Darkness (6 page)

When he didn’t answer, Gina’s lips compressed. She flicked a wary glance back at him. Focused ahead of the boat, his eyes were obsidian slits in a face that was ashen now except for the blue tinge of his mouth, which was grim. His jaw was hard. The wind had dried his hair, which was seal black and cut so short that she wondered if he could be military. She didn’t find the thought reassuring. His shirt was still so wet it clung to him. Through it, she could see exactly how heavily muscled his shoulders and chest were. Despite his clothes, which appeared to be the tattered remains of an expensive suit, the man was definitely not a desk jockey. The lower half of the left side of his shirt was now dark with blood. If he was bleeding like that despite how chilled his body had to be, then it was a serious injury. She marveled that he was still able to function. He had to be operating on pure adrenaline.

To have survived the crash, to say nothing of his immersion in the icy sea, and still be moving and functional, he had to be a fricking
machine
.

HIS GAZE
shifted. Abruptly she found herself looking into his eyes. Even with him on his knees behind her they were higher than hers, which unhappily reminded her of just how big he really was. There was not a trace of softness or compassion in them, or really anywhere in his harshly carved face.

Pulling her gaze away, Gina worked on maintaining an outward facade of calm as she looked unseeingly toward the beach.

“The storm’s getting close,” he said. The tickle of his breath against her cheek made her tense up. Despite his good looks, she hated having him so near. “We’ll be lucky to make it in.”

On that they were in full agreement. Whatever else was going on with them, they were of necessity allied against the storm. For now, it was the common enemy, chasing them across the water like a ravenous gray beast, obliterating sea and sky as it devoured everything in its path. Gina’s heart pounded as she realized that it was gaining on them with alarming speed. Ahead of it, all around where the Zodiac was shooting toward the bay and beyond, the day was darkening as if dusk were falling, although it wasn’t yet four p.m. and there should have been at least an hour and a half of daylight left. The waves were starting to rival skyscrapers in size, and the wind was approaching gale force. As long as they were able to stay a reasonable distance out in front of it, they were actually benefiting from the strength of the blow because it was taking them in faster. Pushed toward land, the boat skimmed the water at what felt like warp speed, touching down with a jolt and then bouncing up again, over and over and over, Gina’s butt smacking the seat with each bump. If she’d been trying to do anything except go straight in, the little craft would have been impossible to control.

He asked, “Anybody going to be waiting for you up there on the beach?”

She hated admitting it. “No.”

“So you’re out here all alone.”

Something in his tone gave her pause. She didn’t answer.

“
Are
you alone?”

The menace was back in his voice. Gina barely repressed a shiver. “Yes.”

By that time they’d almost reached the mouth of the bay fronting the beach that was her target. The water before them wasn’t quite as rough as the waves they were riding, although tall whitecaps rolled angrily toward shore, and near the beach the surf was white with foam. As they flew past, the giant waves they were leaving behind broke over a trio of building-size rocks that served as a breakwater, booming as they showered the boat with a fine mist of icy spray.

Gina barely felt the droplets hit. She had both hands clamped around the wheel as she piloted the boat through the rocks. All her focus had to be on keeping the boat on course as she pointed it directly toward the smoothest section of beach.

Given the turbulence and what was certain to be the concurrent state of the undertow, to say nothing of the temperature of the water, she wasn’t even going to try to bring the Zodiac in in the usual way, which, absent a dock, involved stopping a few yards from shore, hopping out, and pulling the boat through the surf to land.

“Hold on,” she threw at him over her shoulder. “I’m going to beach it.”

He didn’t say anything. Instead he gripped the seat hard with both hands, one on either side of her, which she took as an acknowledgment of her words. He was so close behind her now that he was practically breathing down her neck, boxing her in with hard arms and the solid wall of his chest, but there was nothing she could do to get away from him at this point, and, anyway, she couldn’t worry about
him
at the moment. Bringing the boat in had to be her only concern.

Steering as best she could given the buffeting the boat was taking from the wind and waves, she sent the boat racing toward the beach. At the last possible minute she shifted into neutral and threw the lever that lifted the motor clear of the water. Clenching her teeth, hands clamped around the wheel, she prepared herself for a hard impact as the force of the huge wave they were riding carried them the rest of the way in.

Gina let out an involuntary cry as they hit land with a grinding jolt that threw her forward, slamming her painfully into the wheel, driving the binoculars that still hung around her neck into her breastbone. The stranger crashed into her, heavy as a sack of cement, his chest colliding with her back with the approximate force of a giant sledgehammer. Gasping as the air was driven from her lungs, Gina could only lie helplessly against the wheel with him draped on top of her as the boat scraped over the beach, slewed violently sideways, and then finally shuddered to a halt maybe six feet or so beyond the reach of the surf.

For a moment after they stopped, Gina lay unmoving. The wind had been knocked out of her. Aching, slightly dazed, she gasped for air. After a moment, he levered himself off her. Free of his weight, she finally managed to suck in enough air to fill her lungs.

The world instantly came back into too-sharp and unpleasant focus.

Pushing away from the wheel, she coughed, wheezed, and coughed some more.

“Okay?” he asked. At least he sounded minimally concerned about her well-being, which she took as a good sign. He wouldn’t care if she was hurt if he meant to hurt her himself, would he?

Not that she intended to wait around to find out. Now that they were safely ashore, she was going to ditch him just as fast as she could. She’d saved his life, repaid a little of her karmic debt as it were, and at this point taking care of number one became the most important item on her agenda. He didn’t know it yet, but as soon as she could get off the boat they were going to go their separate ways.

“Yes.” Gina was still taking careful breaths and trying not to wince from what felt like the severe bruising of her chest. If it hadn’t been for the cushioning properties of the life vest and her parka, she thought the impact probably would have cracked a rib. There wasn’t time to sit around assessing any possible injuries she might have suffered, however. She needed to
move
.

The storm was already barreling into the bay. The breakwater rocks were no longer visible. The waves that had carried the boat in had increased in size until they were now towering walls of water thundering to shore. In the few minutes since the boat had skidded to a stop, the air around them had darkened and taken on a greenish tinge. The surf had risen to the point where frothy fingers slithered under the far side of the boat. The wind howled rather than moaned.

Slanting lines of snow obscured her vision. What once had been flakes now felt like hundreds of icy needles hitting her skin. The temperature had dropped so that each exhalation frosted the air. She could see individual bolts of lightning as they zapped to earth inside the clouds. The pounding of the waves against the no-longer-visible breakwater boomed like cannon fire.

What was immediately, abundantly clear was that there wasn’t going to be time to get anywhere that could actually be considered safe. They were lucky they’d made it off the water.

Pulse racing, Gina swung her legs around on the seat, stood up, and stepped quickly past him. In the process of laboriously getting to his feet, he made no move to stop her. She could feel his gaze on her as she ripped off the binoculars and stuck them in her pocket, then shucked the life jacket and crouched by the stern to free her backpack from its hidey-hole.

It was a big backpack, weighing in at a little over thirty pounds. A similar one had been issued to each of the scientists when they had arrived on Attu. All the expedition members were expected to take their backpacks with them whenever they left camp as a precaution against Attu’s unpredictable weather (her current situation provided clear proof of the advisability of that). The Eskimos who’d once made Attu their home had called the sudden, fierce storms that blew in without warning williwaws, which in Gina’s opinion was way too poetic a name for the violence of what was happening around them. At first she’d been skeptical of the need for so much stuff. Now she thanked God for the basic survival gear that the backpack was loaded with, including a small pop-up tent and a sleeping bag, in addition to food supplies and extra water. It should be enough to allow her to ride out the storm, provided she was able to find a spot relatively shielded from the wind where she could deploy the tent.

“We need to find shelter,” he said as she straightened with the backpack slung over one shoulder. His voice was a harsh rasp, and he was starting to slur his words. Standing to his full height, he was, indeed, as tall and athletically built as she’d thought, and as attractive. Under other, better, conditions, she might even have been slightly bowled over by him. As she watched, he bent a little to one side, grimacing, a hand pressed to his injury. His clothes clung to him like a second skin, and she was reminded of how wet he still was, and how deathly—and
deathly
was the word—cold he had to be. The color of the stain had deepened and brightened so that it was now clearly red, clearly blood.

As she looked at him, a particularly strong gust of wind hit. It caught them both, and he took a stumbling step backward before recovering. At what she calculated was about six-four and two hundred–plus pounds, he was way too big to be blown backward by the wind, especially when the same blast hadn’t moved
her
. He was also way too buff to be the kind of fat-cat businessman that his clothes seemed to indicate, or that she would have expected to find on a high-end private jet like the one he’d crashed in. Once again she wondered who and what he was, and could come up with nothing that she found even mildly reassuring. Ordinarily she didn’t think any wind short of hurricane force would have been enough to budge him. But his strength was clearly waning: even through the storm-created twilight and blowing snow, she could see that his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull and his rugged features were pinched and drawn. Every bit of him that she could see that wasn’t pasty white was tinged with blue.

He was hurt and bleeding. Possibly suffering from other injuries that didn’t show. Probably in the throes of hypothermia. Certainly traumatized by the plane crash and perhaps on the verge of collapsing, of going into shock.

In desperate need of help.

Her
help. Because she was all the help there was.

Gina’s lips tightened. The state he was in would have roused her utmost compassion if he hadn’t given her reason to be wary of him. But he
had
given her reason to be wary of him, and she wasn’t about to simply forget about that because right at this moment he needed her. She had many faults: stupid wasn’t one of them.

So it was decided. Flinging first one leg and then the other over the side of the boat, she slid the three feet or so down the slippery rubber rolls onto the beach. The coarse sand crunched beneath her boots as she landed. Because it was (semi)dry land, she silently blessed it.

“Hey,” he said. She didn’t know whether he meant it as a question or a protest. She didn’t care.

“You need to get off the beach in case of a storm surge.” Turning to face him, she shrugged into her backpack. Because he stood in the center of the boat and she was now some six or seven feet away from it, she found herself yelling again to be heard over the wind whipping in from the bay. “There are abandoned structures all over the island. Finding one of those and taking shelter in it would be your best bet.”

Turning, she started walking quickly away, head down, back to the wind, pulling her hood up and securing it in place as she went. She needed to get well away from the beach before she pitched her tent, and there wasn’t much time.

“Wait,” he called after her. Hunching her shoulders defensively, she lengthened her stride. Her conscience did not smite her. She was not, not,
not
going to even so much as look back.

He let out a whoop, the sound high-pitched and startling. It was followed by a heavy thud.

She looked back and got sandblasted in the face by snow mixed with sleet for her trouble. Swiping a hand across her face to get rid of the snow and then shielding her eyes as she tried to make out what had happened, she saw that he was sprawled flat on his face in the wet, grainy sand. Clearly he’d tried to get out of the boat and fallen.