Darkness(70)

Combing out her hair, she twisted it into a loose knot at her nape, shrugged into her coat, which she left unzipped, pulled her boots on over fresh white half socks, and, carrying her discarded clothes, headed back toward the main room.

Cal was down on one knee in a corner and gave her only a cursory glance as she entered. Tucking her bundled clothes and the flashlight into the emptier of the two backpacks, she headed toward him. He’d kindled a fire in a small iron camp stove that clearly he’d found somewhere in the room. She eyed the stove with some misgivings as she approached, but an upward glance following the wisp of smoke it put out told her that there was ventilation: the smoke drifted off through a crack in the ceiling and she suspected that he had chosen the location for exactly that purpose. And one of the great things about a room carved out of stone was that it was not conducive to a spreading fire.

The tantalizing aroma of cooking food made her stomach growl. She was starving.

“How was it?” he greeted her as she stopped beside him to look down past his black head and broad shoulders to what was heating on the cooktop: two opened, individual-size cans of beef stew. She had no idea how he’d managed to get them open without a can opener, but she wasn’t surprised that he had managed. The man, as she had already learned, was efficient.

“Heavenly,” she replied, and he smiled. It was a crooked, charming smile that warmed his eyes and caused her heart to unexpectedly skip a beat, but before she could react in any other way he stood up, which brought him so close to her that she nearly took a step back. Tilting her head back to look up at him, she—barely—managed to stand her ground. It wasn’t fear of him that made it feel dangerous for her to stand so close; it was that the sexual charge between them was too strong.

“Keep an eye on this. I won’t be long.”

That prosaic remark was about the food. Repressing her misgivings—the fire was small and encased in an iron stove, for heaven’s sake; what could go wrong?—she nodded and watched as he headed for their primitive bathroom, then glanced around. He’d dusted off the table: as she looked at it, her eyes widened. Besides the lantern, maybe a half dozen rifles now rested on it, presumably found in the same search that had turned up the stove. From the look of them, they were leftovers from World War II.

While the thought of having more firepower was appealing, the sight of them gave Gina the willies: it looked like he was preparing to take on an army. Besides, she was skeptical that after all this time they would even still work.

Looking past them with effort, she discovered that he’d spread out their sleeping bag bed on two pallets that he’d dragged flush against the wall just behind the door. Two things struck her about that: first, her automatic assumption that it was their bed, which meant that they would be sharing it, and second, that behind the door was an interesting choice of placement for it. Anyone coming through the door would be blocked from seeing the bed and the people in it until the intruders were all the way inside the room. Did that mean that he was expecting somebody to come through the door? Or was it simply a precaution?

Either way, even considering the possibility was enough to send a cold chill snaking down her spine.

Once again, she was reminded that the name of the game here was survival.

As he’d promised, Cal was only gone briefly, and when he came back the stew was bubbling. The smell alone was making Gina salivate, but the sight of Cal all washed and clean and dressed in a snug white tee along with his own suit pants was enough to get her mind off her stomach and take her thoughts in a whole different and entirely unwelcome direction.

“Rifles, huh? Where’d you find them?” she asked as he dropped his coat and snow pants on top of the backpacks and then stopped by the table to gather the rifles up, partly because she wanted to know the answer and partly to redirect her thoughts again.

“Trash cans,” he said, nodding toward the row of them as he leaned the rifles carefully against the wall. “Ammo, too, and other things, all carefully stored. Everything looks mint.”

“Think we’ll need them?”

“Can’t have too many weapons.”

With that surprisingly cheerful-sounding observation, he joined her by the stove.

The fire in the stove was already burning itself out, but she noticed with approval that he took the time to smother it completely before carrying the cans over to the table, using his gloves as pot holders. He’d found a collection of measuring spoons and a single knife, which she’d carefully washed, and they each dug into the stew with a spoon while sharing the knife to cut the bigger pieces of meat. She’d gotten so warm as she stirred the stew and stayed by the stove waiting for his return that she’d shed her coat: it hung over the back of one of the chairs.

Except for the flickering circle of light cast by the lantern, the cavern was dark and full of shadows. The short-sleeved tee she wore was way big on her, and her braless breasts were on the small size and firm, so she didn’t feel self-conscious about revealing too much as she sat down across the table from him.

She was, she discovered as they ate, soon self-conscious about something else entirely. She had trouble keeping her eyes off him. Sitting there eating by lantern light, he looked disturbingly handsome and vaguely piratical with more than a day’s growth of stubble darkening his chin. His teeth were even and white and his brows were straight black slashes above dark brown eyes that had acquired gold glints from the reflected light. The same type of ordinary white tee that she was wearing took on an entirely different appearance on him: in it his shoulders looked about a mile wide and the truly impressive muscles of his chest and arms visibly rippled and flexed against the clingy cotton whenever he moved. She found her pulse quickening just from watching him eat, from admiring the play of the lamplight on the bronzed bulge of his biceps and the hair-darkened length of his powerful forearm every time he lifted the spoon to his mouth, from observing the deft movements of his square-palmed, long-fingered hands. She caught herself wondering what it would feel like to be crushed against that muscular chest without the inches-thick layers of their winter clothes between them—and then she realized to her embarrassment that she was staring at him, and he’d noticed.