Worth Dying For (6 page)

“Please, don’t leave me, Tom,” she mumbled, trying to sit and pull him down to her.

Bane resisted her hands until her grip became desperate and the tears welling in her eyes told him she was about to lose control. He relented, dropping to his knees beside her and allowing her to pull his head into her chest. Amber slept again, her hands buried in his hair and her grip on him surprisingly tight, considering her human frailty. Bane tried to extricate himself when he was sure she wouldn’t wake but whenever he moved, her breathing and heart rate accelerated and she clung to him even tighter. He had no choice but to slip his arms under her body and lift her down onto the sand with him before his back seized up permanently. Leaning away to grab her sleeping bag, he spread it on the ground and placed her on it, never moving his head from her chest as he pinned her against him with one hand.

Their close embrace seemed to calm her dreams and stop her torment, but Bane wished he could say the same. Female human contact was not so unknown to him that he couldn’t control his urges, so he simply ignored the bloodlust throbbing in the back of his throat and the hard tension in his groin. No, that wasn’t the cause of his torture. Lying with a woman this way again—and one who looked so much like Mary at that—caused his agony. Bane closed his eyes against the pain brought on by the emotional intimacy of the stranger’s embrace. How many years had it been since he had sunk into a woman’s softness, inhaled her scent and felt her warmth? He’d had cold, barely satisfying sex with many women since Mary’s death but he had never been embraced by anyone but her. Even Katerina, with her wild sexual appetites and claims of love, had never held him like this.

Bane grimaced at the thought of his maker. Katerina’s beauty made her everything a man—immortal or otherwise—could want. But she would never have anything more than his body, and it had been many decades since she’d had that. Denying her was the only way he had of punishing her for taking Mary’s life and not ending his. Katerina had condemned him to live forever without the woman he would love until the day he died.

* * * *

Amber continued to smooth Tom’s hair, smiling at the sounds of contentment rumbling through him. He always loved it when she babied him. She sighed, pulling him closer and throwing a leg over his hip. They never usually slept so close.

A noise began to irritate her, increasing in intensity as it went on and on. Was it her cell? She opened her eyes just as Tom moved away from her. Had he gone to answer the phone? Amber wondered if he was having trouble finding it when the noise didn’t stop.

“Tom—answer the damn phone!”

She sat up, confused when she looked around and didn’t see the familiar flock wallpaper of the bedroom in their home. But she wasn’t at home. She was in a tent, on an island.

And Tom hadn’t gone to answer the phone. Tom was dead.

The cell continued to wail inside her jacket pocket and she scrambled for it, desperate to stop the torturous noise.

“Hello?” Amber’s voice came out in nothing but a croaky rasp and she coughed to clear what felt like a solid lump of dust blocking her throat but it wouldn’t budge. She answered again, as loud as she could.

“Amber?” the voice shouted from the other end. “Are you okay?”

“R…Richard. What’s wrong?” He sounded crazed.
What on earth had happened?

“Oh, thank God. You’re alive.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Where are you?”

“On the island.”

 
“So they haven’t arrived yet?”

Her brain throbbed from trying to make sense of his words. “Who?”

 
“The rescue helicopter that’s been sent to pick you up.”

“Rescue?”

Richard sighed and spoke again, this time sounding much more like the mellow ex-hippy dude she knew. “Sweetheart, are you sure you’re okay?”

“My head hurts,” she said, wincing as she touched a hand to it. “I think I hit it on something.”

 
“Damn.” The phone went silent for a long time, forcing her to check he hadn’t hung up. “Yes, I’m here Amber. I could kill that prick David for leaving you alone like this.”

“David’s here…somewhere,” she said, wondering where he had gone. For the first time, she noticed the carnage around her. Their belongings and equipment had been half buried underneath lava-like sludge. “Oh, God, what happened?”

“Don’t you remember?” Richard’s gentle tone did nothing to settle her heightening sense of panic.

Amber frowned. “Not really. But looking at the evidence, I’d say there’s been some kind of rock fall or landslide.”

“Yes, that’s what happened. That’s probably how you hurt your head, sweetheart. But don’t worry, help is on the way.”

“David! Oh my God. Is he trapped? Maybe he’s under all this mud. Richard, they’ve got to help David.” Amber tried to stand but a wave of nausea knocked her back onto her knees.

“David is fine.” Richard’s voice lost its familiar warmth. “He left you there and went off in the dinghy to get help. Or at least, that’s what he’s telling anybody who will listen. Beats me why he didn’t just stay with you and use his phone if you both survived. The Coast Guard picked him up, rowing in the wrong direction in the dark.”

“I don’t remember…” Amber felt the phone slipping from her grasp as the need to sleep overwhelmed her again. She could hear Richard’s voice coming from a long way off and she answered his frantic shouts but couldn’t be sure he heard her. Gradually, another sound drowned him out—a loud mechanical whirring. A strong wind accompanied the noise and she put her hands over her face to protect it from the sand being blown into her nose, mouth and eyes.

She heard voices approaching and then a cold, firm pressure on her forehead that she shrunk back from. Amber moaned at a sudden pain at her temple and tried to push whatever had caused it away.

“We’ve got you, Ms. Kirkwood,” someone said.

A sharp, unpleasant sensation in her arm pissed her off and she tried to tell them to leave her alone and stop sticking things into her, but then a nice, warm feeling of peace settled over her and she didn’t care what they were doing as long as they let her go back to sleep.

* * * *

Amber groaned in protest when she woke again to bright morning sunshine that intensified the throbbing ache in her head. The pain medication had worn off—and that sucked—but at least she knew where she was. She’d woken many times in the night and had been afraid to find herself in a stark, white room she had no memory of. Eventually a nurse told her that she had been taken to a small coastal hospital in Maine, arriving sometime before dawn. A vague memory of a helicopter ride nagged at the edges of her mind but she remembered every bit of having her wound sewn up. Jesus Christ, that had hurt. They claimed she only had six stitches but Amber swore they used a fishing hook to do them.

As the only patient in the small, four bed ward they’d put her in, she’d had nothing to do but sleep, pee or stare at the ceiling all night. The morning brought with it hopes of freedom—she longed to get back to her own home and wash the caked blood out of her hair—but last night they’d said she had to stay a few hours longer “for observation”.

The door to the small room swung open and Amber turned to see David walk through it, carrying a huge bunch of flowers. Swallowing down a groan at the sight of him, she forced a tight smile onto her face. Richard had called again earlier and she understood why he had seemed so angry before. David had run off and left her and, no matter how hard she tried to remember what had happened, Amber just couldn’t imagine any scenario that would involve him leaving her to fend for herself. In fact, the only reason she didn’t kick his ass straight back out the door was that she needed him to fill in the gaps in her memory.

 
“There’s my girl.” David said, as if he’d done no more than lose her in a busy mall less than five minutes earlier. “How you doing, baby?”

“Not as well as you.” Amber didn’t try to keep the acid out of her tone.

If he noticed the barbed comment, he didn’t let on. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you.”

“Why? Because you wouldn’t want people to know that you ran off and left me to die?”

David’s smiled slipped. “I went for help.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”

He spread his hands in an open gesture that she instantly distrusted. “You were hurt. And…and I couldn’t be sure I would make it. I would never put you in that much danger.”

“And leaving me alone with a concussion seemed like a good idea to you? What if I’d started to convulse or swallowed my tongue?”

“Look, I didn’t know how badly hurt you were.” David reached for her. “The important thing is, we are both okay now.”

Amber shrugged him off. “Why leave the island? You could have called for help from there.”

“I was in fear for my life and I panicked. The landslide wiped out our camp, burying everything, including you. I didn’t know if you were even alive by the time I made it to the boat.”

“You didn’t stop to
check
?” His story got more fantastic by the minute. Something didn’t add up.

David sank down onto the bed, trying in vain to clasp her hand in his. “It wasn’t that simple.”

 
“Sounds simple enough to me. We were in danger, and you ran without a thought for me. All you cared about was saving your own neck.” She folded her arms, watching his reactions carefully. “I guess I can understand. It’s not like I was ever anything to you. But what I don’t get is why you just didn’t wait at a safe distance and then come back. Did it occur to you as you were rowing away that I could be buried underground somewhere, struggling for air?”

“Fuck, Amber. What do you take me for? I knew you hadn’t been buried alive.”

“How?”

An emotion passed over David’s features that made her stomach clench in trepidation. He dropped her gaze and fell silent for so long that she thought she might lose it if he didn’t tell her what the hell had happened.
 
Finally, he met her stare. “Don’t you recall anything?”

“Not much. I remember stopping on the hill and then realising I was in trouble. I heard you shout for me to run and I did, as fast as I could. I knew I wasn’t going to make it to safety and I remember screaming as darkness closed in over my head…and then the next thing I can recall is when my cell phone woke me.” Confused by his silence, she carried on, voicing the other question nagging at the back of her mind. “How did I get out? I mean, considering the mess I was in before they put me in the shower, I must have been totally immersed in the mud.”

 
“There’s a lot you don’t remember.” His voice drifted off and she could see him struggling with a decision.

“Like what? Tell me, David. Hopefully the missing part of my memory contains something about you getting a spine and coming back to help me.”

He winced and blew out a long, shaky breath. “Someone did help you but it wasn’t me.”

“What are you talking about? We were the only people on that island.”

“I kinda hoped you’d remember by yourself. It will make things easier when you talk to the press—”

 
“The press?”

His face lit up. “The news media are lined up waiting to talk to us about our escape from the island.”

Amber’s head flopped back against the pillow. If David didn’t tell her right this minute what the fuck he was talking about, she would scream. “Why would the press want to talk to us?”

“Because of the guy.”

“What guy?”

 
“The one that saved you,” he continued. Her stunned silence gave him more time to speak and he didn’t waste it. “This guy, Amber, I swear to God he came out of nowhere. And what a big motherfucker—had to be six feet eight and three hundred pounds. He threw himself on top of you as the landslide hit and I thought both of you were dead.”

Amber searched her brain for something—anything—she could remember about the accident. David had to be lying, or covering his ass…or something.

She recovered her voice. “Both of us?”

He nodded, impatient to continue the story. “Until suddenly, he appears again and he’s got you under one arm, throwing rocks and trees out of his way with the other. Then he leaps up—had to be twenty fucking feet in the air—still holding onto you, and grabs onto an overhanging tree branch. That snaps off in his hand and as he is falling, he takes a mighty swing and propels himself across the valley and slams into another tree. I’ve never seen anything like it. Scared the crap out of me.”

David stopped speaking and a look of genuine concern settled on his face. Amber could only guess at her own expression. She could feel the hysteria bubbling up in the pit of her stomach and she knew she had to either laugh or cry. A high pitched giggle erupted before she could stop it and continued until a fresh wave of nausea sobered her up fast. The pain of her injury kicked in with a vengeance—draining her of the last scrap of energy she had left after hearing David’s insane story.

Amber turned her back on him and rang for the nurse. “I think you should leave now.”

“Okay, but we need to talk again soon—get our story straight before the interviews start.” Enthusiasm made his voice rise to a pitch that threatened to split her head and she put her hands over her ears to drown him out. “If we play this right, our lives will never be the same again. I’ve been talking to this PR guy and he says he can get us a book deal. Of course, we’d have to keep something back for that. No point telling everything straight away.”