Darkness(66)

“Is that a threat? Because I’m not impressed.” With a glinting look thrown his way, she walked on past him into the dark. “And don’t call me honey,” she added over her shoulder. The flashlight beam danced ahead of her, pointing the way down what seemed to be a long, narrow passage.

He caught up with her. She flicked a glance up at him to find that his eyes glinted and his jaw was hard.

“You don’t like ‘honey’?” There was steel in his voice. “As long as you’re doing what I tell you, I’ll call you anything you want: baby, sugar, darling, sweetheart—”

“Gina,” she snapped. “If you can’t manage that, Dr. Sullivan works. And I’ll do what you tell me just as long as I agree that it’s the best thing to do.”

Their eyes met and clashed. The air was suddenly charged with hostility. Or, to be more exact, hostility infused with sex. Because the sparks were definitely still there.

“Gina,” he said with elaborate emphasis. “Do you honestly believe that you have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting yourself off this island alive without me?”

The passage crooked to the left again and sloped downward. Gina rested a hand on the smooth stone of the wall as she negotiated the turn. “I think waiting for rescue might be our best option.”

He made an impatient sound. “If you ‘wait for rescue,’ you’ll wind up dead.”

“Sooner or later someone is going to come looking for us,” she argued stubbornly. “I think we should hide until then.”

“Yeah. No.” His tone said Discussion over. “You saved my life. I’m going to do my level best to save yours. Which means we’re getting the hell off this island just as quick as we can.”

“What about escaping by boat?”

He shook his head. “We have a thousand miles of ocean to cross. We’d be caught before we got anywhere near land.”

“There are other islands around. Attu is part of a chain. And the Commander Islands are only a few hundred miles away.”

“The Commander Islands are Russian territory, and the rest of the Aleutians are deserted. If we even made it to any of them, which I doubt we would because they’ll be coming after us with everything they have, we’d be in the same position there as we are here. Running and hiding until they find and kill us.” He gave her an assessing look. “I can fly us out of here. Trust me.”

The sad thing about it was, she did. Trust him. About wanting to save her life, at least. Not that it made any difference as to how she felt. Stealing a plane and trying to fly away in it to safety sounded . . . undoable. Her heart sank at the prospect.

I could tell him, she thought, but outside of the accident investigators who’d come to her in the hospital and the therapist who’d helped her at least put the memories in a box, she had never talked about the plane crash in detail to anyone. Not even to her mother, who she knew didn’t really want to know, and whom she didn’t want to burden. Even now, all these years later, the memories had the power to make her feel sick and weak and dizzy, and she’d learned that the only way to cope was to avoid them at all costs. Anyway, strictly apart from her phobia, she thought that his escape plan was a really, really bad idea. That thousand miles of ocean he’d said they had to cross by boat? The distance didn’t change just because they were in a plane.

“You do whatever you want. I’m going to hide. And try to warn Keith.”

There was a moment of charged silence as her words hung in the air. The air in the cave had changed subtly, Gina noted as, ignoring the darkening face of the man who was now a step behind her, she followed the flashlight beam around a pile of fallen rocks. Deep into the mountain as they now had to be, it was drier, and warmer, and outside sounds were nonexistent. When she reached out to touch the wall the stone felt cool rather than cold, and bone dry.

“This is you being pissed at me because I kissed you and got you hot, isn’t it?” Cal’s voice grated as he caught up to her. She refused to look at him, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was scowling at her: a man on the brink of losing his temper. “What’s the big deal about that anyway? Are you married or something?”

The question hit her like a blow to the stomach. She winced before she could stop herself.

“No.” Her voice was sharp.

“Oh, yeah? Then what’s with the face you just made? And why did you say you can’t get it on with me? Sounds like married-woman guilt to me.”

She glared at him. “I’m a widow, okay?”

“A widow.” His eyes flickered, slid over her. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“How long has your husband been dead?”

Gina focused her gaze straight ahead. Except for the small circle of stone floor revealed by the flashlight beam, there was nothing to see but pitch darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But, see, I do.” She could feel his eyes on her. “You want to tell me how long, or do you want me to start guessing?” He paused, seemed to wait, then continued: “A year? Two?”

“Five years,” she snapped.

“You’ve been a widow for five years.”

“I just said that, didn’t I?”

“How’d he die?”