“You do whatever you want. I’m going to hide. And try to warn Keith.”
There was a moment of charged silence as her words hung in the air. The air in the cave had changed subtly, Gina noted as, ignoring the darkening face of the man who was now a step behind her, she followed the flashlight beam around a pile of fallen rocks. Deep into the mountain as they now had to be, it was drier, and warmer, and outside sounds were nonexistent. When she reached out to touch the wall the stone felt cool rather than cold, and bone dry.
“This is you being pissed at me because I kissed you and got you hot, isn’t it?” Cal’s voice grated as he caught up to her. She refused to look at him, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was scowling at her: a man on the brink of losing his temper. “What’s the big deal about that anyway? Are you married or something?”
The question hit her like a blow to the stomach. She winced before she could stop herself.
“No.” Her voice was sharp.
“Oh, yeah? Then what’s with the face you just made? And why did you say you can’t get it on with me? Sounds like married-woman guilt to me.”
She glared at him. “I’m a widow, okay?”
“A widow.” His eyes flickered, slid over her. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“How long has your husband been dead?”
Gina focused her gaze straight ahead. Except for the small circle of stone floor revealed by the flashlight beam, there was nothing to see but pitch darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But, see, I do.” She could feel his eyes on her. “You want to tell me how long, or do you want me to start guessing?” He paused, seemed to wait, then continued: “A year? Two?”
“Five years,” she snapped.
“You’ve been a widow for five years.”
“I just said that, didn’t I?”
“How’d he die?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“How’d he die, Gina?”
She shot him a furious glance. “My God, can’t you just let it alone?”
“No. He must have been young. In his twenties? So probably an accident. Did he die in an accident?”
She felt the floor start to tilt beneath her. To keep from stumbling, she had to stop walking and put a hand on the wall to steady herself.
Cal stopped, too. He loomed up beside her, frowning down at her. She refused to look at him.
“What kind of accident?” he persisted.
“It was a plane crash,” she said, and closed her eyes as the darkness started to shimmy around her.
“Ah,” Cal said, adding something that she couldn’t quite hear, because the blood pounding in her ears drowned everything else out. Her heart raced and her stomach churned. Leaning against the wall, she took a deep, even breath as she fought to get herself under control again. Then she gritted her teeth, opened her eyes, and shoved away from the wall. Chin up, ignoring his frowning gaze, she took a few tentative steps. Her knees felt so weak that she had to stop and lean against the wall again.
“It’s all right, I’ve got you,” she heard him say over the drumming in her ears. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, slid the other one beneath her knees, and scooped her up in his arms. Then he started walking with her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I’m fine, put me down, is what Gina wanted to say, but she didn’t, because she couldn’t.
Her throat was too tight to allow her to say anything at all.
She didn’t struggle, either.
Instead she looked at his hard, masculine features and realized to her dismay that in his arms was exactly where she wanted to be. She felt safe there. That wasn’t good, and she knew it, but at the moment she was too upset to even try to police what she was feeling. Giving up, she hooked her arms around his neck and rested her head on his wide shoulder and closed her eyes, working on getting her equilibrium back even as she surrendered to the novel experience of having a man take care of her. He smelled of snow and the outdoors, and he carried her as if she weighed nothing at all. After a few moments in which she resisted acknowledging it, she broke down and silently admitted that she found his display of easy strength mind-blowingly sexy. It appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.
She had to face it: he appealed to some primitive part of her that she’d never even suspected existed.
He’s not for you, she warned herself even as she relaxed in his hold.
But she tightened her arms around his neck anyway. The hard muscularity of his arms, the wide expanse of his chest, the solid breadth of his shoulders cradled her, and for just that little span of time she was prepared to let them.
A few minutes later he stopped walking. She opened her eyes to discover that the flashlight that he still held lit up a wooden door set into the stone. The door was ajar, and Gina was still blinking at it in surprise as, stepping carefully over what was apparently a threshold, he carried her through it.