Darkness

by Karen Robards

  “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.”

  “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 ro
ad 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.

  “First, I wasn’t flying the plane when it got shot down. Second, as far as I’m aware nobody had any reason to suspect we might get shot down. Now that I’m flying, believe me, us getting shot down just ain’t gonna happen.”

  That cocky flyboy answer earned him a jaundiced look. But, whether it was idiotic of her or not, it also made her feel better. It both unsettled and alarmed her to discover that her trust in him apparently knew no bounds.

  “Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to do,” he said, and stopped walking to pull the pistol out of his pocket. She stopped, too, looking silently down at the gun in his gloved hand before glancing up at him. Even through the veil of thickly falling snow, he seemed suddenly bigger and more formidable. His jaw was set, his mouth was unsmiling, and Gina realized that he’d gone into warrior mode: she was face-to-face with the hard-eyed, scary man she’d first encountered. For a second she was taken aback. Then she got a grip and reminded herself that he was now her bear.

  “In case of—anything,” he said, his tone as grim as his face—the slight hesitation told her that the “anything” he was referring to was something bad—“I want you to be able to protect yourself. I’m going to give you this, along with a quick lesson in how to use it.”

  Okay, now she got it: the “anything” referred to his death or incapacitation. Nice. Gina looked at the gun, looked at him, and held out her hand.

  “Can I hold it?” she asked sweetly.

  A slightly wary look flickered over his face. He passed the gun to her, grip first. It was big, black, and heavy.

  “Basically, all you have to do is point and shoot,” he instructed, leaning close. “But first you have to release the safety, right here—”

  Before he could finish, she released then reengaged the safety lever on the back of the slide, ejected the magazine and the chambered round, snapped the magazine back into place, and pulled the slide back to rechamber a round, all in a series of crisp, practiced movements that, when she finished and looked at him, had him rocking back on his heels with his eyes wide.

  Pocketing the gun, she raised her eyebrows at him. “What is it they say about assumptions? I traveled to some very unstable regions of the world with my father. I learned to use a gun.”

  Recovering from his surprise, he practically crowed with delight, then wrapped his arms around her, rocking her from side to side as he hugged her against him.

  “So, okay, I’m an ass,” he said, clearly getting her “assume makes an ass out of you and me” reference. “That was awesome. You are awesome. Gorgeous, sexy, smart, can handle a gun. Honey, you’re my wildest dream come true.”

  He was grinning as he said it, but then as he looked down at her and met her eyes his grin faded. A serious, intent expression took its place. Gina was instantly dazzled by the look in his eyes. He kissed her, a slow, lush kiss that made her all melty and dizzy and had her kissing him back as if the world would stop spinning unless they generated sufficient heat. The thought that beat like a pulse through her brain as she twined her arms around his neck and returned the hungry insistence of his mouth was, maybe, just maybe, he was her wildest dream come true.

  Sleet broke them apart. Not just a sprinkling of sleet. A deluge, as if the angry-looking clouds overhead had gotten tired of politely seeding the island with snow and had decided to disgorge their contents in a massive, freezing moisture dump.

  “Holy shit,” Cal said as he flipped the waterproof hood of his coat up over his cap. One arm was still around her and his mouth was close to her ear as he raised his voice to be heard over the loud rushing sound of the falling sleet. “We got to move. If we don’t get in the air soon, the wings will ice over and we won’t be able to take off.”

  Grabbing her hand, he took off at a brisk walk—anything faster was dangerous to impossible given the worsening conditions underfoot—and pulled her along with him. Bending her head against the pounding sleet, Gina didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that the camp was only about half a mile away. The thought of trying to steal a plane and fly away in it made her stomach knot. The thought of trying to steal a plane with possibly iced-over wings and fly away in it into a sleet storm caused her stomach to twist into a pretzel.

  By the time they were close enough to see the buildings, Gina was so cold and so physically miserable that she would have been pulling out the tent and taking shelter in it until the weather improved, and never mind what Cal thought about that, except for the fact that they’d left the tent behind in the cave to lighten the backpack’s load. She was shivering uncontrollably, her face stung, and she could no longer feel her hands and feet. They skirted the camp’s perimeter, skulking low like animals on the prowl for fear that their dark shapes against the white snow might be visible even through the gloom and the driving curtain of silvery sleet. It was early afternoon, although the weather made it seem much later. The main building appeared to have only a few occupants: Gina saw a couple of indistinct shapes moving past the windows. She could only suppose that anyone not at camp when the sleet storm hit had taken shelter in place, as she would have liked to have done. While Cal searched the shadows for sentries—there didn’t appear to be any—she listened to the rattle of the generator, looked at the light pouring out of the windows, and felt envy mix with her fear. What she wouldn’t give to be inside where it was warm and dry! The only thing she wanted more than to thaw out was to be safe.

  “The plane’s gone.” Gina saw with relief that the runway was empty. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized just how tense she was, how tight with anxiety her stomach was, how dry her mouth was at the prospect of getting on a plane.

  “Somebody had the good sense to move it inside the hangar,” Cal replied. They crouched behind the fuel tanks for cover, and he had his hand up, shielding his eyes from the driving sleet, while she had her hood pulled low over her eyes for the same purpose. Looking farther down the runway, Gina saw that he was right. The door to the hangar was open, the first time she’d ever seen it that way. The shadow inside had to be the plane.

  Her breathing quickened as she realized what that almost certainly meant: his plan was still on. She could feel the sudden thumping of her heart.

  She said, “The runway’s solid ice.” That was easy to see: sleet had formed a visible layer over the pavement that gleamed even in the muted light.

  “We’ll have to risk it.”

  Cal was so close that their bodies brushed. Looking at him, she saw that he was assessing the runway, his eyes intent. Determination was visible in every hard line of his face. She could feel him gathering himself, preparing for whatever the next step was. Her gaze flitted desperately around, looking for danger, for some reason to call a halt to what she now, more than ever, really, truly did not want to do. What she saw made her pulse skitter with horror. She grabbed Cal’s le
g.

  “They’re here,” she whispered to him, leaning in close and gesturing urgently at the large party of armed men who appeared like wraiths out of the sleet. The men were at the eastern edge of the compound, jogging at double time toward the buildings. Alarm made her stiffen and reach toward the gun in her pocket, only to abort the maneuver. The falling sleet would coat it with ice in seconds, just like she and Cal were coated with ice. She wanted to keep it dry and operational for as long as she could. Anyway, Cal had one of the rifles, both of which he’d tucked inside his coat when it became obvious the sleet wasn’t going to let up, in his hands. “Oh, my God, did they track us here?”

  She didn’t dare raise her voice to the level they’d previously been using, which had been fairly loud to be heard over the combined noise of the sleet and the generator. Cal heard her anyway. He shook his head.

  “They’re not coming toward us. Look.”

  He was right: they were heading straight for the buildings. From the pair of dogs with them, she deduced that these were the men who had tracked them to Terrible Mountain. She shut her mouth and shrank against the nearest ice-coated tank: the search party was passing terrifyingly close. At that moment only the twelve or so car-size capsules of fuel stood between her and Cal, and them.

  Her heart started to slam against her breastbone.

  Thankfully the men seemed to be more interested in getting out of the storm than they were in looking around. It was obvious that they had no inkling that she and Cal were anywhere in the vicinity, and she prayed that nothing happened to clue them in. Nothing did. Minutes after Gina first spotted them, the last of them filed inside the building.

  She drew a deep, shaking breath of relief.

  “We’re going now. Run as fast as you can to the hangar. Stay low. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Cal’s words sent her gaze slewing around to him. Her stomach seized up, and a hard knot formed in her chest.

  “But we can’t—they’ll see us. They’ll see the plane. Did you see how many of them there are?”