He grabbed her arm again, pulled her towards him, kept her in place when she would have pulled back once more. “What makes them any more worthy of rescue than you?”
Her eyes squeezed shut. When she opened them again they were decided. Serene. “OK, so whomever you decide to save, the decision is skewed and the whole thing is just too macabre. But I don’t want to be the one you rescue. I’d rather someone else survived this. I’ll take my chances with the rest. If we’re to die, as you said, maybe it’s now my time.”
“It isn’t your time.”
“How do you know that? It’s not death but more abuse and torture that I’m afraid of. Save someone else.”
He let go of her arm. He just had to press both hands to his head before it exploded with impotence and frustration and futility. “I want to save you all…”
“But you can’t. And there’s no telling when Molokai will detonate the explosives. So get out of here now, while you at least and two of your choice still can. This is a catastrophe and whatever you salvage out of it is better than nothing. Don’t tempt fate any more.”
So she understood how much he’d already tempted fate. Her insight was astonishing. The insight of someone who’d done her share of fate-tempting?
He had walked into the rebels’ territory, expecting to be gunned down at any moment. When he’d reached Molokai in one piece, he’d just let him have his undiluted disparagement. He’d thought it would be the last thing he did.
Still, his gamble had paid off and it had gotten him here. And here he was, doing what he lived to do, giving people solace and reprieve, easing their pain and their degradation.
It was no longer enough. He couldn’t do what he thought he had to. He, too, had thought two lives saved were better than none. But now he’d seen those people, now he’d tasted their desperation and resignation, now he’d touched Gulnar’s life and power and selflessness, he knew he’d been wrong to settle for what he had, to bargain with the devil.
He wouldn’t any more.
Decided, he sighed, drew Gulnar’s swaying body into the curve of his. She flowed into him with no hesitation, burrowed deep. Hunger for access to her, for a connection, rose inside him like a tidal wave. He took her lips fiercely in brief, deep communion .
She didn’t have a lover. He just knew it. She wouldn’t fit into his flesh, merge with his fervor like this with an existing connection occupying her heart and tethering her senses. His heart lifted with the conviction.
How weird. To feel so upbeat at a time like this. When in a few minutes they’d probably all be dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
“ARE you ready to die, Gulnar?”
Gulnar’s lips vibrated with Dante’s words. Then her mind echoed with them.
Are you ready to die are you ready to die are you ready…?
She couldn’t have heard right, could she? His words had mixed with their harsh breathing, her booming heartbeats. He couldn’t have said that. Asked that.
But if he had, what did he mean? Was he saying goodbye? Or could he…?
Suspicion turned to conviction in a heartbeat. Terrible and insupportable, it cascaded through her, lurched her away from him. She had to read his intentions.
But she couldn’t. She found herself gasping for their connection, for his breath. Horror, suspicion, the militants—nothing mattered. Resistance and caution were non-existent. She pressed back into the safest place she’d ever been. Him.
Yes. Whatever he meant. Yes. As long as he was here, she was ready to die.
Then he was no longer here, jerking away from her. Separation jolted through her, harder this time. A militant’s heavy hand had landed on Dante’s shoulder, pulling him away, ranting at him that he’d done what he’d come to do, to just wrap up and get out.
Gulnar’s blood stopped in her veins at Dante’s expression. Just do what he says. Just get out. It wouldn’t take much now to drive the militant to defy his leader’s orders, to negate Dante’s special status. It would take far less than what Dante intended to do.
But maybe her suspicions were invalid. Maybe she’d superimposed her fears and a far-fetched meaning on his words.
His next words told her she hadn’t. “Listen to me, Gulnar. I am this situation’s last chance of resolution in something less than total loss. I have the best chance of doing something without being shot down on the spot. While their orders not to harm me still hold, I have to act.”
God, no. He did mean to do something suicidal. Her cry for him to save himself was aborted by a harsher knowledge. His mind was made up. There was no changing it. Words scraped her on their way out. “What do you think you can do?”
“Anything is better than nothing.”
“And two lives are better than nothing! Don’t be crazy.”
“I was crazy to even consider honoring that sadistic agreement. Two lives are not better than nothing, Gulnar. This way that monster makes me an accomplice in everyone else’s deaths. It isn’t happening. Everyone here gets an equal chance to survive. Or not. I can’t—I won’t choose.” He cupped her cheek in his large palm, contained her agitation. She turned her face into it, her lips, drank deep of his conviction. “Will you help me, bella mia? I wouldn’t have asked if you haven’t already said you were unafraid, even willing to die. Now, if we do…”
She clung to his arms. He just had to listen to reason. He had to! “We don’t have to do anything. You can walk out of here. Please, Dante…”
“No more Dr. Dante?”
“Oh, give me a break.”
He pulled back, his black eyes devoid of intensity, obsidian wells of serenity, a tinge of almost-humor deepening their beauty. He continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “If we do die, it will count for something, because we’d go out as fighters, not victims, and we’d probably end up saving far more than two lives. What do you say?”
So simple. So calm. As if he was asking her to take a ride with him, a ride with a very pleasant surprise at the end. What a man.
Oh, why hadn’t she met him before? Why did she have to meet him now? Find out that he existed just a couple of hours before they had to die?
The possibility of violent, irrevocable loss had always been a fact of her life. She never got close, never let anyone close, expecting people to go away, to die or worse. Expecting herself to.
But she would have made an exception for Dante. She wouldn’t have cared how soon he would have disappeared from her life. Or how. She would have taken her fill of him, fulfilled all fantasies, assuaged all hunger, if she’d only had a day with him. But she didn’t have a day. Not even an hour.
She’d have nothing of him!
No! She’d already had. A lot. He’d given her so much. Much more than she had ever had. Solace. Strength. Wonder. Affirmation. And he would now give her the ultimate gift. He wouldn’t leave her to die alone.
If she had to go, what better way to go than with him by her side?
She willed her lips to move in answering resolve and lightness. Anything seemed possible with him there, seemed worth it. Anything at all. And then some.
“So do we just charge them or do you have a plan?”
“I have a plan.” He paused, his lips twisting. “Sort of.”
“Reassuring!”
His lips spread in a smile. “It’s still forming as we speak. Feel free to make amendments and suggestions. Here it is. We load all the Valium we have into syringes. Then I’ll pretend that I have decided to leave. You will translate for me that I have chosen you and that guy over there to take with me.”
Her heart picked up, sensing an emerging significance. “Anyan?”
“If that’s his name. He’s unable to move on his own and he’s big enough that it’ll take three men to carry him to the door for me.”
It probably would. “What if they get suspicious? Ask why him specifically?”
He frowned. “You can say he means a lot to you—or something!”
Oh? “But will they believe me? I haven’t come near him ever since I splinted his fractures.”
His frown deepened. “You’ve been busy trying to tend to everyone’s injuries. You are a nurse after all.”
“I see. OK. And then?”
“You and I will hover around them, pretending to help, and while they struggle to lift him we will stick the Valium syringes into them.”
Then it would all hit the fan. “And when they shout out, or decide to shoot us before they lose consciousness?” He had asked for amendments and suggestions, hadn’t he?
He nodded, sighed. “I guess all we can do is make sure we inject the whole thing in one go. If we manage to hit a vein or an artery, they’d drop in a second. Otherwise, we have to be ready with pads of cotton to stifle their shouts with.”
OK again. Maybe. A very shaky one. “What about the others? Where would they be while we’re doing all that? Conveniently oblivious?”
He shrugged. “I am not saying this is iron-clad, but I am counting on the total boredom with me and what I’m doing that they’ve displayed so far. They haven’t been watching us at all, and they have no reason to suddenly start watching us like hawks. I also bet they shove the hauling job onto their lowest ranking men. If they are who I think they are, we’re in luck. These men are real slow.”