Uncharted by Adriana Anders
Chapter 18
Survival depended on lots of factors. Training played a part, at least for Leo, and overall fitness—both physical and mental. There was instinct too—that indefinable thing that told people to duck when they hadn’t yet heard a weapon being fired. In the air, instinct had saved her ass over and over again.
Led by instinct and hardheadedness, she bent, slid her numb hands under Elias’s shoulders, and let herself fall back—his weight working against gravity to keep her up. They went maybe five inches, but even that pulled his feet from the water, bringing the promise of dry ground that much closer.
Her hard exhale blew a cloud of vapor into the air.
Wet fabric clung to their bodies, held them in death’s cold grip, seeping through skin into muscles and bones.
The only thing that kept her brain moving and her lungs pumping was her will to survive.
She looked down at the man who’d saved her life, splayed out like an oversized rag doll, and amended that thought. It wasn’t just her will that kept her here. It was Elias’s.
And now it was payback time.
Another heave back and up, over rocks that dug into his heavy frame, hard enough to bruise. Didn’t matter. What mattered was getting him dry and warm. Before his heart stopped.
Talk about a shitty twenty-four hours.
For some reason, that made her laugh. The spasms started low in her belly to mingle with the shivering that still wracked her entire frame, and came out of her mouth in weird bursts, the sound nothing like her usual voice.
Another foot up, closer to the trees now. Close. Close.
Another foot, another.
Was his shivering slowing down? Oh no. That was bad. She leaned forward and grabbed his chin in one hand, said his name loudly. No response. He was cold and wet and pliable as a dead fish.
Had to get him out of those clothes.
Shit. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get them into the shelter of the trees and off this wet, pebbly shore.
His eyes opened. They were green, not the light brown she’d thought. Green and clear as glass in the fading daylight. They met hers, held them for three long seconds, and then rolled into the back of his head.
“Oh, no. No, you don’t,” she whispered, her voice having let out ages ago. “You stay here, Elias. Stay with me.”
Bo let out a low, mournful sound, drawing Leo’s attention back to the water’s edge. The bag. There’d be something in there she could use.
She raced down as fast as her feet would take her, half crawling and stumbling over the sharp, uneven rocks, and dragged the pack up.
In an offhand way, she noticed something pinging in her knee when she knelt beside him. Other pains popped in and out of her consciousness. Her head thrummed, as if swollen to ten times its size. Didn’t matter. Her fingers were red and raw and ached like someone had taken a hammer to them, her feet were bleeding through the cold, wet socks she still wore, leaving dark footprints in their wake. Nothing mattered but getting dry and getting warm.
Even words made a difference, so she used them, out loud. “Dry.” She pulled out the first thing she found—a boot enclosed in plastic. No. It dropped to the side. Another boot. Two more.
Something else—soft and rolled up—also in plastic.
“You get Best Prepared in high school, Elias? Huh?” No way could these ice-block fingers open the zip lock, so she brought it to her mouth and bit through it, gnawing like a beaver, then pulled the plastic apart. Sleeping bag.
She spread it out on the rocks, turned to him, hands out, and hesitated.
His clothes.
Something like despair took over when she looked at how big and soaked he was—how many layers he’d put on. How impossible it would be to undress him.
Then she remembered the knife at her waist.
The coat she unzipped. The next layer, too. She did hers, scrambling out of them as fast as she could manage. One layer, another, another, each gripping at her skin like heavy, wet eels.
Next, him. His socks came off, flung aside, his outer pants, then the inner layer—of which, she noticed, there was only one. Bastard made her put on three!
It was his shirt she had to cut off, the thinner one, too, before she stopped dead at the gash in his side, oozing blood, just above his hip.
She sagged, breathed for a second or two, then forced herself back into motion.
From his pack, she grabbed another wet bag, ripped it open, pulled out whatever item of clothing was in it and shoved it against the wound. Damn bullet got his abdomen. How was he not dead?
She swiped at the blood and eyed it again. Not a bullet hole. A graze. Something in her belly released, letting her breathe almost normally again. Blood seeped out, but she’d seen worse.
Time to move him. No, wait. Underwear. As efficiently as she could manage with lead weights for limbs, she slid her blade from his waist down his thigh, slicing the fabric open, without sparing a second’s thought to his nudity.
Back to the underarm hold, she hauled him up to the side, away from the remnants of wet clothes and onto the sleeping bag, ignoring his pained moan. Pained moans were good. If he cursed her right now, she’d be ecstatic.
Another scavenging dive into the backpack—more dry clothing that she threw on top of him, stopping when a particularly rough bout of trembling took her over. Shit. Shit, she couldn’t see straight. Panic tried to edge in.
She used action to push it back. Get dry.
Working hard to stave off exhaustion, she looked at herself, tore the last clinging layers from her body, grabbed the emergency blanket from his bag… Another reach… There. Something bulky and soft. The other sleeping bag, followed by another plastic package. Oh, hallelujah! Foot warmers. She knew better than to put those right on his skin, but with a layer or two of insulation, they would help.
She turned on aching knees, caught sight of his massive, shaking form, and stuttered to a stop.
How should she…?
Never mind. There weren’t a million choices of how two people could get warm together. There was one. And she set out to do it.
***
Elias groaned at the painful wrenching of one foot, then the other. Back off! he tried to say, though all he produced was a garbled mumbling.
What the hell was pulling at his hands? He shoved at them, hard. Useless. Useless. He didn’t have the energy to protest. His eyes closed, darkness beckoning like a bridge to the afterlife.
Someone called his name.
No. No.
A jackhammer to his head—loud and abrasive. He tried to swat it away, but couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift his arm or his head or make a word with a tongue that was a big, dry slug in his mouth and—
Liquid flowed in and back out, gagging him so he turned and retched. More of it, more.
Over and over. Again. Again. Burning, pain, tingling, moaning. Low, guttural throbbing every time he breathed a fiery path from mouth to lungs. Excruciating agony.
“Come back, Elias.”
Come on. Come back. Come back come back come back.
I’m here. Here.
A hand on his shoulder, down his arm, back up. Chaffing. Firm, solid. Real.
Darkness. Warmth. Cocooned.
He shivered again, shaking the body above his. Encased in something soft and warm. Warm.
Forever passed. Years.
“Come on, Elias. Just take this and I’ll leave you alone.” He listened, tried to move. “We’ve got to get you warm. Get warm and go. We can’t stay here.”
He couldn’t open his eyes, but let her pry his lips apart, then swallowed the hard little pills, followed by a mouthful of icy water. After sputtering, he tried to settle back and let out an annoyed grunt when she forced more on him. Another swallow. Another.
“Warn me if you need to pee.” Her voice vibrated from her chest into his.
An unexpected laugh shook him—a dying donkey sound—and their bodies moved in tandem, hers half covering him, like a blanket.
“Wait…” He raised one arm just enough to slip it up and over her soft back. “Naked,” he sighed before sinking into dreams of cold, chilly fog and warm, wet female.
***
Leo cracked her eyes open and immediately shut them again, not ready to face the pounding in her skull or the danger surrounding them or, more than anything, the fact that she was lying on a man she barely knew without a stitch of fabric between them.
A tug of the sleeping bag revealed what appeared to be daylight. Crap. Had they spent the entire night here, out in the open, on the lake’s shore?
Somewhere close by, a dog whined.
She swallowed over a thick, swollen throat and the movement pressed parts of her closer to the person she was currently snuggled up to. Naked.
There was no dignified way to get out of this, but maybe if she put out a foot and an arm and inched to one side, taking some of her weight off his…
He groaned, shifted beneath her, and lifted his hips, proving that at least one part of him was awake.
Whoa.
“You conscious? If so, I need you to tell me, ’cause this is kinda…” Hot wasn’t the right word for the situation, but it was what her brain supplied her with. It took a second before she came up with “Inappropriate.”
Another long, low sound emerged from him, this one more of a rough hum. Good. At least he was still alive.
Yeah, well, the hard-on had sort of told her that.
Now time to get off it before this developed into something completely different. Warmth curled in her belly. She ignored it.
“Okay, Elias. Can you open your eyes? You awake?” She craned her head from the sleeping bag, strained to lift up and get a good look at his face, then glanced out at their overbright surroundings before letting the bag fall shut again, careful not to jar his side.
Yep. They’d slept here all night, their naked bodies sandwiched together. It was a terrible spot to have spent the night in, out in the open like this, the sun just coming up in the east, its rays heating the insulated nest she’d created for them.
At least he looked better, though. The parts of his skin she could see were pink instead of gray. That had to be a good sign.
“Can’t stay here.” Her heavy head dropped back to his chest, in direct opposition to her urging. “Have to move.” She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay here and sink back into the blissful heat, the musky smell, the languid pleasure of skin against skin.
One arm slid up and over her, not tight, but warm and comfortable. This shouldn’t feel as good as it did. Not only was this not the time or the place, it really wasn’t the person.
Her libido apparently didn’t agree. If it had its way, she’d make her slow way down—
No.She reared back, dislodging that possessive arm and letting in enough cold and sunlight to make him open one of his eyes. The iris lazily focused on her, and the pupil, she was relieved to see, was reactive. It went pinprick small against the glare. “What the hell are you made of, woman?” He grimaced. “Barely human.”
“I’m not the one running around carrying me everywhere.” She started to lean back and dropped again when the movement put all the focus on her nipples, rasping through chest hair. It made her pulse frantic, her insides heavy with desire.
He coughed out an approximation of a laugh, and she felt a twang of something beyond embarrassment or discomfort or even the attraction simmering in the infinitesimal space between them.
It was warm and squiggly and way more uncomfortable than lust. It contained more feelings than she was used to. Like lust squared.
Without another thought to her nudity, she threw off the cover and rolled from him—right back into the sharp, cold, gravelly nightmare of the lake shore. “Shit!”
“You okay?”
“What are these stupid rocks?” she said, much angrier than the pain in her shins warranted.
He grunted. “I’m not sure.”
“What kinda tour guide are you?”
He let out another low laugh. “Got an extra toothbrush in my bag. Does that help?”
“Five stars.” She didn’t watch him stretch and then jolt when the pain hit his side, didn’t want to see the thick curves of his chest or the curled hair that had set off that ache in her nipples. “But honestly, look at this place,” she blustered, struggling to stand, naked and turned on and really, really unhappy about the situation. “When I asked for rustic,” she said, with a good dose of forced humor. “I figured there’d at least be walls, you know?” He smiled, the white of his teeth stark against his dark beard. It sent a liquid rush to her belly—and lower. “The yeti’s a nice touch, though.” She reached into the pack and pulled out the first item of clothing she found—a long-sleeved thermal T-shirt. “With that pelt, you’re like a…hipster Paul Bunyan or something. Hipster barbarian. Barbarians of Instagram.” If anything, the cotton highlighted the two sharp points of her breasts. She forged ahead, intent on distracting him—or her, mostly—from this unfortunate want. “You look like Jason Momoa and Tom Hardy had a baby and…” His puzzled expression made her stop. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
He shook his head, bringing her focus down to his mouth. In the dawn light, with sleep still marking his features, it didn’t look hard at all. It looked soft and pliable.
What am I doing getting sidetracked by the sexy yeti?She drove her attention up to his eyes and forced a good dose of iron into her next words. “Can you move?”
He lifted the bag and looked down at himself. “Need a minute.”
It took her a beat to understand what he meant. Then, of course, her eyes shot down before her brain had caught up with it. After that, her eyes raced up to meet his—which was another mistake. The man was freaking gorgeous. She knew that, could see it in the perfection of his body parts, the symmetry of his features. The unruly hair and beard barely hid what was underneath. She recalled the pictures of him from before. The ones showing a man being sought for all those murders. His face had seemed too perfect back then, his smile too golden, eyes too limpid. Too good to be true.
This truth, though, of a smooth stone gone rough was so much more appealing. His beauty plucked a chord deep inside her—the answering call of a person who’d become less, not more, polished by life. Sanded down not to a smooth center but a pitted, jagged, broken core that very few people ever saw. If any.
“How old are you?” she asked without realizing she’d even opened her mouth to speak.
“Thirty-nine.” He raised his head and lowered it, as if in pain.
“You okay?”
The sound he made wasn’t even close to a laugh. “Alive, aren’t I?”
“Any frostbite or anything?”
He concentrated for a few seconds—probably wriggling fingers and toes. “Think I’m good.” A pause, during which he avoided her gaze. “Thanks to you.”
“What kind of man doesn’t tell his partner when he gets shot?” She huffed, pulling on a second dry layer from his pack. “You were wounded and you carried me.” Shaking her head, she threw him a dirty look. “Jackass.”
He was so quiet, she almost didn’t hear him say, “Partner?”
“What?”
Ready for a confrontation, she turned to meet his eyes, only to find that there wasn’t an iota of aggression there. “This you breaking my balls, Leo?”
She snorted. “That’s right.” The fleece she pulled on was too big and it smelled like him. Ignoring the goose bumps, she threw one his way.
“Good.” He smiled, catching her in his spell before the shirt landed on his head. When he lifted it off, though, he didn’t look quite so happy. In fact, if she had to pinpoint exactly how he looked, she’d say guilty as hell.
Which didn’t bode well for this partnership thing.