Darkness(84)
Breaking the kiss, he pulled her hard against him. Unfortunately, the action felt anything but romantic. Gina tensed. Her breathing quickened. Inside her gloves, her palms began to sweat. It was on, she knew.
“Put your arms around my neck.” His tone was all business, and as she complied he wrapped the trailing end of the rope that he’d tied around her around his own waist and hers several times before knotting it. “From time to time I’m going to need both hands free to operate the ’chute, but we’re tied together now. I need you to hold on tight, but even if you let go, you can’t fall.” Sliding an arm beneath her bottom, he lifted her off her feet. “Wrap your legs around my waist.”
Struggling against panic, Gina complied. In the distance, she thought she heard muffled sounds. Hushed voices. The thud of footsteps. The scrabble of claws on stone.
Alarmed, she glanced back down the passage. “Cal—”
“I hear it.” His voice was perfectly calm. “Hang on.” His arm clamped around her waist. He started to run, carrying her with him as if her weight was no hindrance at all.
Gina’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched. Her pulse pounded. She twined herself around him and clung like the proverbial monkey in a hurricane, bracing herself for—a horrifying drop into oblivion? A quick, hopefully painless death? A—
“Whatever you do, don’t scream,” he said in her ear.
Then he leaped out into nothingness like an Olympic long-jumper going for gold, like Superman launching himself into the stratosphere—only they fell like a stone.
It felt like getting hit by a train. Air slammed into her back with all the force of a ten-ton locomotive, forcing the breath from her lungs. Her heart rate skyrocketed. Every muscle she possessed went rigid with fright. If she’d wanted to scream—and she did—the g-forces would have made it impossible. It was almost impossible to breathe. Staring wildly up into the tumbling gray clouds, watching in helpless terror as the overcast ceiling receded above her head at an incredible rate, Gina felt the wind rushing past and practically saw her life passing before her eyes. Fast-forwarding through every prayer she’d ever heard in her life, she hurtled toward earth flat on her back, her arms and legs locked desperately around Cal’s hard body, which was no help at all because he was falling through the sky, too. Terrible Mountain’s black, snow-dusted face seemed to shoot upward, too horrifyingly close as she fell down it. The sheer drop that she’d looked out on from the cave entrance flashed past, and she arched upward in terrified anticipation, sure that at any second she would smash into the peak below, be broken, and die on solid rock—
The chute deployed, bursting into the air above them like a silken rocket, the narrow column of flimsy rope and gathered white cloth streaking toward the massing storm clouds.
It billowed, opened—
Just like that they were jerked upright and sent shooting skyward like a rubber ball on an elastic tether. The jolt was so unexpected that Gina almost became dislodged. It didn’t help that Cal’s arm, which had been clamped around her waist during their free fall, was no longer there. Instead, she saw in a terrified glance, he was holding on to two triangular handles that seemed to be attached to the parachute. In that same glance she caught a glimpse of his face. His jaw was hard, his mouth was tight, his eyes were narrowed, and he seemed to be looking down. He appeared intensely focused, but—thank God!—perfectly calm.
He must have felt her glance, because he yelled in her ear, “Doing okay?”
She didn’t yet have enough breath back to yell an answer. Instead, quaking with reaction, she nodded and tightened her death grip on him and watched Terrible Mountain falling away below them. They were soaring up and away, being borne along on the wind through the blowing snow, flying higher than the highest of the peaks, ascending into the clouds—
That realization scared her enough to shriek a question at him. “Shouldn’t we be going down?”
“Updraft,” he shouted back, not sounding at all alarmed but, rather, like a man in his element. He was holding on to the handles, using them to keep the parachute steady in the face of the buffeting wind that sent them skittering this way and that, and also, as she discovered as she risked a look down, to steer. He sent them around the backside of Terrible Mountain, then did his best to keep the parachute following the valley between the peaks. They were so high now that she could see a V-shaped formation of cackling geese flying below them. “We’re good now. Relax and enjoy the view.”
Gina almost choked. Her heart pounded and her pulse raced and her stomach felt as if it were lodged in her throat. Dangling from the floating mushroom above them, she and Cal rocked from side to side. The sensation of being suspended in midair, with nothing but a rope and her death grip on him standing between her and a fall of thousands of feet, was nightmarishly surreal.
“Enjoy the view?” she screamed at him disbelievingly, tipping her head back just enough to allow her to get a good look at his face.
He grinned, got a load of her expression, and said, “Or not.”
Then he kissed her. Another of those brief, hard kisses that thrilled her clear down to her toes. And, freaked out or not, she kissed him back.
The snow-covered landscape below was bleakly beautiful, she had to admit, once he quit kissing her to concentrate on getting them safely back to solid ground, and she recovered enough equanimity to actually look down and check it out. Soaring above it, she might even have appreciated the scenic side of their death-defying stunt if she hadn’t been busy keeping a wary eye out for bad guys with guns, and if her right leg hadn’t been developing a cramp, and if she hadn’t been totally scared to death because they were sailing along thousands of feet above the ground.