Worth Dying For (2 page)

“Here to work, my ass,” he mimicked, throwing another angry look her way as he stopped behind the tree Bane occupied and began to relieve himself.

Bane’s throat tightened as he resisted the urge to reach down and grab David by the scruff. The stench of urine assaulted Bane’s nostrils, reminding him in a very immediate manner that his patience would be tested many times in the coming days. David moved away, ignorant of how close he’d come to having his head separated from his body, and gave Amber another baleful look.

Didn’t the woman have any idea of David’s hostility towards her? Bane had known him for a matter of minutes and already had him pegged as a manipulative coward. Amber seemed oblivious to the tension emanating from David when he returned to camp, and smiled at him as he slumped to the ground beside her.

“Shall we set up the tent first? It’s getting late and I don’t know how much daylight we have left.”

“Fine.”

His curt reply confused her a little and she paused a moment to stare at him as if waiting for an explanation, but when David seemed determined to ignore her, she sighed and continued with the task at hand.

They set up camp in a small clearing just off the edge of the sand, where the rough sea grasses grew and the land became firmer. The spot was a safe one—or as safe as it could be for the type of visiting wildlife they might have expected. Guns, flares and bear spray were placed close at hand in case of emergencies and they stored their food well away from the sleeping area.

Bane observed their efforts to protect themselves from anything nature could throw at them. For the woman’s sake alone, he was glad they didn’t know there was nothing that could save them from the predator lurking in the darkness of the forest.

* * * *

Amber’s hand tingled as she fought the desire to slap herself in the head. It was all she deserved for being such an idiot. Why had she agreed to let David come? He’d always been a jerk, albeit a good looking one and she’d been foolish to think that their working relationship wouldn’t be affected by his attempt to seduce her at a recent Faculty party. As usual, she’d thought wrong.

 
“Shall we eat?” she asked a couple of hours of work later when she got bored of waiting for David to speak to her.

“I don’t care.”

Ok, he’s still sulking
. Amber resolved to ignore him and focused on setting up the small stove. What was it with men that they never showed their true colours before you’d gone and committed yourself to spending time alone with them? David had seemed to handle her rejection well, and their relationship had gone back to the easy-going banter they’d had before. Had he secretly been angry the whole five months?

Amber smiled to herself as she acknowledged that her usually shitty luck hadn’t changed—if it was raining soup, she’d have a fork. She thought she had lucked out when the chance to use some of the University’s budget before the end of the financial year had been presented to her. Amber had racked her brain and come up with a paper-thin excuse for a field trip—to study the flora and the entomology it attracted on a previously un-researched island in the Maine Archipelago. To her surprise, her proposal hadn’t been questioned when she submitted it to the Dean. Richard Snell had simply raised an eyebrow, grunting in derision as he signed the approval form.

“Take a junior colleague with you,” he’d said in a mock stern voice, bunching his eyebrows in a way that was meant to be intimidating but only made him look funny. “Let’s at least get some staff training out of it, shall we?”

Amber suspected that the older man, who she’d worked with for a decade and considered her mentor, understood her need to get away. He’d been a rock for her after recent events. The scars from a traumatic year—one she’d managed to survive despite her doubts at the time—ran deep and burying herself in work was fixing nothing but she knew of no other way to cope.
 

The heavy shroud of despair such thoughts always brought began to descend and a pain started at her temples.
 
Amber straightened her spine, mentally throwing off the pain as she searched almost desperately for something to distract her.
 
She turned to the young man almost vibrating with tension beside her.

David Carmichael’s gorgeous exterior said nothing about the man he had proven himself to be. At thirty, he was only five years younger than her, but it may as well been five hundred years for the difference it made in his maturity. He was pouting like a three year old.
 
The urge to tell him how adorable he looked died on her lips as she realised he might take her words as an invitation and she’d have to reject him again. She bit her tongue and hoped he’d forgive her and start talking to her again before she died of boredom.
 
But as David’s silence stretched on and on, she gave up on him and organised supper instead.

“Food’s ready,” Amber announced after another hour of silence, forcing herself to smile even though he’d turned to her with a frown still on his face. God, had he always been this moody?

David took the plate she offered, the gloom in his brown eyes lifting a little as she held onto it until he looked at her. The dimples he’d been hiding reappeared and he smiled for the first time in ages.

“Thanks.”

Amber ran her fingers through her hair, guilt gnawing at her insides. It might actually be her fault he’d misread her overly friendly attitude since they’d left the mainland, but she’d simply wanted to show him she held no grudge about what had happened. But when he’d grabbed her in front of Eli, she’d stopped trying so hard. David could have no idea that she’d begun to feel…well, kind of tacky, especially with Eli questioning the relationship between them. Had a male professor taken a younger woman alone with him to a deserted island, Amber would be up in arms about it and rightly so. It didn’t make her feel any better that she knew she would have preferred to take the trip on her own.

She tried to explain, “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea. I’m not ready to date anyone yet since…since…well, just not right now.
 
What I need more than anything, David, is a friend.
 
Is that okay?”

To her relief, he simply nodded and threw an arm around her shoulders to drag her in for a brief hug.
 
When he let go before she had to pull away, Amber hoped he had finally understood.

The island was beautiful, despite the eerie silence hanging over it.
 
Amber wondered at how quiet the birds were.
 
The only reason she knew they were there at all was because she’d seen them sitting up in the high branches they’d approached the island.
 
Maybe a storm was brewing, although the clear sky gave no hint of one. The vivid colours of the surrounding scenery clashed with each other brilliantly, even in the shade thrown across the beach by the trees shielding them from the evening sun. The island was almost entirely rock-bound and spruce-covered, save for the tiny strip of beach they’d managed to land the dinghy on. From there, the terrain grew rather more rugged as sand turned into small, smooth pebbles then became large boulders draped in multi-coloured seaweed. Between those larger rocks, tide pools teamed with life.
 
Taking photographs of the miniature worlds contained within the pools was one of Amber’s favourite pastimes and she looked forward to capturing the secrets contained in their watery depths—but that would have to wait until they had at least done some research.

David and Amber sat in companionable silence as dusk fell with a dazzling display of purple, red and orange streaks across the sky as the last rays of the sun died out. They were eventually shrouded in an inky darkness broken only by the light from the stove.
 
Amber took a torch down to the ocean’s edge and washed the plates from earlier before returning and tidying away the evidence that they’d eaten. David fired up a small generator, flooding the campsite with light.

Any hope she’d had their friendship had reached a new level of understanding was blown to pieces when he moved towards her as soon as they’d sat down again.

“Hi,” he murmured, pressing his lips against her cheek. Amber almost laughed.
 
The boy had some
cojones
—that was for damned sure.
 
Either that or he was just plain stupid.
 
After the way he’d acted earlier, he was lucky she was even speaking to him, forget anything else.

“Wow, I’m tired,” she said, shifting away from him and blocking his advance with an arm she raised to stifle a fake yawn. Amber was going to have to tell him, in words of one syllable, that she had no intention of sleeping with him…ever. But she wimped out and decided it could wait until morning because she couldn’t handle another epic sulk. Not yet.
 

A sudden breeze tickled the skin of her neck and a shiver crawled up her spine, making her jump. She turned to see if David had touched her but his arms were at his sides.
 
Her gaze flew towards the trees behind them, scanning the darkness, desperate to find the cause of her sudden discomfort.

“There’s something out there,” she whispered, grabbing David’s arm.

He laughed, making her feel stupid. “Well, if there is, it ain’t human.”

“What if it’s a bear…or something?” She felt foolish even as she said the words, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that eyes were watching her from somewhere in the black forest surrounding the beach.

“Oh, man. Bears?”

David’s mirth didn’t help much, but Amber found herself smiling in response to his teasing, knowing there could be nothing hiding in the night that could seriously harm them. Still, when David unexpectedly wrapped his arm around her shoulders, she jumped out of her skin again. It took everything she had not to shout at him to leave her the hell alone. Maybe he just wanted to comfort her but she knew he would read too much into it if she allowed him to hold her. She shrugged him off, too tired to care if he got mad again.

“Do you want to go inside?” he said, in the kind of voice she would use to console a frightened child. His patronising tone bugged the crap out of her but she let it slide and got to her feet.

“I’ll protect you, honey.”

David lifted her into his arms without warning. Amber screeched as she suddenly found herself in mid-air.
 
Struggling at first until it seemed he wouldn’t put her down, she finally gave up and held still so he wouldn’t hurt himself. At six feet tall, she matched David in height and couldn’t have weighed much less than he did. His trying to carry her was as silly as her trying to do it for him. Why did men have to act this way?

David collapsed, gasping for air in a very unflattering way, after he dropped her onto her bunk with a loud grunt. His ragged panting drowned out any other noise until it morphed into gargling snores when he fell asleep within minutes.
 
Okay, so she was relieved she wouldn’t have to fight him off—again—but she could have done with a little company, at least until her nerves settled.
 

Soon, the tent seemed much too quiet. Amber called out a couple of times and cleared her throat as loudly as she could but besides the odd mumbled grunt or two, David stayed fast asleep.

So much for protecting me
, she thought, and tried to calm herself by running through a mental list of things she needed to do in the morning. But she couldn’t focus with the darkness and silence closing in on her. Why hadn’t she thought to bring her book into the tent? Amber toyed with the idea of getting it but, wimp that she was, she couldn’t make herself go outside alone.

“Get a grip on yourself, Amber. You’re a grown-ass woman who has been in much scarier places than this,” she whispered, placing her feet firmly onto the canvas covered sand, determined to go get her damned book. But then something rustled near the tent—
God, please let it just be the wind in the leaves I can hear
—and she jumped back onto her bunk and buried her legs under the sleeping bag.

 
Time seemed to wind down to a stop and her trepidation grew at every sound or movement that didn’t come from her. Her heart pounded in hard, painful lurches, keeping pace with the pulse throbbing loudly in her ears and beating at her throat. Amber couldn’t hear anything other than the sounds of her own frantic heartbeat and her ragged, erratic breaths. She opened her eyes wide, her gaze drawn to the walls of the tent, watching for shadows she was sure would appear.
  

She began to pray, mumbling the words under her breath, clinging to them for strength. Her mother’s voice came to life in her head and Amber remembered how she always told her daughter that if she was ever afraid, she should call on God for protection. Dorothy Kirkwood had more faith than a woman who’d lived her life should, and Amber always wished she could find as much solace in her beliefs as her mother did.

As a lapsed Catholic, fearing things you couldn’t see wasn’t alien to her. The priests at St. Mark’s used to terrify her with talk of the Devil claiming her eternal soul if she as much as had a bad thought. The cold sense of dread crawling over her skin in the dark, claustrophobic interior of the tent still had the power to paralyse her with fear, just as it had when she’d lain in her bed as a child with the priests’ words ringing in her ears. Three decades ago, she had been a kid and easily scared by the unknown, but there seemed to be no logical reason for the panic she felt now. Her body ached where her muscles had seized up and she dared not turn around or even close her eyes. Amber couldn’t move.