Darkness(30)

But she did. Take the close quarters, add in his rugged good looks and all those muscles and his seminudity, and it was impossible for her not to be aware of him as a man. The look in his eyes made it clear that he was now equally aware of her as a woman.

Their eyes met. Something crackled in the air between them that hadn’t been there before—a kind of current. An electric vibration. An elemental male-female thing.

The sudden spark of sexual heat that flared inside her as he looked at her was so urgent it actually hurt. Her chest contracted. Her throat closed.

And her body started up with a hot, sweet pulse.

She instantly, figuratively, turned her back on it. It was nothing she felt the slightest urge to acknowledge, much less pursue.

The plane crash—her plane crash—was five years in the past now. In the last year, she’d had precisely two dinner dates. Each with a different man, each leading nowhere. Before that, nothing. She hadn’t been ready. She wasn’t ready when she’d gone out on those dates. Along with her father, her husband, David, had died in the crash. Four months after their wedding. Their lives together had barely begun. He’d been her father’s research assistant, twenty-six years old, blond and wiry and handsome. He’d been as reckless and adventuring as her father, and Gina had found herself agreeing to do things she never would have agreed to do if she hadn’t fallen so hard for him. Reckless adventuring was not her nature, but she’d pretended like it was for the year they’d known each other, just like she’d pretended it was for her father. Maybe if she hadn’t pretended so hard, maybe if she’d allowed herself to be her true careful, logical, look-before-you-leap self, she could have stopped what happened and the others would still be alive.

But she hadn’t, and they’d died.

She’d lived, which meant she’d had no choice: slowly, painfully, she’d put her life back together. It was a different life than before, but it had gotten to a place where it was an actual life again. Quiet. Predictable. Stable. Good.

That was what she wanted. That was the only kind of life she could handle now, she saw.

This—this second plane crash, the apparent danger she was in because of it, him—was more than she was equipped to deal with.

It hit too close to home. It brought back too many memories, too many emotions. The trip to Attu had been a baby-steps attempt to get back out into the great outdoors, to embrace the wider world of adventure again, to heal herself. She saw now that it had been a mistake. She was still too raw inside, while reality was too harsh, too sharp. Too ugly.

“Something wrong?” he asked, which was when Gina realized that she’d been staring at him with who knew what kind of expression on her face.

“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.