Darkness(67)

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“How’d he die, Gina?”

She shot him a furious glance. “My God, can’t you just let it alone?”

“No. He must have been young. In his twenties? So probably an accident. Did he die in an accident?”

She felt the floor start to tilt beneath her. To keep from stumbling, she had to stop walking and put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

Cal stopped, too. He loomed up beside her, frowning down at her. She refused to look at him.

“What kind of accident?” he persisted.

“It was a plane crash,” she said, and closed her eyes as the darkness started to shimmy around her.

“Ah,” Cal said, adding something that she couldn’t quite hear, because the blood pounding in her ears drowned everything else out. Her heart raced and her stomach churned. Leaning against the wall, she took a deep, even breath as she fought to get herself under control again. Then she gritted her teeth, opened her eyes, and shoved away from the wall. Chin up, ignoring his frowning gaze, she took a few tentative steps. Her knees felt so weak that she had to stop and lean against the wall again.

“It’s all right, I’ve got you,” she heard him say over the drumming in her ears. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, slid the other one beneath her knees, and scooped her up in his arms. Then he started walking with her.





Chapter Twenty-Two





I’m fine, put me down, is what Gina wanted to say, but she didn’t, because she couldn’t.

Her throat was too tight to allow her to say anything at all.

She didn’t struggle, either.

Instead she looked at his hard, masculine features and realized to her dismay that in his arms was exactly where she wanted to be. She felt safe there. That wasn’t good, and she knew it, but at the moment she was too upset to even try to police what she was feeling. Giving up, she hooked her arms around his neck and rested her head on his wide shoulder and closed her eyes, working on getting her equilibrium back even as she surrendered to the novel experience of having a man take care of her. He smelled of snow and the outdoors, and he carried her as if she weighed nothing at all. After a few moments in which she resisted acknowledging it, she broke down and silently admitted that she found his display of easy strength mind-blowingly sexy. It appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.

She had to face it: he appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.

He’s not for you, she warned herself even as she relaxed in his hold.

But she tightened her arms around his neck anyway. The hard muscularity of his arms, the wide expanse of his chest, the solid breadth of his shoulders cradled her, and for just that little span of time she was prepared to let them.

A few minutes later he stopped walking. She opened her eyes to discover that the flashlight that he still held lit up a wooden door set into the stone. The door was ajar, and Gina was still blinking at it in surprise as, stepping carefully over what was apparently a threshold, he carried her through it.

Her head came up off his shoulder as she looked around, wide-eyed.

Surprise gave her her voice back as Cal played the flashlight over their surroundings: a large natural cavern with a soaring domed roof and—furniture?

He’d said it was a hell of a cave.

“What is this place?”

But even as she asked the question, she knew what it had to be, or at least what its purpose once was: she’d studied up on Attu before arriving. The Japanese had used the extensive cave system that riddled the mountains to hide from, and launch sneak attacks on, the numerically superior American forces. The Americans had been forced into fighting a guerrilla war in which they’d ended up claiming most of the caves for themselves.

“Looks to me like it was used as a military barracks at one time,” Cal replied. He seemed to be striding toward a particular target—an old metal table surrounded by four folding metal chairs, still set up as if whoever had last used them had merely stepped away for a short period. The dust covering them was the only indication that they’d waited like that for a long, long time, Gina saw as the flashlight beam hit them. A moment later Cal nudged a chair out from under the table with his boot, lowered her feet to the ground so that he could pick it up and shake the dust off it, then settled her into it.

“Don’t move,” he told her. Dropping the backpacks on the ground beside her, he walked away.

Left alone in what was—except for the bobbing flashlight beam that was moving steadily away from her—pitch darkness, she instantly missed his arms around her, instantly felt cold and bereft. Folding her arms over her chest, she tracked his movements by watching the flashlight. But then the flashlight went stationary, as if he’d put it down on something, while she could still hear him moving around.

“Cal.”

“I’m right here.” His words were accompanied by a series of scratching sounds. The faint scent of sulfur had just reached her nose when a match flared to life. A moment later the tiny flame found its way into a storm lantern, and the area around it was lit by a spreading glow. The flashlight beam vanished.

The lantern, metal-framed and glass-sided with a single fat candle inside, came toward her. Cal was carrying it, and he set it down in the middle of the table.