Darkness(26)

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.