Black Ice - Anne Stuart [65]
She scooted over to the corner of the bed, wrapping his coat more closely around her, pulling the threadbare blanket over her as well. She was hungry, a notion that horrified her. When her nephew had died in a car accident she hadn’t been able to eat for days—the very sight of food had made her nauseous. But now, even after seeing Sylvia’s brutalized body, she was famished. Part of the survival instinct, she supposed. It didn’t make her feel any less crass, but there it was. She wanted to survive, and she needed her strength to do it. And to be strong, she needed to eat. It was that simple.
Where the hell was he? At least he’d left her the light. She would have been screaming and climbing the walls if she’d awoken alone to total darkness.
He was right, she wasn’t the sort to be crippled by complexes. She’d actually thought she’d gotten over it years ago. She had no problem with familiar places, elevators or dark basements.
It had been her fault in the first place. She’d been eight years old, tagging after her older brothers, always trying to do what the older kids did, refusing to realize her own limitations. The mines were off-limits, even to the older boys, but no self-respecting teenager would pay attention to danger warnings. They would, however, stop at bringing their younger sister on such a risky adventure, so her only choice was to sneak after them. One wrong turn too many, and she’d lost them in the warren of passageways deep below the ground.
They hadn’t known she’d followed them, and no one realized she was missing for hours. Her flashlight had given out, and she’d been trapped in the darkness, in the middle of Miller’s Mountain, while time lost its meaning and monsters crawled at her from every corner. By the time the search party found her she’d been in the dark for nineteen hours, and she didn’t speak for two weeks after the ordeal.
Her father used to joke that after that she never stopped talking. She had a sensible family who carted her straight off to the best therapists, and by the time she was twelve she no longer had to sleep with a light on. By the time she was fifteen she could go down into the basement again, and by the time she left for college she thought she’d put it all behind her. Until last night.
It was probably just the accumulation of horrors that had suddenly made her weak and vulnerable again. She accepted that fact, grudgingly, just as she accepted she needed Bastien’s help. And she might even tell him so, if he ever got his skinny ass back here.
Except he wasn’t precisely skinny. She’d had a good look at his body in his apartment yesterday, whether she’d wanted to or not, and he was long and lean and smoothly muscled.
And she wasn’t going to start thinking about that, even though she should have welcomed the distraction. In the end she was more comfortable thinking about being trapped in a small room with monsters trying to kill her than she was thinking about Bastien Toussaint’s, or whoever he was, naked body.
She didn’t even hear him approach. She didn’t know whether the room was soundproofed or he was simply very silent, but she was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring fixedly at the tiny beam from the flashlight and trying not to think about him when the door slid open and he was standing there.
“Are you all right?” he asked as the door slid shut behind him.
She took a deep breath, trying to sound unconcerned. “I’m fine. I don’t have any idea what time it is, but shouldn’t we be starting toward the airport?”
He said nothing, moving into the room. She saw the spark, and a moment later he’d lit candles that she hadn’t realized were there. “You’re not going to be flying out tonight.”
The knot in her stomach tightened.