Darkness

by Karen Robards

  “We’ve had this conversation.” He flung that over his shoulder at her.

  “Yes, we have.” Her tone was sugar sweet. “And nothing’s changed.”

  That stopped him. He turned to wait for her. “I meant what I said.”

  She smiled at him. “And I meant what I said: you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

  “Honey, I’m bigger than you, and badder than you, and way more experienced with living through the kind of situation we’re dealing with here than you. So I think that makes me the one in charge.”

  “I am absolutely prepared to listen to everything you have to say. And make my own decisions on the basis of your recommendations.”

  He snorted. “Be careful I don’t let you live with that.”

  “Is that a threat? Because I’m not impressed.” With a glinting look thrown his way, she walked on past him into the dark. “And don’t call me honey,” she added over her shoulder. The flashlight beam danced ahead of her, pointing the way down what seemed to be a long, narrow passage.

  He caught up with her. She flicked a glance up at him to find that his eyes glinted and his jaw was hard.

  “You don’t like ‘honey’?” There was steel in his voice. “As long as you’re doing what I tell you, I’ll call you anything you want: baby, sugar, darling, sweetheart—”

  “Gina,” she snapped. “If you can’t manage that, Dr. Sullivan works. And I’ll do what you tell me just as long as I agree that it’s the best thing to do.”

  Their eyes met and clashed. The air was suddenly charged with hostility. Or, to be more exact, hostility infused with sex. Because the sparks were definitely still there.

  “Gina,” he said with elaborate emphasis. “Do you honestly believe that you have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting yourself off this island alive without me?”

  The passage crooked to the left again and sloped downward. Gina rested a hand on the smooth stone of the wall as she negotiated the turn. “I think waiting for rescue might be our best option.”

  He made an impatient sound. “If you ‘wait for rescue,’ you’ll wind up dead.”

  “Sooner or later someone is going to come looking for us,” she argued stubbornly. “I think we should hide until then.”

  “Yeah. No.” His tone said Discussion over. “You saved my life. I’m going to do my level best to save yours. Which means we’re getting the hell off this island just as quick as we can.”

  “What about escaping by boat?”

  He shook his head. “We have a thousand miles of ocean to cross. We’d be caught before we got anywhere near land.”

  “There are other islands around. Attu is part of a chain. And the Commander Islands are only a few hundred miles away.”

  “The Commander Islands are Russian territory, and the rest of the Aleutians are deserted. If we even made it to any of them, which I doubt we would because they’ll be coming after us with everything they have, we’d be in the same position there as we are here. Running and hiding until they find and kill us.” He gave her an assessing look. “I can fly us out of here. Trust me.”

  The sad thing about it was, she did. Trust him. About wanting to save her life, at least. Not that it made any difference as to how she felt. Stealing a plane and trying to fly away in it to safety sounded . . . undoable. Her heart sank at the prospect.

  I could tell him, she thought, but outside of the accident investigators who’d come to her in the hospital and the therapist who’d helped her at least put the memories in a box, she had never talked about the plane crash in detail to anyone. Not even to her mother, who she knew didn’t really want to know, and whom she didn’t want to burden. Even now, all these years later, the memories had the power to make her feel sick and weak and dizzy, and she’d learned that the only way to cope was to avoid them at all costs. Anyway, strictly apart from her phobia, she thought that his escape plan was a really, really bad idea. That thousand miles of ocean he’d said they had to cross by boat? The distance didn’t change just because they were in a plane.

  “You do whatever you want. I’m going to hide. And try to warn Keith.”

  There was a moment of charged silence as her words hung in the air. The air in the cave had changed subtly, Gina noted as, ignoring the darkening face of the man who was now a step behind her, she followed the flashlight beam around a pile of fallen rocks. Deep into the mountain as they now had to be, it was drier, and warmer, and outside sounds were nonexistent. When she reached out to touch the wall the stone felt cool rather than cold, and bone dry.

  “This is you being pissed at me because I kissed you and got you hot, isn’t it?” Cal’s voice grated as he caught up to her. She refused to look at him, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was scowling at her: a man on the brink of losing his temper. “What’s the big deal about that anyway? Are you married or something?”

  The question hit her like a blow to the stomach. She winced before she could stop herself.

  “No.” Her voice was sharp.

  “Oh, yeah? Then what’s with the face you just made? And why did you say you can’t get it on with me? Sounds like married-woman guilt to me.”

  She glared at him. “I’m a widow, okay?”

  “A widow.” His eyes flickered, slid over her. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “How long has your husband been dead?”

  Gina focused her gaze straight ahead. Except for the small circle of stone floor revealed by the flashlight beam, there was nothing to see but pitch darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But, see, I do.” She could feel his eyes on her. “You want to tell me how long, or do you want me to start guessing?” He paused, seemed to wait, then continued: “A year? Two?”

  “Five years,” she snapped.

  “You’ve been a widow for five years.”

  “I just said that, didn’t I?”

  “How’d he die?”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “How’d he die, Gina?”

  She shot him a furious glance. “My God, can’t you just let it alone?”

  “No. He must have been young. In his twenties? So probably an accident. Did he die in an accident?”

  She felt the floor start to tilt beneath her. To keep from stumbling, she had to stop walking and put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

  Cal stopped, too. He loomed up beside her, frowning down at her. She refused to look at him.

  “What kind of accident?” he persisted.

  “It was a plane crash,” she said, and closed her eyes as the darkness started to shimmy around her.

  “Ah,” Cal said, adding something that she couldn’t quite hear, because the blood pounding in her ears drowned everything else out. Her heart raced and her stomach churned. Leaning against the wall, she took a deep, even breath as she fought to get herself under control again. Then she gritted her teeth, opened her eyes, and shoved away from the wall. Chin up, ignoring his frowning gaze, she took a few tentative steps. Her knees felt so weak that she had to stop and lean against the wall again.

  “It’s all right, I’ve got you,” she heard him say over the drumming in her ears. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, slid the other one beneath her knees, and scooped her up in his arms. Then he started walking with her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I’m fine, put me down, is what Gina wanted to say, but she didn’t, because she couldn’t.

  Her throat was too tight to allow her to say anything at all.

  She didn’t struggle, either.

  Instead she looked at his hard, masculine features and realized to her dismay that in his arms was exactly where she wanted to be. She felt safe there. That wasn’t good, and she knew it, but at the moment she was too upset to even try to police what she was feeling. Giving up, she hooked her arms around his neck and rested her head on his wide shoulder and closed her eyes, working on getting her equilibrium back even as s
he surrendered to the novel experience of having a man take care of her. He smelled of snow and the outdoors, and he carried her as if she weighed nothing at all. After a few moments in which she resisted acknowledging it, she broke down and silently admitted that she found his display of easy strength mind-blowingly sexy. It appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.

  She had to face it: he appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.

  He’s not for you, she warned herself even as she relaxed in his hold.

  But she tightened her arms around his neck anyway. The hard muscularity of his arms, the wide expanse of his chest, the solid breadth of his shoulders cradled her, and for just that little span of time she was prepared to let them.

  A few minutes later he stopped walking. She opened her eyes to discover that the flashlight that he still held lit up a wooden door set into the stone. The door was ajar, and Gina was still blinking at it in surprise as, stepping carefully over what was apparently a threshold, he carried her through it.

  Her head came up off his shoulder as she looked around, wide-eyed.

  Surprise gave her her voice back as Cal played the flashlight over their surroundings: a large natural cavern with a soaring domed roof and—furniture?

  He’d said it was a hell of a cave.

  “What is this place?”

  But even as she asked the question, she knew what it had to be, or at least what its purpose once was: she’d studied up on Attu before arriving. The Japanese had used the extensive cave system that riddled the mountains to hide from, and launch sneak attacks on, the numerically superior American forces. The Americans had been forced into fighting a guerrilla war in which they’d ended up claiming most of the caves for themselves.

  “Looks to me like it was used as a military barracks at one time,” Cal replied. He seemed to be striding toward a particular target—an old metal table surrounded by four folding metal chairs, still set up as if whoever had last used them had merely stepped away for a short period. The dust covering them was the only indication that they’d waited like that for a long, long time, Gina saw as the flashlight beam hit them. A moment later Cal nudged a chair out from under the table with his boot, lowered her feet to the ground so that he could pick it up and shake the dust off it, then settled her into it.

  “Don’t move,” he told her. Dropping the backpacks on the ground beside her, he walked away.

  Left alone in what was—except for the bobbing flashlight beam that was moving steadily away from her—pitch darkness, she instantly missed his arms around her, instantly felt cold and bereft. Folding her arms over her chest, she tracked his movements by watching the flashlight. But then the flashlight went stationary, as if he’d put it down on something, while she could still hear him moving around.

  “Cal.”

  “I’m right here.” His words were accompanied by a series of scratching sounds. The faint scent of sulfur had just reached her nose when a match flared to life. A moment later the tiny flame found its way into a storm lantern, and the area around it was lit by a spreading glow. The flashlight beam vanished.

  The lantern, metal-framed and glass-sided with a single fat candle inside, came toward her. Cal was carrying it, and he set it down in the middle of the table.

  “What happened to the flashlight?” Gina asked. She was glad to focus on the here and now, and practical things. If she could do it, she would stuff everything that had happened from the time she’d pulled him out of the sea until this moment into a mental box and never think of it again.

  Except, maybe, for his kisses. And the way his kisses made her feel.

  “It’s in my pocket. I turned it off to save the batteries.”

  “Good idea.” She was looking around.

  “I thought so,” he replied. She could feel him studying her. He was standing right beside her: with her peripheral vision, she could see his long, muscular legs, his oversize black boots, mere inches from her own. She was not, she discovered, quite ready to look up and meet his gaze. Uneasy as it made her to recognize it, the dynamic between them had changed. The sexual charge was unmistakable, but with it was a new sense of emotional intimacy that she actually found more disturbing.

  The last thing in the world she meant to let herself do was develop feelings for this man.

  “Feeling better?” he asked, and the gravelly rasp of his voice slid over her like a lover’s touch.

  She actually shivered. From nothing more than the sound of his voice.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself sternly, and lifted her eyes to meet his even as she responded with a cool “Yes, thanks.”

  His eyes were impossible to read in the flickering, uncertain light. His face likewise revealed nothing. His mouth was unsmiling. Grave, even.

  Sexy.

  Gina found that she couldn’t look at it, because looking at it made her pulse quicken and her body start to tighten deep inside. She had an instant, involuntary flashback to those blistering kisses. Heat flashed through her.

  Rattled, she glanced away.

  “You really did mean a barracks,” she said, with equal parts surprise and satisfaction at finding a neutral topic of conversation, as her gaze lit on what looked like stacks of broken-down metal bed frames piled against one wall.

  “Looks like it.” He moved away from her, and her breath escaped in a soundless sigh of relief.

  The farthest reaches of the cavern were deep in shadow, but she could see that more chairs like the one she was sitting on were piled against another wall, along with a number of folded tables, a stack of wooden pallets, and a row of metal garbage cans with the lids on. Open metal shelving held a hodgepodge of objects. Everything was covered with the fine silt that was the cave version of dust. But the room was dry and surprisingly warm and there was light.

  Cal closed the door—he had to lift it by the handle to get it to move, and the hinges squeaked in protest—and returned to stand by the table just a few feet away. Knowing that avoiding doing so would reveal more than she wanted to, she met his gaze in what was meant to be a casual glance. From the thoughtful expression on his face as he returned her look, she figured he was on the brink of initiating a serious conversation. She tensed, wary about what the topic might be.

  She did not want to talk about David. Or the plane crash that had killed her family. Or anything hard or painful. She was tired to the point of exhaustion, aching in every muscle, scared to death, shaken, grieving—and so aware of Cal that she could feel her body tightening just because he was near.

  “We should be okay here until daylight,” he said. She got the feeling that it wasn’t what he’d intended to say, and wondered what he’d read in her face.

  “That’s good,” she replied, grabbing on to the neutral topic gratefully.

  He’d removed the watch cap and was running a hand over his hair. It looked seal black in the uncertain light. His eyes looked black, too, as they moved over her in an assessing way that worried her as she tried to work out what he was thinking. The chiseled planes and angles of his face were harsh with shadows. He looked tired and wired and big as a tractor trailer and tough as nails—and so handsome that her heart beat a little faster just from looking at him.

  This is bad. You cannot fall for him.

  She found herself watching as he pressed a hand against his coat just below his waist, and immediately had the distraction she needed.

  “Are you bleeding?” She frowned as she nodded toward his wound, which was what he was pressing his hand against through the layers of his coat and other clothes, she knew. “You probably tore the wound open carrying me.”

  And how was that for being matter-of-fact about something that still had her pulse tripping?

  He lifted his brows at her. “Honey—oh, sorry, Gina—you’re not that heavy. And if you think that’s the most strenuous thing I’ve done all day, you obviously missed something.” As she acknowledged the truth of th
at with a little grimace, he unzipped his coat and pulled up yesterday’s crumpled and dried-stiff shirt to peer down and probe at the Band-Aids still adhering to his honed abdomen. As she blinked in bemused admiration at the strip of tanned, hard-muscled flesh thus exposed, he added, “It’s not bleeding, I don’t think. It hurts some, is all. Not enough to worry about.”

  “Let me look at it,” she said, resigned to getting as up close and personal as tending his wound required despite the fact that, right at this moment, the idea of touching his bare skin set off all kinds of warning bells in her head.

  To her surprise, and relief, he shook his head. Dropping his shirt, he looked at her semihumorously. “Weren’t you the one who said something along the lines of ‘getting shot is supposed to hurt’?”

  She was, but she now discovered that she didn’t like the idea of him hurting. Worse, she didn’t like the idea that she didn’t like the idea of him hurting. What that told her was that she really was starting to get in too deep with him, and her poor damaged heart recoiled at the thought. Under different circumstances she would have insisted on looking more closely at his wound, but, worried by the turn their association was taking, she glanced down at the backpacks instead and said in a neutral tone, “You should probably take some Tylenol. There should be some in the first aid kits.”

  “I will,” he said. Even though she was no longer looking at him, she could feel him watching her like a cat at a mouse hole, and it made her uncomfortable. To forestall the conversation she knew in her bones was coming, she hurried into speech again.

  “We need to eat.” She tried to remember what she’d shoved into the backpack during her fraught foray through the kitchen cabinets. “Something besides protein bars.”

  “You’re right.” He crouched beside the backpacks, unzipped one, and started rummaging around inside it. That brought him close enough so that she could have laid her hand against his bristly cheek—and the unnerving part was, she wanted to. He pulled out a first aid kit and handed it to her. “You fish out the Tylenol, and I’ll find us some food.”