by Anne Stuart
"You fell out of the plane...."
"When I was trying to climb out," she explained with limited patience. "Why do you suppose I was trying to dry out my clothes?"
The significance of the clothes line began to register. He looked at her with renewed interest, realizing that she was naked, or damned close to it, underneath that scratchy wool blanket. "I'll get some water," he said, not bothering with his jacket. He suddenly felt quite warm. "You got any food in your plane besides the tomato juice?"
"I already ate the crackers," she said defiantly.
"Then it's lucky for me I brought some. Stay put."
"Where did you think I'd be going?"
"Watch your smart mouth, Angel," he said mildly, "or I'll take care of it for you." And he headed out into the gathering twilight.
It was going to be a cold night, he thought, humming under his breath. Angela wasn't going to want to share that blanket, and the few puny pieces of wood stacked outside the hut weren't going to go very far. He grabbed his emergency satchel from behind the cockpit, grinning to himself. He'd seen the look in her eyes when he'd mentioned food. Maybe this god-awful twenty-four hours was going to end more pleasantly than he'd ever imagined. But then, he'd been imagining a lot of pleasant things with Angela Hogan ever since he met her. He doubted she'd live up to the fantasies.
But he had every intention of finding out. He'd been a gentleman long enough. Angela Hogan wasn't going to stay alone beneath that blanket for very long. And when he was through with her, maybe then he'd be able to get her out of his system.
He was honest enough with himself to know that that was a feeble excuse. To know whether Angela Hogan was a sexual tigress or a shrinking violet had nothing to do with his ability to get clear of her. He'd never get clear of her, damn it. No matter how far or how fast he ran.
His mood wasn't quite as cheerful as he stepped back inside the cabin, a bucket of icy water in one hand, the satchel in the other. He looked over at Angela and stopped. He should have taken her clothes with him when he went out to the plane. She'd managed to pull on a pair of damp long Johns, and she sat there in the bed, shivering, mistakenly thinking she was decently dressed. The damp cloth clung to her skin, outlining her with delicious exactitude, and her nipples were hard against the wet, chilly cloth. He allowed himself a small, satisfied smile before dropping down on the cot beside her, placing the satchel in her lap.
"What's this?" she said, deliberately ignoring the fact that the cot sagged ominously beneath his added weight.
"Emergency rations. Don't you carry something like this with you?" He unfastened it, pulling out chocolate bars, a flask, malted milk tablets and most precious of all, a tin of Nescafe.
Angela couldn't keep her distance any longer. "Coffee," she moaned. "God, Clancy, I could just kiss you."
"Be my guest."
Her wariness immediately returned. "Do you think we dare use the water?"
"I have every intention of risking it. At least I'll die happy. Lie down."
Her magnificent blue eyes took on a cold gleam. "Why?"
"So I can ravish you, of course. There's something about long Johns that turns me into a lustful beast," he drawled, his irony disguising the fact that her long Johns were having precisely that effect on him. "I have to clean that wound a little better. There's a first-aid kit in that package, too. I don't suppose you carry one of those with you, either."
"Sorry," she muttered, lying down with more obedience than she'd ever shown. "And I do have a first-aid kit. I just wasn't in any shape to look for it. The landing knocked me out for a bit."
"Damn," he muttered, peering into her eyes with clinical detachment. The pupils were even, appropriately dilated against the dimness of the hut. "How long were you out?"
"Not long. I don't think I've got a concussion." She winced as his fingers began to probe her scalp.
"What makes you the expert?"
"I've had concussions before in my life, Clancy. I'm a pilot, remember? I've had worse crashes than this one. If the ground hadn't been quite so slick, I would have been just fine."
"A good pilot takes all the ifs into account. You must have come in too fast."
She couldn't very well deny it. "Get your hands off me, Clancy. I've got a bump on the noggin and a bruised hip, and apart from that I'm just hunky-dory."
"You want to show me your hip?" he said, tipping some of the icy water into a tin cup and dampening a cloth in it.
"Dream on." She let out an anguished shriek as the ice water dripped down the front of her long Johns. "Couldn't you have warmed that on the stove?"
"I wanted to make you suffer," he said, his gentle fingers at odds with his bantering tone as he cleaned away the dried blood. "You've got quite a lump there, kid. Bet you have a hell of a headache."
"It's terminal," she agreed, shivering.
"I happen to have salvation in the form of aspirin. You want to risk the water, or would you rather use the contents of my flask?"
She glared up at him. "I'm not touching a drop of hooch, thank you very much. I've sworn off it, anyway, and I'm certainly not going to change my mind when I'm stuck in this hut with you."
"Afraid you won't control your own lustful impulses, Angel?"
Her response was impressive, reminding him that she'd spent most of her adult life around pilots and mechanics, men not known for their euphemisms. "Go away, Clancy," she said, much more mildly. "I can take care of myself."
"So I noticed." He stood up, moving away from her, stretching his cramped body in the tiny confines of the hut. He'd just spent the last fourteen hours in the cockpit of his Fokker, and even that splendid aircraft had space limitations. "I'm going to check out the lay of the land. Are those gas tanks full?"
"They're mine!" she said fiercely.
"Honey, your plane isn't going anywhere for a while. If we're getting out of here, it's going to be in the Angel, and she's a little short of fuel."
"I'd rather walk."
He was getting a little tired of this. "I might just be tempted to let you do that. But I'm taking the fuel with me. Why don't you finish cleaning yourself up while I scrounge around? If you stop snapping at me, I might be persuaded to make dinner."
Her face was almost pathetic. "Dinner?" she said. "You mean, apart from the candy bars and the malted milk tablets?"
"I happen to have a can of beef stew with me," he said. "Tucked in the back of the Fokker for emergencies like this one. If you're nice to me, I'll share it with you."
Angela's eyes misted over. "Real food," she breathed. "Take me, I'm yours."
Clancy allowed himself a brief, wry grin. "I intend to." And he stepped back out into the darkening night.
Chapter Sixteen
By the time Clancy had finished refueling his plane using the tedious hand pump, cleaned himself off in the icy stream and fetched the battered can of beef stew from the plane, he was in less than a charitable mood. When it came right down to it, he didn't really expect to get Angela Hogan out of those scratchy long Johns anytime in the near future. It was probably best all around if they spent the night at opposite ends of the tiny hut, keeping their armed truce going. She was already mad enough at him for not volunteering the information about his record-setting Newfoundland-to-Havana run. When she found out what else he hadn't informed her about, she was going to be beyond livid. If she found herself seduced in the bargain, there was no telling to what lengths she might go.
No, he'd be a wiser man to keep his mind above his waist and remind himself what a stuck-up, coldhearted pain in the rear Angela was. Of course, that was a little hard to do when he stepped back into the cabin and found she'd managed to get most of the sticky blood out of her hair and comb it into a damnably seductive cloud around her pale face. She'd put some sticking plaster on her forehead, and it gave her a rakish look. Her lips were pale without her usual lipstick, her eyes dark and questioning, and even though the long underwear had dried in the heat of the wood stove, he could stil
l see, and imagine all too vividly the feel of, her small, perfectly shaped breasts.
She looked at him with a nakedly hungry look on her face, and then he realized she was staring at the can in his hand. He shrugged, dismissing his disappointment. "Dinner for Madame," he said with a flourish. "Got anything as useful as a can opener around here?"
"I thought you were Tom Swift, complete with every tool known to man," she countered, her earlier anger fading into light mockery.
He controlled his smutty response. "My trusty pocket knife will take care of it, I imagine." He glanced around the cabin. She'd rehung the clothesline neatly down the middle of the cabin, and on the floor was the blanket, folded neatly, clearly symbolizing his pallet for the night. "What's this?"
"I'll take the cot, you can have the blanket. Unless you'd rather switch?" It took someone who knew her intimately to recognize the anxiety beneath her cool voice. He knew her intimately.
"The blanket's fine," he said. "How come we have the Walls of Jericho? You've seen too many movies, Red. I'm not about to jump you without a direct invitation."
"And I'm sure you have enough sense not to hold your breath waiting for that remote eventuality," she said coolly. "I just thought we both might like a little privacy. I'm not used to sharing a bedroom with someone of the opposite sex."
"I am," Clancy said, deliberately provoking her as he set the opened can of stew on the stove. He reached up and felt the clothes, the gabardine trousers and cotton blouse, the leather flight jacket and long thick socks. With a gentle tug he pulled the clothesline down again, dropping the almost-dry clothes onto the floor. "I don't need privacy, I need something more comfortable than a thin wool blanket to lie on. Since you don't seem disposed to share your cot, I'm going to use your clothes for a mattress. Got any objections?"
She opened her mouth, clearly ready to state a few, then shut it again. "I'll argue with you after dinner," she said, eyeing the can.
"Smart move. It's never wise to bite the hand that feeds you before you've actually eaten."
"I'm a smart cookie," she said, her voice sounding oddly bleak.
They ate their meal companionably enough, considering the tension running through the room. Clancy sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against the narrow cot, Angela sat above him, her long legs curled under her, as they shared the can of beef stew, using the pen knife as an eating utensil. She smelled like flowers, he thought absently. How could a woman who'd flown for twelve hours, crash landed her plane, taken a dunking and been covered in blood still smell like flowers?
They split one candy bar, saving the second one for breakfast, and drank the instant coffee with an appreciation seldom felt for something they usually took for granted. Then Clancy lit two cigarettes, passing one to her, and they sat there in an oddly companionable silence, the faintly fragrant smoke swirling upward in a lazy spiral.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you it was my record you were so intent on breaking," he said finally, the apology sounding harsh and forced even to his own ears. No wonder. He was a man who seldom apologized to anyone for anything. "You didn't happen to confide in me, you know. If you'd asked my opinion, even bothered to talk about it, I would have told you."
"It doesn't matter now," she said, stretching out on her stomach on the concave cot, rather like a sleek cat in baggy underwear. "It's just that I hate being lied to."
"I didn't lie, Red."
"I suppose you didn't. But I hate being spared things. I hate lies of omission, I hate being kept in the dark about things that I'd be much better off knowing and facing. I can't stand being spared things only to have them come up from behind me and knock me down when I least expect it." Her voice was a fierce undertone.
Clancy thought back to the situation, the people he'd left behind at the hangar and knew an uneasy settling in his gut. If she didn't like being kept in the dark about something as innocuous as this, how was she going to respond to what was going on under her nose?
"Okay, so I won't spare you," Clancy said, leaning forward and stubbing out his cigarette against the old iron stove. "Don't make the flight. It's a stupid risk for nothing."
"That's for me to decide, isn't it?" she asked coolly, not moving from her innocently tempting stretch on the cot.
He wanted to jump on her, shake some sense into her, do a lot more things to her. Instead he stood up, fighting his own temptation. "I'm going for a walk," he said, his voice cool and distant.
She glanced up at him. "There's an outhouse behind the shack."
"Did I ever strike you as a man who beat around the bush? If I wanted to use the can I'd say so. I'm going for a walk." Grabbing his leather jacket, he headed for the door.
"You want to leave me another cigarette?" she asked.
"Nope. I'll share my food, my booze and my candy bars with you. But I'm a bit more partial about my cigarettes." And he slammed out of the hut.
He shouldn't have turned so crabby, he told himself as he headed off across the semifrozen tundra. It was guilt, pure and simple, that made him that way. Not that Angela Hogan wasn't an infuriating human being. But she hadn't done anything but slither like Little Eva on that damnably narrow cot and remind him, without realizing it, what a liar he was. It was no wonder he was in a bad mood.
Of course he knew full well what was at the heart of that bad mood, along with guilt. He wasn't going to get Angela Hogan. He wasn't going to be able to unbutton all those tiny buttons and have his wicked way with her. He was going to have the worst night of his life, even worse than the previous night when he'd flown through the darkness, terrified that she'd crashed somewhere along the way. Tonight he'd have to lie on a pile of clothes on a damnably uncomfortable wood floor within inches of her, breathing in her flowery scent, listening to her breathe, the shift and rustle of her clothes as she turned over, the sighs and sleepy murmurings.
And he wasn't going to touch her. Because if he touched her, he'd take her. And if he took her, he wouldn't ever want to let go. If he made love to her, he'd fall in love with her. A simple, never-before equation that he couldn't risk.
He glanced over at the Angel, tanked up and ready to go. He could fly away from there, now, head for St. John's or an even bigger city and send someone after her. Hell, he could just keep going, like he should have done the first time he ran away from her.
At the very least he could sleep in his plane. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done so, and on colder nights than the fiftyish air surrounding them. He could do whatever he had to to keep his hands off her.
He lit a cigarette, noticing with absent wonder that his hands were trembling slightly. It wasn't that cold. They were trembling with the effort not to go in there and grab Angela and overcome all her resistance.
An oil lamp was burning through the small, smoked up window, sending a warm glow out into the eternal twilight. It was only a little past eight, but he was worn out. He hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Maybe if he just sacked out, fate would take care of the problem.
She'd made his bed up carefully, folding her clothes evenly beneath the thin blanket. She was sitting cross-legged on that damnable cot, rubbing her arms against the chill of a room that was too warm and looking up at him out of wary eyes.
"I thought you were going to fly away and leave me here," she said.
"I considered it."
"Should we both fly out? It's not that dark...."
"No, but I'm too damned tired. I spent all last night in an airplane flying after you. And I'm not trusting my plane in anyone's hands, much less someone who's been conked on the noggin. We'll wait till daylight, till after I get some shut-eye."
She nodded. "I appreciate that. It's very kind of you—"
"It's not kind at all. I haven't a kind bone in my body," he snapped, sitting down on the rickety chair and pulling off his boots. "What're you going to use for a cover?"
"The room's warm enough."
"Then why are you rubbing your arms like you're at the North Pole?"
<
br /> "I have a slight chill," she said defensively. "It'll pass."
He stripped off his jacket and hurled it at her with just a touch more force than necessary. "Take this and stop arguing. I need some sleep." And he dropped down on the makeshift mattress, cursing his awkward nobility and sense of self-preservation.
The room lapsed into silence. She was still sitting on the cot, his jacket across her lap, not moving. "Do you want me to turn off the lantern?" she asked in a very small voice.
"Do what you please."
"I don't suppose you'd feel like sparing one more cigarette...?"
He sighed, a long-suffering sound. "The pack's in the jacket," he said. "You might as well hand me my flask while you're at it."
She climbed off the cot, stepping over him very carefully as she headed for the oil lamp that stood on the tiny table next to his flask. She blew it out, plunging the room into darkness, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The bright orange flames of the wood stove danced behind the door, the midsummer twilight filtered in the one window with a ghostly charm. And every move she made was torment.
She held the flask out to him and he took it, his hand brushing hers. Her flesh was icy cold in the warm room and he knew a sudden panic. Maybe she was hurt more badly than she'd said. It would be just like her to cover up.
"Why are you so cold?" he demanded angrily, sitting up. "Have you been lying to me about your injuries?"
"I don't lie," she said stiffly, moving past him to stare out the window into the darkness. "I told you, I have a chill."
"Nerves," he said flatly.
"What have I got to be nervous of?" she demanded, not bothering to turn around.
"Not a damned thing," he replied. "Have a swig of the flask. It'll warm you up and put you to sleep in one fell swoop."
"What's in it, a magic potion?"
"Just hundred-and-fifty-proof rum, sister. It works wonders."
"No, thanks," she said distantly. "I've sworn off the stuff. It's too dangerous."
