Without waiting for her to reach him, he turned and started walking away, heading down the passage with the sliver of light skipping ahead of him.
“I still want to warn Keith,” she said to his retreating back. It was absolutely true, but it was also in the nature of underscoring the fact that she hadn’t given in: she might be walking after him now rather than walking away as she’d been doing before he’d grabbed her and they’d kissed, but that did not mean he was the one calling the shots. Necessarily. Only if she agreed with what he suggested. She’d spent most of a lifetime giving in to people who thought they knew best, against her better judgment, and she wasn’t about to make that mistake again.
“We’ve had this conversation.” He flung that over his shoulder at her.
“Yes, we have.” Her tone was sugar sweet. “And nothing’s changed.”
That stopped him. He turned to wait for her. “I meant what I said.”
She smiled at him. “And I meant what I said: you don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“Honey, I’m bigger than you, and badder than you, and way more experienced with living through the kind of situation we’re dealing with here than you. So I think that makes me the one in charge.”
“I am absolutely prepared to listen to everything you have to say. And make my own decisions on the basis of your recommendations.”
He snorted. “Be careful I don’t let you live with that.”
“Is that a threat? Because I’m not impressed.” With a glinting look thrown his way, she walked on past him into the dark. “And don’t call me honey,” she added over her shoulder. The flashlight beam danced ahead of her, pointing the way down what seemed to be a long, narrow passage.
He caught up with her. She flicked a glance up at him to find that his eyes glinted and his jaw was hard.
“You don’t like ‘honey’?” There was steel in his voice. “As long as you’re doing what I tell you, I’ll call you anything you want: baby, sugar, darling, sweetheart—”
“Gina,” she snapped. “If you can’t manage that, Dr. Sullivan works. And I’ll do what you tell me just as long as I agree that it’s the best thing to do.”
Their eyes met and clashed. The air was suddenly charged with hostility. Or, to be more exact, hostility infused with sex. Because the sparks were definitely still there.
“Gina,” he said with elaborate emphasis. “Do you honestly believe that you have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting yourself off this island alive without me?”
The passage crooked to the left again and sloped downward. Gina rested a hand on the smooth stone of the wall as she negotiated the turn. “I think waiting for rescue might be our best option.”
He made an impatient sound. “If you ‘wait for rescue,’ you’ll wind up dead.”
“Sooner or later someone is going to come looking for us,” she argued stubbornly. “I think we should hide until then.”
“Yeah. No.” His tone said Discussion over. “You saved my life. I’m going to do my level best to save yours. Which means we’re getting the hell off this island just as quick as we can.”
“What about escaping by boat?”
He shook his head. “We have a thousand miles of ocean to cross. We’d be caught before we got anywhere near land.”
“There are other islands around. Attu is part of a chain. And the Commander Islands are only a few hundred miles away.”
“The Commander Islands are Russian territory, and the rest of the Aleutians are deserted. If we even made it to any of them, which I doubt we would because they’ll be coming after us with everything they have, we’d be in the same position there as we are here. Running and hiding until they find and kill us.” He gave her an assessing look. “I can fly us out of here. Trust me.”
The sad thing about it was, she did. Trust him. About wanting to save her life, at least. Not that it made any difference as to how she felt. Stealing a plane and trying to fly away in it to safety sounded . . . undoable. Her heart sank at the prospect.
I could tell him, she thought, but outside of the accident investigators who’d come to her in the hospital and the therapist who’d helped her at least put the memories in a box, she had never talked about the plane crash in detail to anyone. Not even to her mother, who she knew didn’t really want to know, and whom she didn’t want to burden. Even now, all these years later, the memories had the power to make her feel sick and weak and dizzy, and she’d learned that the only way to cope was to avoid them at all costs. Anyway, strictly apart from her phobia, she thought that his escape plan was a really, really bad idea. That thousand miles of ocean he’d said they had to cross by boat? The distance didn’t change just because they were in a plane.