Darkness (15 page)

Looking around, she bared her teeth at him in a savage nonsmile. “Never gonna happen.”

“So, what, you’re planning to sit there thinking evil thoughts about me all night?”

“What I’m planning to do is none of your business.”

“I’m not going to attack you, if that’s what you’re worried about. We can sleep back to back. Head to foot. However you want to do it. The key word is,
sleep
.”

She scooched around to face him. “Like I said, never gonna happen.”

“You’re not going to share this sleeping bag with me?”

“My, you
are
quick on the uptake.”

They exchanged measuring looks.

“Right.” He flung back the top of the sleeping bag and sat up again. Under the circumstances, seeing so much honed and chiseled male flesh coming at her made her nerves twitch with alarm. It was all she could do to stand—well, sit—her ground. In that she was aided by the fact that there wasn’t anyplace for her to go.

Her voice bristled with suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“You take it.” He rested a hand lightly over his wound as he pulled his legs out of the depths of the bag. She saw no blood on the bandage, but it was obvious the wound was hurting him. “The thing’s all yours.”

He was referring to the sleeping bag, she knew.

“I don’t want it.” Her sweatpants rendered him minimally decent, not adequately dressed. She watched his bare calves and big feet crammed into her socks swing toward her and was reminded of how nearly naked he was—and also of the ordeal he’d so recently gone through. He really needed to stay wrapped up and keep still—wait, stop, she didn’t care if he hurt himself, remember? Crossly she added, “Get back in there. It’s going to get cold in here later, when the heat from the rocks dies out. I’m dressed for it. You’re not.” When he made no move to obey, she snapped, “Get back in the damned bag.”

He shook his head. “That would be ungentlemanly.”

She made a scoffing sound. “Why mess up your track record?”

That made him smile again. Which in turn made him way more handsome than she cared to think about. In response, the scowl she was directing at him turned ferocious. He was sitting up now with his knees bent and his arms resting on his knees. Strapping bare shoulders, arms, chest, abdomen, calves—his position equaled way too much raw masculinity on display for her comfort.

He said, “Look, I’m going to unzip the sleeping bag and open it up, and we can both use it as a blanket. You stay on your side of the tent, I’ll stay on mine. How about that?”

Gina considered. The pad beneath them would be enough to keep the ground’s cold from penetrating. Used as a blanket, the sleeping bag wouldn’t provide as much warmth, but it should provide enough.

She would be relatively toasty. He would probably avoid freezing to death.

Both were consequences she could live with.

“Fine,” she said ungraciously. As he twisted around to start unzipping the bag, she winced before she could stop herself at the flexing going on with his abdominal muscles and the Band-Aids, gave up on the whole wishing-him-dead thing, and added, “Stop moving around. You’ll start bleeding again. I’ll do it.” Eyes narrowed, lips tight, she crawled toward him. “Stay out of my way,” she warned.

He stopped, slanting an unreadable look at her. “Whatever you say.”

Chapter Thirteen

I
n just a few minutes Gina had the bag unzipped and spread out over the floor. Taking care to avoid the pan of rocks, she slipped beneath the sleeping bag and stretched out on her side with her back to him. Lying down felt surprisingly wonderful, even on so unforgiving a surface. She was so tired she was practically boneless. Every muscle in her body was sore.

On the other side of the tent, she could feel him stretching out, too.

“Here,” he said.

Gina rolled onto her other side and looked at him with mistrust. Even with both of them hugging opposite sides of the tent, there wasn’t more than a foot of space separating them. He lay on his side, facing her. The flashlight was on the ground now. Its beam cut through the space between them like a lightsaber. Above it, his face was deep in shadow. She could just make out the muscular shape of his bare shoulder and arm.

He was in the act of shoving the backpack toward her. “Pillow,” he said.

Having him lying so close was unsettling. Gina regarded him with open suspicion as she accepted the backpack.

“Good night,” he said before she could say anything, and switched off the flashlight.

The tent instantly went as dark as the inside of a sewer pipe. Gina turned her back to him again, tucked the backpack—most uncomfortable pillow ever, she could see why he’d given it up—beneath her head, wrapped her arms around herself, and closed her eyes. The memory of the way he had kissed her surged to the forefront of her mind, making her tense. Right on the heels of that came the memory of how his hands on her body had felt. Deep inside, she felt a curl of desire. Instantly, every cell in her body seized up in instinctive rejection.

What kind of person gets a thrill from a guy she doesn’t know and doesn’t trust?

“HOW DOES
your group communicate with each other? Does everybody have a radio?”

That deep, rasping voice so close at hand, coming abruptly out of the blackness, made her start guiltily, as if there were any way he could possibly be aware of what she had just thrust from her mind. Taking a quiet, steadying breath, she opened her eyes. The darkness was so complete that she might as well have kept them closed. The nylon wall flapped inches away as a gust of wind shook the tent, but she could only hear, not see it.

“Yes,” she replied, totally composed, totally over what had just been going on with her.

“Now that your friends can’t reach you on the radio, they’re going to come looking for you, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”
But not before the storm clears, and not before daylight
. She didn’t say that, though. It was probably a good thing for him to think that it was possible that her fellow scientists could stumble upon them at any moment. It made her feel a little safer, at any rate.

He said, “But they won’t come looking for you until morning at the earliest.”

Okay, so he wasn’t worried about her colleagues finding them right away. Well, she’d told him herself that nobody would be out in the storm. Big mouth.

More slowly, he added, “It’s better if you don’t tell them about this.”

Gina frowned at the noisily fluttering tent wall she couldn’t see. “What?”

He repeated his words, adding, “You need to get away from me.”

She blinked in surprise. “At last we agree on something.”

He ignored that. “The people who are after me—you don’t want them after you, too. You don’t want to get on their radar.”

Gina was wide awake now. “You’re right, I don’t.”

“No one has to know that you saw my plane crash. No one has to know that you saw me.”

“That’s true,” she replied slowly.

“If the people who are after me find out that you saw me, talked to me, it’s a good bet they’ll kill you.”

Gina shivered. Goose bumps racing over her skin, she rolled over to stare fruitlessly in his direction, unable to see anything except a wide expanse of blank darkness.

“Wonderful.”

“So you don’t let them find out,” he replied while an army of cold little feet duckwalked down her spine. “You don’t tell your colleagues about me. You don’t tell anybody about me. For all intents and purposes, you got caught in the storm and spent the night out here in your tent, alone.”

She thought that over. “I can say that.”

“In the morning you need to head back to your camp bright and early, before any of your friends have a chance to track you down.”

“Okay.” That had been her plan anyway, although he didn’t know it. Only she’d meant to tell her colleagues the whole story, alert the authorities, and come back here with them so that they could all keep collective watch over him until help arrived.

She liked his plan better. Because what he said made terrifying sense. If bad guys with guns were after him, she definitely did not want them after her and her group, too.

He said, “Once you get back, I need you to do something for me.”

Her reply was cautious. “What?”

“How does your group communicate with the outside world? E-mail? Phone?”

“Not e-mail. There’s no connection. We have a satellite phone.”

“Ah.” It was a sound of satisfaction. “Do you have access to it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make a call without anyone knowing?”

This time her answer was more uncertain. “I suppose I could.”

“I need you to make a call for me. As soon as possible after you get back to camp. No one else can know.”

“Who would I be calling and what would I say?”

“I’ll give you the number before you leave. All you have to do is dial it and key in another set of numbers I’ll give you. That will bring somebody here to pick me up and give me a ride home.”

Her silence must have conveyed some of the doubt she was feeling, because he added persuasively, “One call, and I’ll be gone within a matter of hours. Out of your life forever. You can pretend like you never laid eyes on me.”

That sounded promising, but—

“The other people on the plane—their deaths have to be reported to the authorities,” she said. “So does the crash.”

“Will you trust me to take care of that?”

He must have taken her silence to mean precisely what it did—she
didn’t
trust him—because he added, “Believe me, you don’t want this to come back on you. I’ll make sure all the right people are notified. And you and your friends stay safe.”

It was the “stay safe” part that did it. “All right.”

“So you’ll make the call.” From his tone, she could tell it wasn’t really a question.

Still she hesitated. “Will I be aiding in the commission of a crime? Or committing treason or something equally hideous?”

“No.” From the sound of his voice, it seemed that made him smile.

“Would you tell me if I was?” Suspicion dripped from every word.

“Probably not.” He
was
smiling. She could tell.

“Then I don’t think—”

“The alternative is, I can go to your camp tomorrow and commandeer your phone and place my own call, but then I’d be putting every single one of you in danger.” He no longer sounded like he was smiling.

Persuasive argument
. She made a face into the dark. “Fine, I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.”

Gina snorted by way of a
you’re welcome
.

He didn’t say anything after that, and she didn’t, either. After a few minutes, she turned over and tried to fall asleep.

She couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. She didn’t know why she was even surprised. The backpack felt like a stone beneath her head. Even through the pad, the ground felt almost as hard and bumpy. She was so tired she felt boneless, but her mind raced.

It was the mind-racing part that kept her awake.

It would be tricky to place the call without anyone taking notice. And she still had no real proof she wouldn’t be abetting a crime by doing so. But all things considered, taking the chance to get away from him and then doing what she could to get him off the island as quickly and quietly as possible seemed like the lesser of a number of evils. Just as pretending that she’d never seen him or his plane seemed like the smartest thing she could do.

Having made the decision, she tried to empty her mind, tried to go to sleep.

He
was asleep.

She could tell from the way he was breathing.

Slow and deep. Rhythmic.

Close.

Too close.

The wind screamed. The tent rattled and shook. Some combination of sleet and snow clattered relentlessly down on the ground outside. In the distance she could hear the boom of the surf, the roll of thunder, the occasional crack of what she thought must be lightning.

But what bothered her was his breathing. The more she listened to it, the more it made her tense up. Made her own breathing quicken. Made her heart beat faster.

Finally she figured out why.

It wasn’t just that he was so near. It wasn’t just that she didn’t trust him, or that she was, in fact, slightly afraid of him.

It was that his breathing sounded so very—male.

She hadn’t slept this close to a man since David’s death.

The last night of his life they’d cuddled together on a single cot in a tent in the Yucatán. They’d made love. Afterward, he’d fallen asleep and she’d lain there in the dark listening to him breathe. She’d thought,
I’m happy
.

David’s breathing had sounded slow and deep. Rhythmic. Unmistakably male.

Her insides quivered at the memory.

The next morning the two of them, plus her father and sister, had gotten on that plane.

And taken off into the teeth of a threatening storm.

She could still hear the patter of rain on the fuselage—

No
. Gina sat up abruptly, desperate to banish the memory. It was too late. She was trembling. Her chest felt tight. Bile rose in her throat.