“Can you get your clothes off?” she asked as she began assembling the tent. He was still in danger from hypothermia despite the space blanket, the hand warmers, the water, and the fire, which hissed and smoked as stray flurries reached it from the eddies of snow and sleet that rose and swirled in miniature whirlwinds around the outcropping. His face was too deep in shadow to read, but his eyes slid her way. He had, she thought, been warily probing the darkness beyond their sanctuary. She didn’t like to think about what—or who—he was looking for.
“As soon as the tent’s up,” she continued when he didn’t reply, snapping another support into place, which suddenly made the crumpled pile of weatherproof gray nylon that was the tent start to take on size and shape, “we’re getting in it, and you can’t go inside it like you are. You’ll get everything wet and we’ll freeze. You need to strip.”
“You want me . . . naked.” Something in his harsh voice brought her gaze whipping up to meet his.
Too dark to read his eyes. Didn’t matter.
Gina rocked back on her heels to point an I-mean-business index finger at him. “Take another step down that path, and I really will take my tent and find somewhere else to ride out the storm.”
It wasn’t her imagination: one corner of his mouth ticked upward in what might have been the slightest of smiles.
He held up a placating hand.
“Just clarifying,” he said innocently.
The look she gave him was ripe with warning. “I have a pair of dry sweatpants in my backpack you can put on.”
“Ah. Got it.”
She watched him narrowly as his hand disappeared beneath the Mylar to start on his shirt buttons, then returned her attention to the tent. Two more fiberglass ribs locked into place, and the thing was done. Long and low, it was a two-man tent with zippered entrances at both ends and a vestibule to keep the weather out as you crawled into it. On her hands and knees, she pushed it as close up against the outcropping as she could in hopes of protecting it from the worst of the weather. As she had suspected, the rocky, frozen ground made staking it impossible. Instead she lugged a quartet of large rocks from their resting places nearby and placed them atop the stake loops. Dragging her backpack behind her, she crawled partway inside, being careful to keep her wet and dirty boots out of the main part of the tent. Quickly she spread out and inflated the vinyl pad that formed a barrier between the sleeping bag and the floor of the tent. With that done, she unrolled and positioned the sleeping bag on top of it.
Finished, she surveyed the space, which was the approximate shape of a hot dog bun, just about tall enough for her to kneel in with an inch or so of clearance above her head, and wide enough for two people to sleep side by side. One of them—that would be him, because he was the one with no clothes and incipient hypothermia—would get the sleeping bag. The other would sleep in her outdoor gear. With the addition of her improvised furnace, the arrangements should be sufficient to get them through the storm alive.
Crawling out of the tent, she was fuzzy-headed with fatigue until a wayward gust blasted her in the face. The arctic coldness of it was enough to shock her back into wakefulness. Pelting down just a few feet beyond the edge of the tent, a wall of sleet reflected orange from the fire. She knew it was mostly sleet now because of the sharp pattering sound it made as it hit. The small fire looked pitifully inadequate against the raging, shrieking blizzard surrounding them. The heat it put out was a puny defense against the encroaching cold. The smell of smoke was strong; her senses hurriedly reached past it to latch onto other smells—dampness and the sea.
Beside the fire, draped in the Mylar blanket, the man was a hulking shape slumped against the rocks. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was looking out into the storm again. As if he was afraid someone might be out there.
Not liking the anxious feeling that thought gave her, she aimed her flashlight at him.
“Ready?” she asked as he blinked and looked her way. Teeth chattering, she moved toward him. The sweatpants and spare socks from her backpack were tucked beneath her parka, where, in theory at least, they were being warmed by her body heat. Her plan was to get him dried off fast with the hopefully not too bloodied turtleneck, get him into the sweatpants and socks and then the tent, and take care of whatever else needed doing—like, say, treating his injury—in there, where there was less chance of both of them expiring from exposure to the cold.
He didn’t reply.
She reached him and saw why: he was not naked. Not even close. Even with the Mylar blanket draped over him, she could see that he was still struggling with the buttons on his shirt. As far as she could tell, not one stitch of his clothing had been removed.
“Oh, my God,” she said, exasperation in every syllable. She was so tired she could barely move, aching all over, and cold to her bone marrow. The weather was growing worse by the minute and the fire that was warming the air was spitting and hissing in warning that the next influx of blowing snow that landed in it might well snuff it out. The only thing she wanted to do was curl up inside her sleeping bag in her tent and wait the storm out.
Instead she was going to be undressing this sinister stranger. Then giving him her sleeping bag and sharing her tent with him.
“My fingers don’t seem to be working,” he said gruffly. Without another word, she pulled off her gloves and thrust them into her pocket. Pushing the Mylar blanket aside, she plucked the hand warmers off him, shoved them into her pocket, too, and started unbuttoning his shirt for him.
His shirt was icy and stiff, almost frozen dry. She had to work to get the buttons through their buttonholes. As her increasingly chilled fingers brushed the glacial dampness of his skin beneath, she was reminded of what bad shape he was in. No surprise that he wasn’t able to undress himself. The wonder was that he was conscious and talking.
She unfastened the rest of his buttons as quickly as she could, noticing in the process that a wedge of curly black hair covered his chest and tapered down to a narrow trail that disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. She noticed, too, that his chest was wide and about as solid as a concrete wall, and beneath the cold and clammy skin he was all steely muscles and heavy bone.
The guy was seriously big, and seriously buff. Ordinarily she might have found that attractive. Okay, she did find it—him—attractive. Under the circumstances, however, alarm was the more appropriate response.
Once more she wondered who he was. She didn’t even know his name. Which, now that she thought about it, was ridiculous.
She looked up from unbuttoning his cuff. “Think you could tell me your name now? Seeing as how I’m taking off your clothes?”
His eyes were dark and unreadable as they met hers. “I thought—no suggestive comments.”
Gina moved on to the other cuff. “That wasn’t a suggestive comment. It was an illustrative one, designed to make the point that, under the circumstances, I should probably have something to call you besides, hey, popsicle boy. So, name?”
“Popsicle boy?” His lips twitched. For just a moment a flare of amusement lit his eyes. But still he seemed to hesitate. Why? God, she didn’t want to know. Gina had just flicked another, frowning glance at him when he said, “Cal.”
“Cal?” He didn’t respond. “Cal—what?”
“Let’s just stick with Cal.”
That was it. No last name forthcoming. Or maybe that was his last name. No, more likely it was a nickname.
Not that it made any real difference. Whatever his name was, whatever he was into, he’d become her responsibility. Or, to be more precise, she’d made him her responsibility, by fishing him out of the sea and dragging him up off the shore and, in general, saving his life. And that would be because, she realized with a not particularly welcome flash of insight, when she’d seen his plane crash, when she’d spotted him alive in the water, she had immediately, instinctively identified with him. As in, they were members of the same club.
Plane Crash Survivors Anonymous
, anyone?
“Nice to meet you, Cal.” Her voice was dry.
“Likewise.” He paused, then added deliberately, “Gina.”
So he remembered her name. At the time she hadn’t even been sure it had registered with him.
She could feel him watching her as she quickly unbuttoned his other cuff and reached for his belt buckle, but she didn’t look up again.
Assuming that because they’d been through a similar experience they were somehow alike could prove to be an error of major proportions, she told herself. A dangerous error. Because she was growing more and more convinced that he was a dangerous man.
Meaning to wait to strip his shirt completely off at the same time as his pants so as not to leave any one part of him exposed to the frigid air for longer than was necessary, she moved on, unfastening his belt buckle with brisk efficiency even as she firmly ignored the muscular six-pack her fingers couldn’t help but brush, then undoing the button below it and reaching for his fly.
“I got this part,” he said. His hands were at his zipper, brushing hers aside.
Okay. She so did not have a problem with that. At the sound of his zipper being lowered, she sank back a little.
Without the pressure of his hand holding it in place, the pad he’d been pressing to his side—her turtleneck—slid from his body to the ground.
She saw what was beneath it.
A round, dark hole the approximate size of a dime. On his far left side an inch or so above his hipbone. Sluggishly oozing blood. Bruising and dark smears all around it.
His injury. The one that had stained his shirt. The one that had been bleeding all along.
She’d assumed it was a gash of some sort, the result of the plane crash.
She’d assumed wrong.
That’s a bullet hole.
Surprise widened her eyes. Before she could stop herself from looking up, she did, and her gaze collided with his.
Chapter Ten
He’d been shot.
The knowledge hung there in the air between them.
She knew, and he knew she knew. Neither of them had to say a word.
Gina felt her heart start to thump. She remained motionless, staring at him like a bird hypnotized by a cobra as his eyes bored into hers. They were about as expressive as the rock he leaned against.
It had to have happened right before the plane crashed—on the plane?—because the wound was clearly fresh, still bleeding, with no evidence of significant clotting or that it had received any kind of treatment. And besides the one on Attu, the next closest airport was almost seven hundred miles away.
Remembering the rapid descent of the plane before it exploded, Gina suddenly had a radical new vision of what was happening in those last few minutes on board.
He’d said there were three others on the plane with him. That they were dead.
Now she found herself wondering whether it was the crash that had killed them.
At the one other glaring possibility that presented itself to her, the hair stood up on the back of her neck.
Is he a killer?
Her heart thumped at the prospect.
His eyes narrowed as they held hers. His mouth thinned. From that, Gina took that he was getting a pretty accurate reading as to the gist of her thoughts. That he wasn’t happy about her speculation. About her knowledge.
The hardening of his face left her in no doubt whatsoever about one thing: the man was definitely dangerous.
While the storm raged she had no way to escape from him, nowhere to go. To run off into it would be suicidal.
The only thing she could do was stay put and play out the hand she’d dealt herself.
Her pulse raced. Her stomach fluttered. Her lungs ached with the need to expel the breath she’d been holding.
She let it out slowly. Carefully. Panic was her enemy.
Something her father had said to her once when they were in one of his all-too-frequent tight spots came back to her: when your head is in the mouth of the bear, the only thing to do is say, nice bear.
“I have a first aid kit in my backpack,” she said matter-of-factly, as if finding bullet holes in scary men she was trapped with were something that happened to her every day. “Once you’re in the tent I can bandage that up for you.”
As she spoke, she deliberately refocused her gaze on his chiseled abs and tugged his pants down his lean hips. It said a lot about her state of agitation that she didn’t even really see a single ripped inch of him.
He pulled the Mylar blanket across his lap.
That caught her attention, made her blink.
Not a creep, then, she thought, then followed that with a sardonic, Oh, yay. Like the fact that the threatening guy with the bullet hole in him doesn’t seem to be a perv makes this all better.
That’s when it hit her: if he had a bullet hole in him, then somebody might really be hunting him.
Through the storm. On Attu.
Her stomach knotted. Her breathing quickened. She had her fingers hooked in his shorts—soggy, icy boxer briefs—as well as his pants and was pulling both off him at the same time. Her cold fingers clenched in a death grip around the freezing wet cloth as she darted a nervous glance out past their small circle of light, at the gusting, swirling fog of snow and ice. The near-whiteout conditions partially reassured her: it was inconceivable that anyone would be hunting him in this. Besides, if the three who’d been on the plane with him were dead, who was left to track him down?
Good question. With, she realized with a sharp increase in her anxiety level, nothing but bad answers. Because clearly he was convinced someone was.
“I’m not going to hurt you, you know,” he said. She’d ducked her face to try to keep her thoughts hidden as she dragged his pants down long, hard-muscled legs. His words were so unexpected that she looked up, and thus inadvertently met his gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, and heavy-lidded with what she thought was a combination of exhaustion and pain and the effects of too much cold and too much sea. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
Great. Clearly her efforts to keep her thoughts hidden from him had failed, and just as clearly he was trying to reassure her. His gaze was calm and steady. But she thought she detected a stillness behind it, a predatory stillness, as though a part of him were crouched and waiting.
To see what she was going to do.
And God help her if she did the wrong thing.
Should she believe him, trust in the truth of what he was telling her? Trust that he wouldn’t hurt her, that she didn’t need to be afraid of him?
Only if she were dumb as a box of rocks.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she lied. One thing she’d learned over the years was that showing fear to a predator was never a good idea. “I never thought you’d hurt me. Why would you? I’ve done nothing but help you. And without me, you’re toast.” With that less than subtle reminder, she pulled his pants the rest of the way off. “Can you get your shirt off?”
“Yeah.” He struggled to do so while she yanked his socks off and hastily dried his feet and legs with the bloodstained turtleneck and thought frantic thoughts that she did her best to marshal into some sort of a cohesive plan.
Shoving dry socks onto his icy, blue-with-cold feet—he made a sound under his breath that she thought denoted pleasure at the sudden warmth—she tried to come up with some way to communicate with Arvid and the others but couldn’t think of one. Wrestling her size-six but fortunately spandex sweatpants up his legs, she pondered the chances of making it back to camp in the storm but concluded that they were so small as to be nonexistent.
“Wait,” he said as she got the pants about halfway up his thighs, which were thick with muscle and a real test of the cloth’s capacity to expand. She paused, in action and thought, to look at him. He’d managed to get his shirt off and was reaching down beneath the Mylar that was still tucked around him to grab onto the waistband. She glimpsed brawny arms and one wide bare shoulder and then they were both w
restling with the pants.
“You’re going to have to lift your butt,” she told him, slightly breathless with effort.
He managed it, awkwardly, and together they got the sweats up. The Mylar blanket was dislodged in the process, and she was afforded an up-close-and-personal view of some pretty impressive male equipment that she really would rather have not seen. When the job was done and she sank back, almost warm now despite the occasional arctic blast that made it through the fire’s small circle of heat and the driving wall of sleet and snow pounding down mere feet away, she saw that the black sweats that were roomy on her fit him like too-small tights. The waist hit him inches below his navel and the legs ended halfway up his calves. His every muscle and sinew was revealed by the snug-fitting cloth, along with an impressive package that she was already more familiar with than she wanted to be. A glance up his torso found that he was as totally built as she’d thought: narrow hips, flat belly, wide chest, broad shoulders, heavy on the muscle with not an ounce of fat that she could see.
She was human. She was female. She was alive. And he was smoking hot. She couldn’t help the tingle of sexual awareness that pulsed to life inside her.
If it hadn’t been for the bullet wound in his side and the whole I-just-might-kill-you-in-your-sleep vibe he gave off, she would have been wildly attracted to him.
The good news was, all the activity had calmed her jumbled thoughts enough to have enabled her to come up with a plan: she would do what she had to do to allay any suspicions he might be harboring about her while they rode out the storm together in the tent. Then when the storm had passed she would leave him in the tent, hike to camp, tell the others what had happened, alert the authorities to the plane crash, his gunshot wound, and everything else via satellite phone, and, acting under the guiding principle that there was safety in numbers, bring her fellow scientists back with her to both rescue him and keep him under guard until the authorities arrived.
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