Darkness(85)

The descent was gradual. They dropped into the shadow of the mountains, went down past a nesting colony of rare red-legged kittiwakes (the location of which, under better conditions, she would have been itching to record), and skimmed rocks and snowdrifts before touching down in a narrow, horseshoe-shaped valley surrounded by mountains as softly as one of the snowflakes falling around them. She’d thought that she would see the ground rushing up at her, that they would hit hard and maybe roll or something, but his feet touched and he took a few running steps while apparently doing something that freed the canopy part of the parachute. As the white silk went billowing away without them, he slowed and stopped.

“Thank God,” Gina said devoutly, mentally kissing the ground, which, since they’d landed in Henderson Marsh, was spongy tundra beneath about six inches of snow. Unwrapping her poor, cramped legs from their death grip on his waist, she let them drop with a sigh of relief, only to find as her feet touched the ground that they were full of pins and needles. Her arms slid down from around his neck until her hands clutched the front of his coat for stability, and she rested against him thankfully as her legs regained their feeling.

“You did great.” He rubbed her back in apparent congratulations, then cut her free of the rope that had harnessed them together. She hadn’t seen the folding knife, which he pulled from his boot and which he’d apparently found in the cave before.

“You enjoyed that,” she accused, resting her cheek against his wide chest.

“I haven’t jumped for a long time.” His faintly nostalgic tone made it an admission that she was right. After freeing her of the rope, he lifted the backpack off her back, then set it down in the snow. Not quite having recovered the full use of her legs yet, she sank down cross-legged in the snow beside it while he unstrapped himself from the parachute case and buried it by kicking snow over it.

“Do you think they saw where we went?” Pulling the backpack onto her lap, Gina dug inside it for essentials: water and a protein bar. They hadn’t yet had a chance to eat anything that morning, and the way she was feeling, she needed to if she was ever going to move again. Unscrewing the top of the water bottle, she drank.

“Not unless we’re really unlucky. We dropped so fast that they couldn’t have seen us go, and I steered us around the far side of the mountain once we had lift, so I don’t think the men with the trackers could have spotted us. And if anyone had seen us land—well, we’d know about it.” He hunkered down in front of her, a big, dark figure against the background of towering mountains and endless snow.

“They’d have shot us by now, you mean.” Glumly Gina passed him the water bottle and broke off half the protein bar and handed that over, too, before biting into her half. With the knit cap pulled down low over his eyes and the black scruff on his jaw and chin growing in thick, he looked so disreputable that if she were to see him coming when she was walking alone down a street, she would cross to the other side.

“You don’t have to worry. I told you I’d get you out of this alive, and I will.”

Under his steady regard, Gina, to her own astonishment, found herself feeling suddenly shy. She had an instant, way-too-vivid flashback to the things they’d done together in bed, to how uncharacteristically wild he’d made her, to how passionate he’d been, and as her heartbeat sped up and her body heated she took refuge in flippancy.

“You sweet-talker, you,” she said, and treated him to an exaggerated batting of her eyelashes.

He grinned, said, “Eat up, we need to go,” and demolished his own protein bar in four bites.

Then he pulled the binoculars from the backpack, stood up, and started scanning the surrounding slopes with them. By the time she finished eating and he reached down to help her to her feet, this reminder of the danger they were in had her insides twisting with anxiety.

“Nothing,” he said in response to the look she gave him. “And there’s almost no cover, so I’m pretty sure I would have spotted anyone who was up there.”

That was good, and she felt a tingle of relief.

“Now what?” she asked as he tucked the binoculars back into the backpack and shrugged into it.

He started walking, his boots crunching in the snow, and she fell in beside him.

“Now we go steal a plane.”

She’d known he was going to say that. Her stomach turned inside out at the thought, but she didn’t say anything, just kept trudging along at his side through the falling snow. But something of what she was feeling must have shown on her face, because after a glance at her he said, “You trust me, remember.”

She sighed, faced the truth of that, and said, “I do.”

“I just need you to trust me this one more time. Just till we get home.”

Home. That was the word that did it. Because she knew that his idea of home and her idea of home were two entirely different things. The knowledge that at home, in the real world, they had no place in each other’s lives stabbed sharp as a knife through her heart. Which, because of its implications for the future state of that heart, scared her to death.

She stopped dead. As he turned to frown questioningly at her, she folded her arms over her chest, lifted her chin at him, and said, “Just so we’re clear, I haven’t flown in a plane since the last one I was in crashed and burned. I haven’t had sex with anyone but you since my husband died. I live a quiet, peaceful, stable life as a college professor, and I like it. I don’t do death-defying stunts, and I don’t do one-night stands with dangerous men who flit through my life like a puff of smoke and then disappear. I’m not brave, or adventurous, or sexually uninhibited. That isn’t me. It won’t ever be me.”