being afraid of a man who owed her his life, and tired—exhausted, actually—in general. So tired she ached with it. She supposed that up until now she’d been experiencing an adrenaline rush, too, and that, like his, it was fading.

“So when did you start making arrangements for this trip?” he asked.

“We’ve been working on it for six months,” she answered shortly. Then, despite knowing he was probably going to make something of it, she added, “Final approval for the funding came through two weeks ago.”

He did. Doubt narrowed his eyes. “What you’re telling me is that your entire twelve-person group was able to get it together and get here on two weeks’ notice.”

“Two weeks’
final
notice. I told you, we’ve been planning the trip since the end of last semester.” Straightening her spine, she scowled at him. “What is it, exactly, that you suspect my colleagues and me of anyway? I’d like to know. It can’t be of shooting you.” She pointed a finger skyward. “You were up there”—her finger reversed itself to point at the ground—“and we were down here when it happened. Anyway, I doubt my colleagues even know you exist. How could they? I’m as sure as it’s possible to be that none of them were close enough to see your plane crash, because if they had been they’d be all over us by now. If somebody’s after you,
it isn’t any of us
.”