Instead she was going to be undressing this sinister stranger. Then giving him her sleeping bag and sharing her tent with him.
“My fingers don’t seem to be working,” he said gruffly. Without another word, she pulled off her gloves and thrust them into her pocket. Pushing the Mylar blanket aside, she plucked the hand warmers off him, shoved them into her pocket, too, and started unbuttoning his shirt for him.
His shirt was icy and stiff, almost frozen dry. She had to work to get the buttons through their buttonholes. As her increasingly chilled fingers brushed the glacial dampness of his skin beneath, she was reminded of what bad shape he was in. No surprise that he wasn’t able to undress himself. The wonder was that he was conscious and talking.
She unfastened the rest of his buttons as quickly as she could, noticing in the process that a wedge of curly black hair covered his chest and tapered down to a narrow trail that disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. She noticed, too, that his chest was wide and about as solid as a concrete wall, and beneath the cold and clammy skin he was all steely muscles and heavy bone.
The guy was seriously big, and seriously buff. Ordinarily she might have found that attractive. Okay, she did find it—him—attractive. Under the circumstances, however, alarm was the more appropriate response.
Once more she wondered who he was. She didn’t even know his name. Which, now that she thought about it, was ridiculous.
She looked up from unbuttoning his cuff. “Think you could tell me your name now? Seeing as how I’m taking off your clothes?”
His eyes were dark and unreadable as they met hers. “I thought—no suggestive comments.”
Gina moved on to the other cuff. “That wasn’t a suggestive comment. It was an illustrative one, designed to make the point that, under the circumstances, I should probably have something to call you besides, hey, popsicle boy. So, name?”
“Popsicle boy?” His lips twitched. For just a moment a flare of amusement lit his eyes. But still he seemed to hesitate. Why? God, she didn’t want to know. Gina had just flicked another, frowning glance at him when he said, “Cal.”
“Cal?” He didn’t respond. “Cal—what?”
“Let’s just stick with Cal.”
That was it. No last name forthcoming. Or maybe that was his last name. No, more likely it was a nickname.
Not that it made any real difference. Whatever his name was, whatever he was into, he’d become her responsibility. Or, to be more precise, she’d made him her responsibility, by fishing him out of the sea and dragging him up off the shore and, in general, saving his life. And that would be because, she realized with a not particularly welcome flash of insight, when she’d seen his plane crash, when she’d spotted him alive in the water, she had immediately, instinctively identified with him. As in, they were members of the same club.
Plane Crash Survivors Anonymous, anyone?
“Nice to meet you, Cal.” Her voice was dry.
“Likewise.” He paused, then added deliberately, “Gina.”
So he remembered her name. At the time she hadn’t even been sure it had registered with him.
She could feel him watching her as she quickly unbuttoned his other cuff and reached for his belt buckle, but she didn’t look up again.
Assuming that because they’d been through a similar experience they were somehow alike could prove to be an error of major proportions, she told herself. A dangerous error. Because she was growing more and more convinced that he was a dangerous man.
Meaning to wait to strip his shirt completely off at the same time as his pants so as not to leave any one part of him exposed to the frigid air for longer than was necessary, she moved on, unfastening his belt buckle with brisk efficiency even as she firmly ignored the muscular six-pack her fingers couldn’t help but brush, then undoing the button below it and reaching for his fly.
“I got this part,” he said. His hands were at his zipper, brushing hers aside.
Okay. She so did not have a problem with that. At the sound of his zipper being lowered, she sank back a little.
Without the pressure of his hand holding it in place, the pad he’d been pressing to his side—her turtleneck—slid from his body to the ground.
She saw what was beneath it.
A round, dark hole the approximate size of a dime. On his far left side an inch or so above his hipbone. Sluggishly oozing blood. Bruising and dark smears all around it.
His injury. The one that had stained his shirt. The one that had been bleeding all along.
She’d assumed it was a gash of some sort, the result of the plane crash.
She’d assumed wrong.
That’s a bullet hole.
Surprise widened her eyes. Before she could stop herself from looking up, she did, and her gaze collided with his.
Chapter Ten
He’d been shot.
The knowledge hung there in the air between them.
She knew, and he knew she knew. Neither of them had to say a word.