Darkness(62)

When he put it that way, the welling guilt she felt seemed absurd. But still she felt it, and sorrow and anger and fear as well, even as she struggled to push such useless emotions aside. Right now, she needed every bit of focus she could summon just to keep going.

Her reply had an edge to it. “Arvid isn’t—wasn’t—my boyfriend. He was a friend, and a colleague, that’s all. Doesn’t mean I can’t grieve for him. And Mary and Jorge and all the others, too.”

“You absolutely should grieve for them. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about something that wasn’t your fault and that you couldn’t have prevented no matter what you did.”

Having him nail her on the guilty part bothered her. She didn’t like that he had such an accurate read on what she was feeling. They didn’t know each other in any substantive, real-life way, and that was how she wanted to keep it. A man like him—well, he wasn’t for confiding her deepest, most personal secrets in.

A sudden petrifying thought made her stop dead and pivot to face him. “We have to find Keith Hertzinger—I think it’s Keith who’s still alive; his gear was missing from his cubby—and warn him. Oh, my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think about that sooner. Arvid might still be alive if I’d thought to try to warn him.” She fixed unblinking eyes on Cal as it hit her that Keith could at any time be shot by assassins he didn’t even know were stalking him, or blindly walk in on the murderous situation at the camp just as she had done, or—the possibilities were endless. She grabbed Cal’s arm. “He should have his radio with him. We have to find a radio.” She shook her head at her own missing of the obvious. “I should’ve thought to look for a radio before we ran out of the building earlier. I’m sure there was one in there. I could have warned Arvid and—”

“We’d be dead,” Cal interrupted before she finished. “If you’d managed to do that, you would have led them right to us. The radio frequencies are being monitored, remember?”

The reminder was so appalling that Gina could only stare up at him. With the flashlight beam pointed at the ground and casting long upward shadows, he looked almost impossibly tall and intimidating. Menacing, even. Only, she discovered, she wasn’t the least bit afraid of him anymore.

For better or worse, she discovered with a degree of dismay, he was just Cal to her now.

“I have to warn Keith.” Her voice was tight with determination.

“No, you don’t.” As Gina opened her mouth to argue he added, “There’s no way we can. We don’t have a radio, and anyway radios are out. We could try flashing Morse code signals at him out the door of the cave with the flashlight, but they’re a hell of a lot more likely to be seen by the people looking for us than by your friend. Or did you mean to just start screaming his name from the mountaintop and hope he shows up?”

“We could go looking for him.” Ignoring his sarcasm, Gina did her best to recall the details of Keith’s research project. “I think I know where he might be.”

“We’re not going anywhere.” Cal’s voice was grim.

Gina’s brows snapped together. “You don’t get to tell me what I’m going to do.”

Dropping his arm, she turned away to head back toward the entrance. She wasn’t going to leave the cave. Upset as she was, she wasn’t totally stupid, and given that it was now fully night and freezing cold and there was a snowstorm and killers on the loose, she recognized that she was confined to the cave until at least daylight. But she wanted to get her bearings, to see whether she could look out into the darkness and remember where Keith had been working that day. To see whether she could think of some way to get a message to him.

If he was even still alive. Her stomach knotted and her fists clenched as she faced up to that. Probably he wasn’t. Probably she was the only one left—

When Cal’s arm snaked around her waist and he yanked her back against him, that was the thought that made her whirl in the hard circle of his arm and shove her palms furiously into his chest and snarl, “Damn you, let me go.”

“Not a chance,” he said through his teeth. Shoving the flashlight in his pocket so that only the smallest, dimmest circle of illumination surrounded them, he grabbed her wrists and backed her up against the wall and pinned her hands to it on either side of her head and leaned into her, holding her in place with the solid weight of his body. “Let’s get something straight right now: I told you I was going to get you out of this alive and I mean to do it. So yeah, until then, I do get to tell you what you’re going to do. Every step of the way.”

“Get off me.” Gina struggled to free herself. It took only a moment for her to figure out that she was wasting her time: she wasn’t getting away until he chose to let her go. But in the process she became all too keenly aware of how truly big and muscular he was, of how firm and unyielding his body felt against hers, of how warm and strong the hands imprisoning hers were—and of how vulnerable she apparently was to his particular brand of way-too-aggressive masculinity.

She was furious at him. Spitting mad.

But the feel of him against her was turning her on. The weight of his body holding her more or less helplessly against the wall was making her feel things she hadn’t felt in years. The crush of his chest against her breasts made them tighten and tingle with pleasure. The hardness of his thighs against hers gave her an electric thrill. The unmistakable bulge between them was large and urgent enough to be felt through the combined layers of their clothes, and it excited her more than she ever would have believed was possible.