Darkness by Karen Robards Page B

can bandage that up for you.”
    As she spoke, she deliberately refocused her gaze on his chiseled abs and tugged his pants down his lean hips. It said a lot about her state of agitation that she didn’t even really see a single ripped inch of him.
    He pulled the Mylar blanket across his lap.
    That caught her attention, made her blink.
    Not a creep, then , she thought, then followed that with a sardonic, Oh, yay. Like the fact that the threatening guy with the bullet hole in him doesn’t seem to be a perv makes this all better .
    That’s when it hit her: if he had a bullet hole in him, then somebody might really be hunting him.
    Through the storm. On Attu.
    Her stomach knotted. Her breathing quickened. She had her fingers hooked in his shorts—soggy, icy boxer briefs—as well as his pants and was pulling both off him at the same time. Her cold fingers clenched in a death grip around the freezing wet cloth as she darted a nervous glance out past their small circle of light, at the gusting, swirling fog of snow and ice. The near-whiteout conditions partially reassured her: it was inconceivable that anyone would be hunting him in this. Besides, if the three who’d been on the plane with him were dead, who was left to track him down?
    Good question. With, she realized with a sharp increase in her anxiety level, nothing but bad answers. Because clearly he was convinced someone was.
    “I’m not going to hurt you, you know,” he said. She’d ducked her face to try to keep her thoughts hidden as she dragged his pants down long, hard-muscled legs. His words were so unexpected that she looked up, and thus inadvertently met his gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, and heavy-lidded with what she thought was a combination of exhaustion and pain and the effects of too much cold and too much sea. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
    Great . Clearly her efforts to keep her thoughts hidden from him had failed, and just as clearly he was trying to reassure her. His gaze was calm and steady. But she thought she detected a stillness behind it, a predatory stillness, as though a part of him were crouched and waiting.
    To see what she was going to do.
    And God help her if she did the wrong thing.
    Should she believe him, trust in the truth of what he was telling her? Trust that he wouldn’t hurt her, that she didn’t need to be afraid of him?
    Only if she were dumb as a box of rocks.
    “I’m not afraid of you,” she lied. One thing she’d learned over the years was that showing fear to a predator was never a good idea. “I never thought you’d hurt me. Why would you? I’ve done nothing but help you. And without me, you’re toast.” With that less than subtle reminder, she pulled his pants the rest of the way off. “Can you get your shirt off?”
    “Yeah.” He struggled to do so while she yanked his socks off and hastily dried his feet and legs with the bloodstained turtleneck and thought frantic thoughts that she did her best to marshal into some sort of a cohesive plan.
    Shoving dry socks onto his icy, blue-with-cold feet—he made a sound under his breath that she thought denoted pleasure at the sudden warmth—she tried to come up with some way to communicate with Arvid and the others but couldn’t think of one. Wrestling her size-six but fortunately spandex sweatpants up his legs, she pondered the chances of making it back to camp in the storm but concluded that they were so small as to be nonexistent.
    “Wait,” he said as she got the pants about halfway up his thighs, which were thick with muscle and a real test of the cloth’s capacity to expand. She paused, in action and thought, to look at him. He’d managed to get his shirt off and was reaching down beneath the Mylar that was still tucked around him to grab onto the waistband. She glimpsed brawny arms and one wide bare shoulder and then they were both wrestling with the pants.
    “You’re going to have to lift your butt,” she told him, slightly breathless