It was the mind-racing part that kept her awake.
It would be tricky to place the call without anyone taking notice. And she still had no real proof she wouldn’t be abetting a crime by doing so. But all things considered, taking the chance to get away from him and then doing what she could to get him off the island as quickly and quietly as possible seemed like the lesser of a number of evils. Just as pretending that she’d never seen him or his plane seemed like the smartest thing she could do.
Having made the decision, she tried to empty her mind, tried to go to sleep.
He was asleep.
She could tell from the way he was breathing.
Slow and deep. Rhythmic.
Close.
Too close.
The wind screamed. The tent rattled and shook. Some combination of sleet and snow clattered relentlessly down on the ground outside. In the distance she could hear the boom of the surf, the roll of thunder, the occasional crack of what she thought must be lightning.
But what bothered her was his breathing. The more she listened to it, the more it made her tense up. Made her own breathing quicken. Made her heart beat faster.
Finally she figured out why.
It wasn’t just that he was so near. It wasn’t just that she didn’t trust him, or that she was, in fact, slightly afraid of him.
It was that his breathing sounded so very—male.
She hadn’t slept this close to a man since David’s death.
The last night of his life they’d cuddled together on a single cot in a tent in the Yucatán. They’d made love. Afterward, he’d fallen asleep and she’d lain there in the dark listening to him breathe. She’d thought, I’m happy.
David’s breathing had sounded slow and deep. Rhythmic. Unmistakably male.
Her insides quivered at the memory.
The next morning the two of them, plus her father and sister, had gotten on that plane.
And taken off into the teeth of a threatening storm.
She could still hear the patter of rain on the fuselage—
No. Gina sat up abruptly, desperate to banish the memory. It was too late. She was trembling. Her chest felt tight. Bile rose in her throat.
“Mmm?” the scary stranger sharing her tent murmured in sleepy inquiry.
She didn’t answer. Instead she stayed very still. After a moment his deep, rhythmic breathing began again.
Oh, God.
Listening, she felt her every nerve ending being scraped raw.
He was, she thought, sound asleep once more.
While she felt like she might never sleep again.
Drawing her legs up close to her body, she wrapped her arms around them. Then she dropped her head so that her forehead rested on her knees.
She didn’t cry. What was the point? She’d already shed multiple oceans’ worth of tears, and not one single thing had changed.
It’s just breathing. She forced herself to listen to it, hoping that she would soon grow desensitized to the sound.
Her mind was on board, but her body, her senses, her emotions seemed to be having trouble adjusting.
Gradually they did. Or else she just grew so tired that she couldn’t feel anything anymore.
After the shakes went away, after the knot in her chest loosened, after the bile receded, exhaustion finally claimed her. She lay down, huddled in a little ball facing away from him. Deliberately she thought about birds: the rare ones she’d spotted on the island, the eagle she’d helped save, the tests she hoped to perform to better assess the health of various species before leaving. She loved working with the island’s horned puffins, the funny-faced, black-and-white clowns of the seabird world. To test their diets for pollutants, she’d placed screens in front of their burrows while they were out fishing. When they returned with their beaks full of fish, they had to spit out their catch to remove the screens, which they could do easily once their beaks were empty. While the birds dealt with the screens, she nabbed a sample of their diets. They didn’t seem disturbed by her presence, and just recalling their head-bobbing, foot-shuffling dance as they approached their burrows made her smile. From there her thoughts segued to the plovers, the terns, the northern fulmars, the pigeon guillemots, all of which she’d seen in her brief time on the island. Seven hundred different kinds of birds had been identified as living on Attu. Deliberately she began ticking them off one by one, and smiled a little as she recognized that what she was doing was an ornithologist’s version of counting sheep. But it focused her mind, and eventually sleep claimed her.
Chapter Fourteen