Page 38

The way was definitely damper now, fissures forming irregular ridges in the stonework. He flicked a look high up at something that had caught his eye and nearly convulsed. “Did you see that?”

Kit stopped, staring at the place where he pointed. “Where?”

“Above us. Something crept along that ridge up there where the water’s dripping.”

“An animal something? Your squirrel?”

“Nah.” He beamed the headlight and clenched his jaw. A scream bubbled out of him in a decidedly unmanly volume. “It’s a rat.” He grabbed her forearm and swiveled her in line with the exact spot. “There. There’s a rat right there, big as a cat.”

She looked closer, squinting. “Oh, I see it now. I’d say it’s more hamster size, though.”

He now understood what it meant to have your skin crawl, because his was writhing in disgust. Spiders, snakes, even scorpions he could handle.

But rats ... The scaly tails, silent paws, yellow teeth.

Defense . What could he do? He snatched a fallen rock.

“Don’t worry. If it comes close, I’ll take it out with this. ”

“The rat is not interested in us, Cullen. It’s got a nest up there, which means we’re probably getting closer to the surface. They’d have to live near food and water, right? Nothing grows down here for them to eat.” She paused. “The rat is a good thing.”

He pulled in a breath through his nose. “A rat is never a good thing.” He realized she was giggling at him, and he tried to force himself to relax a notch. “What? So I’m not a fan.”

She was laughing harder now, both of Tot’s hands clutching fistfuls of her hair. “A big, strapping ex-cop is afraid of rodents? Yelping like a kid?”

He did not slacken his grip on the rock. “Tons of individuals would agree with me on this point, Kit.”

“You’re overstating to distract from your terror.”

He chose to ignore the word. “I’m not. That thing probably has hundreds of relatives waiting in the wings. Who would be okay with that situation? No one. No one at all.”

She continued to giggle.

Miffed, he went on. “List for me the people who would be fine traipsing along a tunnel filled with creatures that live in sewers, probably teeming with rabies. It’d be a short list, I’ll tell you.”

“It’s actually pretty rare statistically for a small rodent to have rabies,” she said, between spurts of chuckles.

How much did the woman read, exactly? She was a walking encyclopedia. “Rodents are vermin,” he said as calmly as he could. “Haven’t you ever heard of the black plague?”

“The plague was transmitted to humans by the fleas on the rodents, technically, not by the actual rats themselves.”

“That’s hardly a comforting factoid, and anyway, the rats might scare Tot.” Well, now he’d lost it. There was no saving his ego.

She held up a palm, her giggles subsided. “All right, Cullen. Whatever you need to tell yourself to get through this. I’ll go first with Tot, and you can keep watch for a rat ambush. Can you live with that?”

He opened his mouth and closed it. “Now I’m coming off like a chicken.”

She smiled and tugged the brim of his baseball cap. “Totally, but a really handsome, six-foot-tall chicken.”

He could not stop the grin. “You think I’m handsome?”

“The best-looking chicken I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks.” Ego thoroughly checked, he flattened himself against the tunnel wall. “You two go. If it makes a move, it’s going down.”

Her giggle bounced and echoed in the passageway, and he was sure he was never going to hear the end of his cowardice.

Rock in hand, he smiled. He didn’t mind being the source of merriment for Kit, but he fisted his weapon tight anyway, shoulders to the wall so he could keep the rats in his field of vision in case of a rear attack.

He didn’t fully exhale until he’d edged by with no incident.

Rats behind him, he moved closer to Kit and Tot. A gradual bend brought them into a damper area where they had to tiptoe around small puddles that trickled into larger ones. Water oozed through cracks in the stone walls. Ominous? Or did it indicate they were moving in the right direction?

Minutes bled into hours, or so it seemed to Cullen as they trudged through the void. The clammy chill felt ever more oppressive the farther they traveled. It was almost ten when Tot began to fuss.

They had to continue on for another fifteen minutes before they came upon a stretch that was relatively dry with the added benefit of a couple of rocks that could act as seats.

Cullen lifted Tot off Kit’s back. The bottle in his pocket wasn’t warm, but his body heat had at least kept it tepid. With a painful effort, he eased down on a stone and offered the milk, which Tot took after a couple rejections, swallowing only a few ounces before refusing any more.

“Oh Tottie. You’re tired of this dark place, huh?

Me too.” He asked Kit for a handwarmer, then wrapped it carefully in his spare knit cap before he nestled it near her tummy.

She wriggled, but he distracted her with a graham cracker.

There was no way he was going to risk cereal bits falling all over and enticing the rat brigade.

His ribs throbbed with a steady pain now that he was stationary, the muscles tightening with the cold.

Kit unwrapped some protein bars and gave him one, which he ate with his free hand. She followed that up with a water bottle. His throat was parched, and he would have happily downed the whole thing, but there was simply no way to tell how much farther they’d have to travel. A couple sips would do.

Kit turned off her headlamp, and he did the same after activating the handheld lantern, which did little to dispel the heavy darkness. They listened to the steady rippling water and the quiet shushing, which he sincerely hoped wasn’t caused by rat activity.

She gazed at the way ahead of them. “Feels like we’ve been hiking for days. Did Archie mention how long it took him and his friends to get home through the tunnel? Or how many miles it extended?”

“If he did, I sure don’t remember.” He tried to shift to one side on his rock seat to ease his aching bones.

Kit sighed. “I wish he was here with us.”

“Me, too, only I’d be in trouble about the rat thing.”

“You’re still in trouble over the rat thing,” she said with a laugh.

He enjoyed the way her laughter surrounded him, enveloped him, cheered him even in this dank place. “Yeah. Might just ruin my whole rep.”

With Kit holding Tot and him the diaper, they managed to change it and get her dressed again.

He draped Tot over his shoulder with the handwarmer sandwiched between them.

A tight circle of patting and walking did the trick, and she grew heavy in his arms. Kit tied her on Cullen’s back, and they set off again, headlamps on.

He didn’t feel too refreshed, and he was still thirsty.

Kit must have been too, but she didn’t complain.

“There was a culvert type thing near my middle school, all damp and dim like this place,” he said. “We used to climb around and slide down the sides and such. Thought we were hot stuff, impressing the girls to get them to go out with us.”

“Did it work?”

He chuckled. “Nah. I eventually grew up and figured out it took more than teen bravado to get a date.” He paused, feeling the moment opening up before him. “Do you date much?” Slick, the way he’d brought up that topic. His palms grew sweaty, as if he were an eighth-grade boy again.

“Me?”

“Of course, you. Tot’s decades away from entering the dating pool,” he joked.

“Not much.”

He ignored the defensive shell that coated her words.

Sometimes people needed to be coaxed. He didn’t think they’d have many more opportunities to walk so close together, momentarily safe from threat, literally treading on common ground.

Besides, the idea of growing closer to Kit drew him like a moth to a porch light.

“Why not?” Did his comment read as rude or interested?

She tipped her face away from him, sending the light from her headlamp running from his. Darkness piled in between the beams. He tried to think of what to say to smooth over the awkwardness he’d obviously created, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

“That’s kind of personal,” she said finally.

“I thought we’d already gotten personal.” He thought of their conversation about her family and his. Wasn’t that personal? He shrugged off the frisson of alarm. “I’m curious by nature.” Especially about her.

Her light separated a fraction more from his. “It’s because of work. I don’t stay in one place too long since I started my trucking company. I don’t have time for relationships. I have a business to run.”

Her strides grew longer, faster.

He suspected she probably hadn’t been immersed in another person’s life intensely since her marriage dissolved.

Yet here they were now, with no one but each other, and they hadn’t landed in this spot by coincidence.

God worked in mysterious ways. He pointed out a glimmering puddle, large as a hubcap, which they skirted single file before he plunged in again.

“But you control your schedule, right? And where you’ll be?

Where you drive and how you stack the jobs? So if you met someone interesting—”

“Yes,” she interrupted, the clipped word echoing slightly in the dank space. “I am in charge of my schedule, and like I said, my focus is business, not relationships. What about you? How’s your dating life?”

He smiled at the way she’d turned the tables. “I like dating. I like interacting with people in general, women in particular.”

“Anything serious?”