Gina was heavy eyed and cross-looking as she struggled into a sitting position inside the cramped and gloomy confines of the tent. She thrust the tangled fall of her hair out of her face, then, with a grimace, rolled her neck from side to side. The storm was history, but overnight it had gotten cold enough in the tent to turn the tip of her nose red. Watching her, Cal found himself thinking it looked cute, that she looked cute, actually way more than cute, and immediately dismissed the thought. He’d felt her up and kissed her and made both of them hot, but that was the end of it. His life, and maybe her life, too, and countless other lives as well, were on the line here. He didn’t have time to waste on anything but managing the situation so that they all stayed alive.
“Stiff neck?” he inquired.
She gave a nod as she scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears in an apparent attempt to ease the tension in them. “I should have let you keep the backpack.”
“What can I say? Being nice has its rewards.” Cal sat up, too, wincing as what felt like a white-hot poker pierced his abdomen. His hand automatically went to the wound, but other than that he ignored the pain. This bullet wasn’t going to kill him, or even slow him down much. He’d been shot before, on the ground in Afghanistan, much more seriously, and had seen a fair number of others shot, too. He knew bullet wounds, and this one didn’t amount to much. He was lucky there’d been a metal door between him and the gun as the shot was fired, which meant that by the time the bullet drilled into his flesh it was all but spent.
Still, the sucker hurt. When he got home, which was a beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, that he shared with Harley and that, because of work, he left vacant for way too many days of the year, that bullet was coming out.
Chalk up one more scar to add to his collection.
“How’s your wound?” she asked. Having followed his hand as it went to his side, she glanced up and met his gaze. Now that she was fully awake, he could see that she felt equal parts awkward and wary around him. He was sorry about that, some, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Better,” he said.
“Good.” She glanced away from him, toward the front of the tent, then started to crawl toward it.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Out.” Her tone was short. He got the distinct impression that she didn’t want him following her. Probably she had personal business to attend to.
Fair enough.
It required conscious effort on his part to keep from looking at her ass as she crawled away from him. Then he slipped up, did a quick Check Six, and was rewarded by not being able to see anything of her ass at all. Between her coat and snow pants, she was well covered. Although when he’d searched her he’d been able to feel—
Don’t go there.
Instead, as she un-Velcroed and unzipped and otherwise worked her way out of the tent, he turned his attention to the cold, dead remains of what had been their furnace. The technique she’d used to build it was both simple and effective. He’d seen it used before, by commandos in the field. Her knowing how to do it was interesting, but he didn’t think it was especially significant.
Too many things—she was unarmed, she was clearly half-afraid of him, she went out of her way not to ask him any questions, she was too, well, young and pretty—argued against her being an operative.
The kiss had clinched it. It had gotten her hot, he knew. But after the first few seconds in which she’d kissed him back like she meant it, she’d gone cold as ice.
If she was an operative, he couldn’t see where that got her.
A night spent huddled on opposite sides of the tent, a parting at dawn. Not one bit of information gleaned. She hadn’t even tried.
No, she wasn’t an operative. He was almost 100 percent sure.
That conclusion made him truly sorry that she’d gotten caught up in this mess. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d saved his life.
“Stay close,” he told her right before she disappeared through the opening, his mind instantly going to who else might be around. There was almost certainly no one in the immediate vicinity, because if someone had known he had survived and where he was, and that someone was within range, he and Gina would already have found themselves under fire. He was taking it as a given that there was at least one enemy operative on the ground, because someone had to have fired the missile that brought down his plane. He wasn’t quite sure which of many possible groups that operative was affiliated with, or which group was at that moment closing in on Attu, but he was as sure as he was that he needed air to breathe that at least one of them was. Maybe more than one. He was fairly confident, though, that there was no way anyone could know that he’d survived the crash. They had to be thinking everyone who’d been on board his plane was dead.