Darkness(38)

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.

“Mmm?” the scary stranger sharing her tent murmured in sleepy inquiry.

She didn’t answer. Instead she stayed very still. After a moment his deep, rhythmic breathing began again.

Oh, God.

Listening, she felt her every nerve ending being scraped raw.

He was, she thought, sound asleep once more.

While she felt like she might never sleep again.

Drawing her legs up close to her body, she wrapped her arms around them. Then she dropped her head so that her forehead rested on her knees.

She didn’t cry. What was the point? She’d already shed multiple oceans’ worth of tears, and not one single thing had changed.

It’s just breathing. She forced herself to listen to it, hoping that she would soon grow desensitized to the sound.

Her mind was on board, but her body, her senses, her emotions seemed to be having trouble adjusting.

Gradually they did. Or else she just grew so tired that she couldn’t feel anything anymore.

After the shakes went away, after the knot in her chest loosened, after the bile receded, exhaustion finally claimed her. She lay down, huddled in a little ball facing away from him. Deliberately she thought about birds: the rare ones she’d spotted on the island, the eagle she’d helped save, the tests she hoped to perform to better assess the health of various species before leaving. She loved working with the island’s horned puffins, the funny-faced, black-and-white clowns of the seabird world. To test their diets for pollutants, she’d placed screens in front of their burrows while they were out fishing. When they returned with their beaks full of fish, they had to spit out their catch to remove the screens, which they could do easily once their beaks were empty. While the birds dealt with the screens, she nabbed a sample of their diets. They didn’t seem disturbed by her presence, and just recalling their head-bobbing, foot-shuffling dance as they approached their burrows made her smile. From there her thoughts segued to the plovers, the terns, the northern fulmars, the pigeon guillemots, all of which she’d seen in her brief time on the island. Seven hundred different kinds of birds had been identified as living on Attu. Deliberately she began ticking them off one by one, and smiled a little as she recognized that what she was doing was an ornithologist’s version of counting sheep. But it focused her mind, and eventually sleep claimed her.





Chapter Fourteen





Gina was heavy eyed and cross-looking as she struggled into a sitting position inside the cramped and gloomy confines of the tent. She thrust the tangled fall of her hair out of her face, then, with a grimace, rolled her neck from side to side. The storm was history, but overnight it had gotten cold enough in the tent to turn the tip of her nose red. Watching her, Cal found himself thinking it looked cute, that she looked cute, actually way more than cute, and immediately dismissed the thought. He’d felt her up and kissed her and made both of them hot, but that was the end of it. His life, and maybe her life, too, and countless other lives as well, were on the line here. He didn’t have time to waste on anything but managing the situation so that they all stayed alive.

“Stiff neck?” he inquired.

She gave a nod as she scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears in an apparent attempt to ease the tension in them. “I should have let you keep the backpack.”

“What can I say? Being nice has its rewards.” Cal sat up, too, wincing as what felt like a white-hot poker pierced his abdomen. His hand automatically went to the wound, but other than that he ignored the pain. This bullet wasn’t going to kill him, or even slow him down much. He’d been shot before, on the ground in Afghanistan, much more seriously, and had seen a fair number of others shot, too. He knew bullet wounds, and this one didn’t amount to much. He was lucky there’d been a metal door between him and the gun as the shot was fired, which meant that by the time the bullet drilled into his flesh it was all but spent.

Still, the sucker hurt. When he got home, which was a beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, that he shared with Harley and that, because of work, he left vacant for way too many days of the year, that bullet was coming out.

Chalk up one more scar to add to his collection.

“How’s your wound?” she asked. Having followed his hand as it went to his side, she glanced up and met his gaze. Now that she was fully awake, he could see that she felt equal parts awkward and wary around him. He was sorry about that, some, but it couldn’t be helped.

“Better,” he said.

“Good.” She glanced away from him, toward the front of the tent, then started to crawl toward it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Out.” Her tone was short. He got the distinct impression that she didn’t want him following her. Probably she had personal business to attend to.

Fair enough.

It required conscious effort on his part to keep from looking at her ass as she crawled away from him. Then he slipped up, did a quick Check Six, and was rewarded by not being able to see anything of her ass at all. Between her coat and snow pants, she was well covered. Although when he’d searched her he’d been able to feel—