“A fair bit. Why?”
She placed a hand on her hollow-feeling stomach. “I was sort of hoping you’d know how to scavenge breakfast.”
“I usually carried a bag of supplies with me when I spent a day in the woods.”
She sighed wryly. “Oh, well. I suppose it won’t hurt me to diet for a couple of days.”
He gave her a leisurely once-over. “You hardly need to diet.”
She looked quickly toward the cave opening to hide an unexpected and unwelcome blush. “I’m very thirsty again. Maybe I’ll risk another drink of that stream water before we move on.”
Donovan’s reply was lost in a loud crash of thunder. Chloe started, proving that she was still very much on edge no matter how calm they were both pretending to be. “It sounds like it’s going to rain,” she said, trying to cover her jumpiness with nonchalance.
The sound of a hard rain filled the cave almost before she’d completed the sentence. A gust of wind pushed a fine mist inside, chilling the cool air even more.
“Yeah, I think it might rain,” Donovan murmured.
“Great.”
“That’s not such a bad thing. Any tracks we might have made last night will be eradicated by a downpour this heavy.”
She knew he was trying to put a positive spin on their circumstances for her sake. She appreciated the effort. “What’s our agenda now?”
“We can wait out the rain here for a while. There’s no need to go out in it.”
“And when the rain stops?”
Looping his arms around his upraised knees, he looked toward the opening. “We move on.”
She kept her own legs outstretched, keeping her poor feet as still as possible. The thought of hiking several more miles was hardly pleasant. The cave was dry and well-hidden—both of which made her reluctant to leave—but they couldn’t wait here for rescue. For one thing, no one was looking for them—except their kidnappers.
“Do you think we’ll be able to find our way out of the forest before…well, before anyone finds us?”
“We’re going to be very careful about who finds us. Our biggest problem right now is figuring out which direction to go when we leave the cave. We’re probably in the middle of several thousand uninhabited acres. If we go deeper—farther from civilization—it could be days before we stumble across anyone. I hate to risk going that long without food.”
“But if we go back the way we came, we could run into the kidnappers.”
“Exactly. I’m sure they’re still looking for us—and they might well have brought back-up.”
“So?”
“We do our best,” he replied. “I’ll make some educated guesses—and we’ll hope for some luck.”
“Are you usually lucky?”
It was nothing more than a quip, intended to keep the conversation light. But instead of smiling, Donovan frowned and let the question pass unanswered.
After an awkward moment, Chloe tried again to keep him talking. The weather was always a nice, neutral subject, she figured. “It sounds as though the rain has settled in for a while.”
He nodded. “It’s coming down hard.”
She pulled the denim shirt more snugly around her. “It’s getting colder.”
“Not much. It’s just that the air blowing in is damp, which makes it feel cooler.”
“At least the cave is a bit elevated, so the water isn’t running in.”
She didn’t even get a monosyllabic reply that time—just a grunt. They might as well have been back in the car again—only this time she didn’t even have passing scenery to entertain her.