“Extra Strength Tylenol,” she explained when he looked askance at the tablets she’d given him.
He eyed the small pills on his palm with disfavor. “That the best painkiller you have?”
“Yes.”
He swallowed the pills, chased them with a gulp of water, and looked at her.
“Got any more?”
“Tylenol? One more packet. I suggest you save it for later.”
“What about food? Water?”
“A couple of protein bars. No more water. If we have to, we can always gather snow and melt it.” That’s it, Gina, you can throw the “we” around, too. Make it sound like the two of you are a team. Although given how wet everything was going to be after the storm, gathering fuel for a fire might be a problem. But she could use the lighter flame by itself if necessary. She would need the pan, but she could dump the rocks out once they’d cooled.
She didn’t like to think about the rocks cooling. Their heat had already appreciably warmed the tent. Since she didn’t want to overheat—sweat was an enemy in cold conditions—she pushed back her hood and unzipped her parka. Beneath it she was wearing a red thermal long-sleeved tee tucked into her waterproof pants. Beneath the pants was a pair of jeans. The thermal tee was snug as befitted an inner layer. So were the jeans.
As her coat opened her hair spilled out to tumble around her face. Sometime over the last hour or so it had worked its way free of the bobby pins that had secured it. Shaking it back impatiently, gathering the mass of it in both hands, she ran a hand along the length of it to check for any remaining bobby pins and found none. Twisting it into a rope, she knotted it at her nape with the efficiency born of long practice. It wouldn’t stay that way for long, but for now at least it was out of her face.
Finishing, she looked up to find that he was watching her. Intently. The tee had a crew neck, so she was still covered from the base of her neck to the tips of her toes, even if her shape—small but round and firm breasts above a lithe waist and slim hips—was now more readily apparent. And her hair was just—hair. No need to feel uneasy under his gaze.
But she did. Take the close quarters, add in his rugged good looks and all those muscles and his seminudity, and it was impossible for her not to be aware of him as a man. The look in his eyes made it clear that he was now equally aware of her as a woman.
Their eyes met. Something crackled in the air between them that hadn’t been there before—a kind of current. An electric vibration. An elemental male-female thing.
The sudden spark of sexual heat that flared inside her as he looked at her was so urgent it actually hurt. Her chest contracted. Her throat closed.
And her body started up with a hot, sweet pulse.
She instantly, figuratively, turned her back on it. It was nothing she felt the slightest urge to acknowledge, much less pursue.
The plane crash—her plane crash—was five years in the past now. In the last year, she’d had precisely two dinner dates. Each with a different man, each leading nowhere. Before that, nothing. She hadn’t been ready. She wasn’t ready when she’d gone out on those dates. Along with her father, her husband, David, had died in the crash. Four months after their wedding. Their lives together had barely begun. He’d been her father’s research assistant, twenty-six years old, blond and wiry and handsome. He’d been as reckless and adventuring as her father, and Gina had found herself agreeing to do things she never would have agreed to do if she hadn’t fallen so hard for him. Reckless adventuring was not her nature, but she’d pretended like it was for the year they’d known each other, just like she’d pretended it was for her father. Maybe if she hadn’t pretended so hard, maybe if she’d allowed herself to be her true careful, logical, look-before-you-leap self, she could have stopped what happened and the others would still be alive.
But she hadn’t, and they’d died.
She’d lived, which meant she’d had no choice: slowly, painfully, she’d put her life back together. It was a different life than before, but it had gotten to a place where it was an actual life again. Quiet. Predictable. Stable. Good.
That was what she wanted. That was the only kind of life she could handle now, she saw.
This—this second plane crash, the apparent danger she was in because of it, him—was more than she was equipped to deal with.
It hit too close to home. It brought back too many memories, too many emotions. The trip to Attu had been a baby-steps attempt to get back out into the great outdoors, to embrace the wider world of adventure again, to heal herself. She saw now that it had been a mistake. She was still too raw inside, while reality was too harsh, too sharp. Too ugly.