Darkness(86)

“Gina.” His eyes slid over her, then rose to meet hers as he reached out to catch her by the arms. She couldn’t quite read what was in them, but his mouth curved in the slightest of wry smiles, which made her think she was amusing him, which had her frowning direly at him. “You parachuted off a mountain with me: in my book, that makes you pretty brave. You came here to Attu, which makes you plenty adventurous. As for sexually uninhibited”—his eyes glinted at her in a way that served as a graphic reminder of everything he’d done to her and she’d done to him, and, not coincidentally, set her heart to knocking—“you’ll do. You have my personal guarantee.”

Shaking her head no, she burst out with, “But that was a one-time thing. That isn’t me.”

“Maybe,” he said, “that’s you with me.”

That rendered her speechless. She searched his eyes, and at what she saw blazing at her from the coffee-brown depths, butterflies fluttered to life in her stomach. Maybe the crazy-hot attraction she felt for him, maybe the way her body quaked and burned at his slightest touch, maybe the explosion of passion she’d experienced with him that was like nothing she’d ever felt before had an explanation just that simple. This was a different, fresh relationship. This was how she and Cal were together. This was them. You with me.

Her mind boggled. Her heart skipped a beat.

He continued, “As far as I’m concerned, last night wasn’t a one-night stand, and I’m not planning on vanishing from your life like a puff of smoke unless you want me to. I think what we have going on here, this thing between us, might be the start of something special. We could try it out. I could bring you flowers, take you to dinner, that kind of thing. See where it goes.”

Something—hope, happiness, a promise of fresh, new love—burst to life inside her heart like the first delicate spring crocus shooting up through a long winter’s worth of snow.

She smiled at him, a beautiful sunburst of a smile, which immediately turned into a suspicious frown as a thought hit her.

“You’re not just saying that to get me on that damned airplane, are you?”

He laughed, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. Hot and sweet at first, the kiss soon turned hot and urgent, and by the time he let her go the snow was practically melting around them and Gina was blissfully convinced that he’d meant every word he’d said.





Chapter Twenty-Six





During the hours-long trek to camp, the weather deteriorated. More heavy gray clouds rolled in to hang low in the sky and turn what had been a pale but relatively clear morning as gloomy and dark as if dusk had fallen. The temperature dropped and the wind picked up until it bit at their cheeks and whistled around their ears. Fog blew in, not in a heavy blanket but in thick wisps that formed islands of mist floating just above the ground. The snowfall grew heavier, wetter. Every indicator was there: another major storm was on the way. The only questions were, when would it hit and would they be caught out in it.

Gina devoutly hoped they wouldn’t be. She was freezing cold, dead tired, aching in every muscle, and scared to death. Under such conditions, it was difficult to maintain a warm little glow of happiness. But she was managing it.

Cal seemed pretty cheerful, too, for a man armed with two rifles, a pistol, and a knife in his boot, who was keeping a wary eye out for anyone wanting to kill them so he could kill that person first. At her urging, he told her about his beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, and his company, and his dog, Harley, whose very existence Gina found completely charming. Without revealing too much, he also filled in more details about the circumstances surrounding the plane crash that had dumped him in her lap. In turn, she talked about her life, telling him about the time she’d spent in the hospital and how she’d passed the long, slow days of her recovery watching the birds they kept in giant cages there and developing a fascination with them, which had spurred her, when she was released at last, to go on and get her master’s and PhD in ornithology. She told him about her life as a college professor, and her condo, and beautiful, sunny Northern California.

At length they found an old army road, which Cal instantly mistrusted even though Gina assured him that, to her knowledge, there were no operational land vehicles on Attu other than the tractor. He felt that the road made too obvious a target for a search party, and also that there was no way to know whether the bad guys had brought something like, say, ATVs with them. But since they were sure to hear anything like that coming, and walking was so much easier with the firm surface of the hard-packed dirt road beneath the snow than with the squishy tundra, and time was of the essence, they were trudging along it anyway.

Cal said, “With the weather looking like it is, the trackers and any other search parties will most likely be heading back to the Coast Guard station. We want to beat them there if we can. It’ll be a lot easier to steal a plane out from under the noses of a few men than twenty or more.”

As much faith as she had in Cal, the thought of attempting an escape via plane still made Gina queasy.

She said, “Don’t you think somebody’s going to notice when the plane starts to move? I mean, the only way it can go is down the runway right past the buildings.”

“Once we’re moving, it’s too late.”

“Aren’t you the person whose plane just got shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile? What’s preventing whoever shot your first plane out of the sky from shooting you out of the sky again?” If there was a note of exasperation in her voice, it was because they were getting worrisomely close to camp and close to the whole steal-a-plane scenario, which she wouldn’t even have dreamed of agreeing to if it had been presented to her by anyone other than Cal.