Darkness (35 page)

“Updraft,” he shouted back, not sounding at all alarmed but, rather, like a man in his element. He was holding on to the handles, using them to keep the parachute steady in the face of the buffeting wind that sent them skittering this way and that, and also, as she discovered as she risked a look down, to steer. He sent them around the backside of Terrible Mountain, then did his best to keep the parachute following the valley between the peaks. They were so high now that she could see a V-shaped formation of cackling geese flying below them. “We’re good now. Relax and enjoy the view.”

Gina almost choked. Her heart pounded and her pulse raced and her stomach felt as if it were lodged in her throat. Dangling from the floating mushroom above them, she and Cal rocked from side to side. The sensation of being suspended in midair, with nothing but a rope and her death grip on him standing between her and a fall of thousands of feet, was nightmarishly surreal.

“Enjoy the
view
?” she screamed at him disbelievingly, tipping her head back just enough to allow her to get a good look at his face.

He grinned, got a load of her expression, and said, “Or not.”

Then he kissed her. Another of those brief, hard kisses that thrilled her clear down to her toes. And, freaked out or not, she kissed him back.

The snow-covered landscape below
was
bleakly beautiful, she had to admit, once he quit kissing her to concentrate on getting them safely back to solid ground, and she recovered enough equanimity to actually look down and check it out. Soaring above it, she might even have appreciated the scenic side of their death-defying stunt if she hadn’t been busy keeping a wary eye out for bad guys with guns, and if her right leg hadn’t been developing a cramp, and if she hadn’t been totally scared to death because they were sailing along thousands of feet above the ground.

The descent was gradual. They dropped into the shadow of the mountains, went down past a nesting colony of rare red-legged kittiwakes (the location of which, under better conditions, she would have been itching to record), and skimmed rocks and snowdrifts before touching down in a narrow, horseshoe-shaped valley surrounded by mountains as softly as one of the snowflakes falling around them. She’d thought that she would see the ground rushing up at her, that they would hit hard and maybe roll or something, but his feet touched and he took a few running steps while apparently doing something that freed the canopy part of the parachute. As the white silk went billowing away without them, he slowed and stopped.

“Thank God,” Gina said devoutly, mentally kissing the ground, which, since they’d landed in Henderson Marsh, was spongy tundra beneath about six inches of snow. Unwrapping her poor, cramped legs from their death grip on his waist, she let them drop with a sigh of relief, only to find as her feet touched the ground that they were full of pins and needles. Her arms slid down from around his neck until her hands clutched the front of his coat for stability, and she rested against him thankfully as her legs regained their feeling.

“You did great.” He rubbed her back in apparent congratulations, then cut her free of the rope that had harnessed them together. She hadn’t seen the folding knife, which he pulled from his boot and which he’d apparently found in the cave before.

“You enjoyed that,” she accused, resting her cheek against his wide chest.

“I haven’t jumped for a long time.” His faintly nostalgic tone made it an admission that she was right. After freeing her of the rope, he lifted the backpack off her back, then set it down in the snow. Not quite having recovered the full use of her legs yet, she sank down cross-legged in the snow beside it while he unstrapped himself from the parachute case and buried it by kicking snow over it.

“Do you think they saw where we went?” Pulling the backpack onto her lap, Gina dug inside it for essentials: water and a protein bar. They hadn’t yet had a chance to eat anything that morning, and the way she was feeling, she needed to if she was ever going to move again. Unscrewing the top of the water bottle, she drank.

“Not unless we’re really unlucky. We dropped so fast that they couldn’t have seen us go, and I steered us around the far side of the mountain once we had lift, so I don’t think the men with the trackers could have spotted us. And if anyone had seen us land—well, we’d know about it.” He hunkered down in front of her, a big, dark figure against the background of towering mountains and endless snow.

“They’d have shot us by now, you mean.” Glumly Gina passed him the water bottle and broke off half the protein bar and handed that over, too, before biting into her half. With the knit cap pulled down low over his eyes and the black scruff on his jaw and chin growing in thick, he looked so disreputable that if she were to see him coming when she was walking alone down a street, she would cross to the other side.

“You don’t have to worry. I told you I’d get you out of this alive, and I will.”

Under his steady regard, Gina, to her own astonishment, found herself feeling suddenly shy. She had an instant, way-too-vivid flashback to the things they’d done together in bed, to how uncharacteristically wild he’d made her, to how passionate he’d been, and as her heartbeat sped up and her body heated she took refuge in flippancy.

“You sweet-talker, you,” she said, and treated him to an exaggerated batting of her eyelashes.

He grinned, said, “Eat up, we need to go,” and demolished his own protein bar in four bites.

Then he pulled the binoculars from the backpack, stood up, and started scanning the surrounding slopes with them. By the time she finished eating and he reached down to help her to her feet, this reminder of the danger they were in had her insides twisting with anxiety.

“Nothing,” he said in response to the look she gave him. “And there’s almost no cover, so I’m pretty sure I would have spotted anyone who was up there.”

That was good, and she felt a tingle of relief.

“Now what?” she asked as he tucked the binoculars back into the backpack and shrugged into it.

He started walking, his boots crunching in the snow, and she fell in beside him.

“Now we go steal a plane.”

She’d known he was going to say that. Her stomach turned inside out at the thought, but she didn’t say anything, just kept trudging along at his side through the falling snow. But something of what she was feeling must have shown on her face, because after a glance at her he said, “You trust me, remember.”

She sighed, faced the truth of that, and said, “I do.”

“I just need you to trust me this one more time. Just till we get home.”

Home
. That was the word that did it. Because she knew that his idea of home and her idea of home were two entirely different things. The knowledge that at home, in the real world, they had no place in each other’s lives stabbed sharp as a knife through her heart. Which, because of its implications for the future state of that heart, scared her to death.

She stopped dead. As he turned to frown questioningly at her, she folded her arms over her chest, lifted her chin at him, and said, “Just so we’re clear, I haven’t flown in a plane since the last one I was in crashed and burned. I haven’t had sex with anyone but you since my husband died. I live a quiet, peaceful, stable life as a college professor, and I like it. I don’t do death-defying stunts, and I don’t do one-night stands with dangerous men who flit through my life like a puff of smoke and then disappear. I’m not brave, or adventurous, or sexually uninhibited. That isn’t me. It won’t ever be me.”

“Gina.” His eyes slid over her, then rose to meet hers as he reached out to catch her by the arms. She couldn’t quite read what was in them, but his mouth curved in the slightest of wry smiles, which made her think she was amusing him, which had her frowning direly at him. “You parachuted off a mountain with me: in my book, that makes you pretty brave. You came here to Attu, which makes you plenty adventurous. As for sexually uninhibited”—his eyes glinted at her in a way that served as a graphic reminder of everything he’d done to her and she’d done to him, and, not coincidentally, set her heart to knocking—“you’ll do. You have my personal guarantee.”

Shaking her head no, she burst out with, “But that was a one-time thing. That isn’t
me
.”

“Maybe,” he said, “that’s you with me.”

That rendered her speechless. She searched his eyes, and at what she saw blazing at her from the coffee-brown depths, butterflies fluttered to life in her stomach. Maybe the crazy-hot attraction she felt for him, maybe the way her body quaked and burned at his slightest touch, maybe the explosion of passion she’d experienced with him that was like nothing she’d ever felt before had an explanation just that simple. This was a different, fresh relationship. This was how she and Cal were together. This was
them
.
You with me
.

Her mind boggled. Her heart skipped a beat.

He continued, “As far as I’m concerned, last night wasn’t a one-night stand, and I’m not planning on vanishing from your life like a puff of smoke unless you want me to. I think what we have going on here, this thing between us, might be the start of something special. We could try it out. I could bring you flowers, take you to dinner, that kind of thing. See where it goes.”

Something—hope, happiness, a promise of fresh, new love—burst to life inside her heart like the first delicate spring crocus shooting up through a long winter’s worth of snow.

She smiled at him, a beautiful sunburst of a smile, which immediately turned into a suspicious frown as a thought hit her.

“You’re not just saying that to get me on that damned airplane, are you?”

He laughed, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. Hot and sweet at first, the kiss soon turned hot and urgent, and by the time he let her go the snow was practically melting around them and Gina was blissfully convinced that he’d meant every word he’d said.

Chapter Twenty-Six

D
uring the hours-long trek to camp, the weather deteriorated. More heavy gray clouds rolled in to hang low in the sky and turn what had been a pale but relatively clear morning as gloomy and dark as if dusk had fallen. The temperature dropped and the wind picked up until it bit at their cheeks and whistled around their ears. Fog blew in, not in a heavy blanket but in thick wisps that formed islands of mist floating just above the ground. The snowfall grew heavier, wetter. Every indicator was there: another major storm was on the way. The only questions were, when would it hit and would they be caught out in it.

Gina devoutly hoped they wouldn’t be. She was freezing cold, dead tired, aching in every muscle, and scared to death. Under such conditions, it was difficult to maintain a warm little glow of happiness. But she was managing it.

Cal seemed pretty cheerful, too, for a man armed with two rifles, a pistol, and a knife in his boot, who was keeping a wary eye out for anyone wanting to kill them so he could kill that person first. At her urging, he told her about his beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, and his company, and his dog, Harley, whose very existence Gina found completely charming. Without revealing too much, he also filled in more details about the circumstances surrounding the plane crash that had dumped him in her lap. In turn, she talked about her life, telling him about the time she’d spent in the hospital and how she’d passed the long, slow days of her recovery watching the birds they kept in giant cages there and developing a fascination with them, which had spurred her, when she was released at last, to go on and get her master’s and PhD in ornithology. She told him about her life as a college professor, and her condo, and beautiful, sunny Northern California.

At length they found an old army road, which Cal instantly mistrusted even though Gina assured him that, to her knowledge, there were no operational land vehicles on Attu other than the tractor. He felt that the road made too obvious a target for a search party, and also that there was no way to know whether the bad guys had brought something like, say, ATVs with them. But since they were sure to hear anything like that coming, and walking was so much easier with the firm surface of the hard-packed dirt road beneath the snow than with the squishy tundra, and time was of the essence, they were trudging along it anyway.

Cal said, “With the weather looking like it is, the trackers and any other search parties will most likely be heading back to the Coast Guard station. We want to beat them there if we can. It’ll be a lot easier to steal a plane out from under the noses of a few men than twenty or more.”

As much faith as she had in Cal, the thought of attempting an escape via plane still made Gina queasy.

She said, “Don’t you think somebody’s going to notice when the plane starts to move? I mean, the only way it can go is down the runway right past the buildings.”

“Once we’re moving, it’s too late.”

“Aren’t you the person whose plane just got shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile? What’s preventing whoever shot your first plane out of the sky from shooting you out of the sky
again
?” If there was a note of exasperation in her voice, it was because they were getting worrisomely close to camp and close to the whole steal-a-plane scenario, which she wouldn’t even have dreamed of agreeing to if it had been presented to her by anyone other than Cal.

“First, I wasn’t flying the plane when it got shot down. Second, as far as I’m aware nobody had any reason to suspect we might get shot down. Now that I’m flying, believe me, us getting shot down just ain’t gonna happen.”

That cocky flyboy answer earned him a jaundiced look. But, whether it was idiotic of her or not, it also made her feel better. It both unsettled and alarmed her to discover that her trust in him apparently knew no bounds.

“Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to do,” he said, and stopped walking to pull the pistol out of his pocket. She stopped, too, looking silently down at the gun in his gloved hand before glancing up at him. Even through the veil of thickly falling snow, he seemed suddenly bigger and more formidable. His jaw was set, his mouth was unsmiling, and Gina realized that he’d gone into warrior mode: she was face-to-face with the hard-eyed, scary man she’d first encountered. For a second she was taken aback. Then she got a grip and reminded herself that he was now
her
bear.