Except for the flickering circle of light cast by the lantern, the cavern was dark and full of shadows. The short-sleeved tee she wore was way big on her, and her braless breasts were on the small size and firm, so she didn’t feel self-conscious about revealing too much as she sat down across the table from him.
She was, she discovered as they ate, soon self-conscious about something else entirely. She had trouble keeping her eyes off him. Sitting there eating by lantern light, he looked disturbingly handsome and vaguely piratical with more than a day’s growth of stubble darkening his chin. His teeth were even and white and his brows were straight black slashes above dark brown eyes that had acquired gold glints from the reflected light. The same type of ordinary white tee that she was wearing took on an entirely different appearance on him: in it his shoulders looked about a mile wide and the truly impressive muscles of his chest and arms visibly rippled and flexed against the clingy cotton whenever he moved. She found her pulse quickening just from watching him eat, from admiring the play of the lamplight on the bronzed bulge of his biceps and the hair-darkened length of his powerful forearm every time he lifted the spoon to his mouth, from observing the deft movements of his square-palmed, long-fingered hands. She caught herself wondering what it would feel like to be crushed against that muscular chest without the inches-thick layers of their winter clothes between them—and then she realized to her embarrassment that she was staring at him, and he’d noticed.
To that point, they’d been busy eating and hadn’t been talking, or at least nothing more substantive than “This is good” and “Shame we don’t have bread,” that sort of thing. But at the look in his eyes as she accidentally encountered them, after she’d watched with close attention for what was probably the two dozenth time as he raised his arm to take another bite of stew, she felt a rush of flustered consternation and hurried to think of something to say that would send his thoughts in another direction.
“You know, if we could locate Keith, that would give us one more person on our side,” she said. “If those rifles work, he would even be armed. There would be three of us. Can’t have too many people shooting those weapons.”
Having turned his words back around on him, she watched his eyes narrow at her: distraction completed.
“Another civilian would be a liability, not a help.” His gaze slid over her face. When he continued, it was in a tone of careful patience. “Gina, look: trying to warn your friend is out. If we start running all over the island like chickens with our heads cut off, we’re way more likely to run into the guys who want to kill us than we are into him. You know that.”
She did know it. She just hated to face it—and what it meant for Keith. “If we don’t warn him, he’ll be killed.” The thought made her feel sick. She put down her spoon abruptly, wishing she’d waited to bring the subject up. She’d never meant to let the matter go, but if she hadn’t been so intent on refocusing his attention on something other than the way she had been looking at him, she would have held off until morning.
“We’ll be killed if we try. For all you know, somebody else in your group managed to warn him. Got a call out to him over the radio or something. Before—”
He broke off, but she knew what he meant: before the person doing the warning, Mary or Jorge, say, or one of the others, was killed.
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know one way or the other. And you don’t, either.” Something in her face made his mouth twist. “Once we get off this damned island, we can send help back, okay? Anyway—”
He broke off again. Gina frowned at him. His expression had suddenly become closed off, unreadable.
“Anyway what?” she demanded.
He shook his head. Clearly he didn’t mean to elaborate.
“Either we’re in this together, or we’re not,” she said, looking at him hard. “It’s not going to be just you running the show. It’s you and me, partners, or else it’s nothing.” He’d put down his spoon, too, which would have been a more impressive indication of the effect of her speech on him if he hadn’t eaten all his stew by that time. Observing that, her eyes narrowed at him. “So you want to finish what you started to say? Anyway . . . ?”
His eyes were dark and intent as they met hers. His mouth was suddenly grim. “If you’re so eager to share everything, why don’t you start by telling me about the plane crash that killed your husband?”
Pain twisted through her. She’d known he was going to want to talk about that. And she couldn’t. Just could not.