The night had been terrifying before, but now, knowing something had happened to Jeb, Honor found the dark intolerable. Tipping her head back, heedless of the way the ropes cut her as she twisted, she tried to see the stars, but the thick pine needles hid even that much from her.

Anything, anything at all, could come crawling out of that darkness now, and she couldn’t even run or try to protect herself. Thoughts of foot-long bugs and giant spiders seemed a lot worse than Mrs. Gilhooley.

Who was still hovering around like a bad odor, Honor thought, shivering. Oh, God, how long till morning? How long until night would give way to dawn, until the chill would succumb to the warmth?

And Ian, even with Jeb out of commission, was walking into some kind of trap, and there was no way to warn him. Short of sending him frantic messages, which wasn’t an easy thing to do when she couldn’t be sure he was getting them.

Her skin prickled suddenly, as if it had been brushed by something. But nothing was there. She thought immediately of insects. Snakes. Ghosts.

And then she heard the low rumble. At first she wondered if it was a distant storm. But gradually she realized it was approaching, growing louder. Aircraft engines. Lots and lots of aircraft engines.

A bombing mission, she thought, and wondered how close it would be. It couldn’t be here, of course, or there wouldn’t be any trees. All the trees would long since have been knocked down or blown to smithereens.

As soon as she had the thought, the night burst with the brilliant white light of explosion. Almost before she understood what was happening, there was another…and another…and another. Coming closer. Oh, God, coming this way!

Why were they bombing the trees?

Dirt showered her, and her shoulder stung as something hit her. The shock waves kept rolling over her, leaving her breathless, and she couldn’t even cover her ears with her hands. She felt as if she were caught inside the thunder.

She was going to die. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind that she was going to die.

Another series of explosions began to approach from the same direction as the first. Carpet bombing. Saturation bombing. Oh, God, whatever you called it, they weren’t going to leave a tree standing or an inch of ground untouched. An explosion. Another one. More dirt showered her.

Suddenly something fell on her, covering her. She opened her mouth to scream, to release the intolerable terror in the only way she could, when she realized it was a body. A body had fallen on her. Jeb?

“Honor! Honor, it’s me!”

Ian! Oh, God, it was Ian! His mouth against her ear. His hands gripping her shoulders.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he shouted, even as he slashed at her bonds with his knife. They gave way quickly. He didn’t bother with her hands. Another run of bombs was making its way toward them. He hauled her to her feet, but her legs gave way, numb from endless hours of immobility. In an instant he tossed her onto his back and held her by her wrists as he ran through the night.

She couldn’t imagine how he could see anything at all. Nature had never made a night as dark as this, as dark as a cave’s interior, the darkness punctuated only by the hellish explosions of the bombs. The light kept blinding her, and she couldn’t see a thing. How could he?

They were both going to die, she thought as dirt struck them again, this time with enough force to sting. Ian shouted something to her, but another explosion drowned out his words.

Turning her head, she buried her face against his neck and tried to close her mind to the danger and the fear. How could he run like this with her on his back? Tirelessly, it seemed. Effortlessly.

Another bomb exploded, so close this time that her cheek stung from the heat from the blast. Then another. God, they were coming closer! She pressed her face to Ian’s neck and prayed harder than she’d ever prayed in her life.

And on into the night he ran.

 

“Here.” Slowly Ian squatted and eased her from his back to the ground.

“The bombs…”

“It’s okay now,” he said. “It’s okay. They’re heading the other way now.” He reached for her wrists and began to saw away the rope.

She couldn’t see a thing until another bomb exploded and the light fell across them. He was wearing some kind of goggles, she realized. That must be how he managed to see when she felt utterly blinded.

Another explosion, and she realized he was right. The sounds were retreating now. Dirt was no longer showering them.

“Somebody’s going to get hell come morning,” Ian remarked, as calmly as if they were sitting on the porch sipping tea.

“Why?”

“They missed the bombing range by a quarter mile, that’s why.”

“They weren’t supposed to blow up the trees?”

He finished cutting the rope that held her wrists, then raised his head and looked straight at her. She couldn’t read his expression, because his eyes were hidden behind those strange goggles. “No,” he said slowly. “They weren’t supposed to blow up the trees. Or you.”

Suddenly he grabbed her, and she found herself crushed to his hard, broad chest, held as if she might slip away if he didn’t hold her tightly enough. And suddenly, very suddenly, she felt safer than she’d ever felt in her life. And closer to tears than at any time in her memory.

“Is it…is it okay if I get hysterical?” she asked shakily.

“Sure, baby. Sure. But…maybe you can hold off just a little longer? Until we get to the car?”

He helped her to stand again, and this time her legs were able to support her. He led the way through the thick growth at a brisk pace that kept her breathing heavily. From time to time he paused and let her catch her breath, and then they were off again. In silence. With a sense that something was following. Pursuing them.

Not until they were in Ian’s Jeep did the feeling of pursuit quit. When she drew a long, sobbing breath of relief, he reached out and squeezed her thigh gently. “Just a little longer, honey. Hang on just a little longer, babe.”

So she did. But it wasn’t easy. As the realization of safety, however temporary, sank in, the control that had kept her going all day began to evaporate.

They were driving down the dark road at breakneck speed, and she had no idea where they were going. Some corner of her mind kept trying to tell her that she at least ought to ask, but it somehow didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was that he had found her and saved her at the risk of his own neck. After this night, there was nothing she wouldn’t trust him with.

She was astonished when she realized they were on the air base proper, and even more astonished when he pulled up to what appeared to be a motel beneath towering oaks.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Base TLQ. Temporary Lodging Quarters. Be right back.”

Before she could enquire further, he was out of the Jeep and headed for a brightly lit doorway. Temporary Lodging Quarters, she thought inanely. Count on Uncle Sam to come up with a name like that. What were they doing here?

Ian was back in just a couple of minutes. Without a word, he drove down to the end of the long, low building and then parked. “You’re staying here tonight,” he said.

She was? Moments later they were inside and the night was locked out. Ian stood with his back to the door like a guard and looked at her. “Now you can get hysterical.”

She shook her head slowly. She didn’t feel like it anymore. She felt exhausted, miserable, filthy and scared, but not hysterical. “I just want to shower. Why did you bring me here?”

“I want you someplace safe while I go take care of that old woman once and for all.”

“What—?” No. She cut herself off. Not right now. Right now she was going to get in the shower. Maybe then she would be up to questioning him about his plans. But now, right now…

His arms were suddenly there; his hands were suddenly helping. Some kind of dissociative state, she thought. She was numb, and she only thought she was coping.

Gently he stripped her filthy, sweaty clothes away, then his own. Gently he helped her into the shower, and gently he washed her from head to foot, using bar soap on her hair, but that was all they had, and anyway…anyway…

She never knew when she started crying.

Afterward, she remembered Ian lifting her from the tub, wrapping her in towels, drying her as tenderly as if she were a baby, and finally tucking them both beneath the warm covers of the double bed. There he cuddled her close and let her cry her eyes out.

 

“I thought I was dead.” Her voice was rusty, cracked, and her eyes ached from weeping.

“Me too. Oh, God, baby, me too.” His voice was a husky sound in the dark. Rough. “I didn’t think I’d get there in time. You kept falling asleep, and I couldn’t feel you….”

“That’s how you found me?”

“After dark. Before dark I tracked you. It was easy. But when it got dark…you remember that game where you’re blindfolded and trying to find something, and somebody directs you by saying you’re getting hotter or colder as you move? And then you’d fall asleep and there wouldn’t be any ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ to guide me.”

“Something happened to Jeb. I heard him scream.”

“He’s dead.”

There was a finality to his tone that said he was sure of it. She didn’t question him further. “It was a trap. You were supposed to get killed.”

“I know. And you were the bait. I know.”

“But…the planes weren’t supposed to bomb there.”

“Yeah.” He paused and then squeezed her close. “It sure makes you think, doesn’t it? If she could do something about that, affect instrument readings or whatever…” He let the words trail away.

“What do we do now? Give up?”

“Screw that,” he said, steel running through his voice. “No. I’m going to put that bitch to rest for good, if I have to take that house apart board by board to do it.”

He touched her damp hair and patted her shoulder with the awkwardness she found somehow endearing. “Now, try to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll be right here. Nobody’s going to hurt you, Honor. Ever again.”

That promise warmed her deeply and eased the last of the tension from her. In a little while she was asleep, surrounded by his strength, his heat, his promise.

 

Pink light edged around the corners of the generic white curtains on the windows and cast a rosy glow through the room. Honor sighed, trying not to think about the problems still facing them, and turned onto her back.

And looked in cat-green eyes. Ian was propped on his elbow, watching her, and he made no secret of what he was thinking. It was plain in his eyes, in the flush on his cheekbones, on his parted lips. He wanted her.

“Like hell on fire,” he said, in answer to her thoughts. “Like nothing I’ve ever wanted before.”

She turned toward him with no thought except that the man she loved wanted her and there was no greater joy on earth. All the horror of the day before faded away beneath the brush of his hands, the heat of his mouth and, finally, the weight of his body.

 

“I want you to stay here while I go back and get to the bottom of this.” He was lying on her, still joined to her, as the sweat on their bodies slowly dried. She was running her hands along his sides, but she stopped suddenly when he spoke.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to put you at risk again. Look what happened yesterday.” He lifted his head so that he could look down into her eyes. “She knows we’ve figured out that she’s hiding something. She tried to kill you. Tried to kill us both. You don’t think she’s going to leave it alone now, do you?”

“So you expect me to let you go back there and face it—her—alone?” Her voice was calm, but she saw at once that he wasn’t deceived. That was the tough part about dealing with a telepath.

Suddenly he grinned, and his incredibly boyish expression at once amazed her and warmed her to her very toes. “Don’t even try,” he said, his voice a deep rumble. “The better I get to know you, the easier you are to read. You’re not coming with me, and that’s that.”

 

Two hours later she was beside him in his Jeep. She’d just had to be stubborn, that was all. And had to promise to stick to his side as if she were attached by glue. Not that he would have hog-tied her in the room or anything. Ian wasn’t like that. He would never force her to do anything against her will.

But he could exact a lot of promises, and he had.

It wasn’t that she wanted to face that ghost again. At this point she was all but ready to abandon the house and spend the rest of her life paying off the mortgage. But she couldn’t let Ian face that thing alone. No way. If she had stayed behind, she would have chewed her fingers and climbed walls and finally called a cab to take her there anyway.

As they neared their neighborhood, Honor could have sworn she felt Mrs. Gilhooley, as if the old woman’s ghost were poisoning the air with evil. And for an instant, one long instant, she allowed herself to wish she was driving away from here, never to return.

She glanced at Ian from the corner of her eye and wondered what he was thinking. Wondered if he were reading her mind. Damn it, there ought to be some kind of flag he put up, so that she would know when her privacy wasn’t absolute.

But even as she had the thought, she cast it away as petty. She didn’t have a thing to hide, except possibly her anxiety that he would lose interest in her the moment the ghost was gone. And to tell the truth, she honestly couldn’t imagine him staying interested in her for long. Why should he? She certainly didn’t have anything a billion other women didn’t have.

“What are we going to do about Jeb?” she asked him as they jolted down the dirt road toward their houses.

“I already notified some people that he had been out there. They’ll look for him.”

“I wish I knew what happened to him. I was arguing with him, and he ran away into the woods, and then I heard him scream.” And the memory of that scream was going to stay with her for a long, long time. Ian’s hand settled comfortingly on her shoulder and squeezed. She gave him a grateful look.

“He probably tripped on something and broke his neck,” Ian said quietly. “But all I know for sure is that he was dead before I found you. I can’t explain how, but I just know when someone dies.”

Honor waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t even try. I probably couldn’t understand in a million years what it’s like for you.”

 

If it was possible, the shadows beneath the live oaks around her house looked even darker this morning, as if the Florida sun couldn’t penetrate them at all. As if they were doorways into another world.

“Listen,” Ian said. “You just wait at my place while I search.”

“No.”

He turned his head and looked straight at her with those odd green eyes. “No?”

“You taught me how to use that word,” Honor remarked as she shoved her door open. “No.”

Ian filled an insulated jug with water and ice, while Honor changed into clean clothes. Then they headed next door with the jug, a couple of crowbars and two flashlights.

He really meant it, Honor thought. He was going to take the place apart board by board if necessary. And she was darn well going to help him. Enough was enough. There couldn’t possibly be anything hidden in that house worth Jeb’s death. Worth the attempt to kill the two of them.

The shadows sucked the heat from the day, and there was no mistaking the chill beneath the trees. It wasn’t natural, Honor thought now. No way should shade be this dank and cold.

The house was worse. Never in a million years would she have bought this place if she had felt then what she felt now. Mrs. Gilhooley’s presence was an evil miasma, haunting the entire house, her rage an almost palpable thing.

Honor instinctively glanced at Ian, thinking that if she could feel it, it must be much worse for him. His face revealed nothing, probably the best indicator that he was exercising a great deal of self-control.

“Let’s start in the attic,” Ian said. “Something about her antics yesterday made me think I was getting close.”

“Six of one…” Honor shrugged, leaving the sentence incomplete.

At the foot of the attic stair, the chill had grown almost arctic.

“Maybe you’d better go wait at my place,” Ian said as she recoiled from the cold spot. “Honor, really, all I’m going to do is wreck your attic. I can do that all by myself.”

She tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m not leaving you alone. Quit suggesting it.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the way your dad raised you, does it?” he asked as he started climbing the stairs.

“Probably. All that stuff about not deserting your buddies got to me.”

He gave a small chuckle that was probably supposed to be humorous but didn’t quite make it.

Almost the instant they were both standing in the attic, the wind outside kicked up savagely. The roof creaked threateningly overhead, and branches tapped like bony fingers at the round windows.

“Probably building up to another afternoon thundershower,” Ian remarked as he set down the jug and the flashlights. “Okay. I started at that end yesterday and got as far as that one raised floorboard over there. That’s where we’ll start. The only question I have is, do you want me to nail everything back in place as we go?”

Honor looked around and shook her head quickly. “No, damn it. Let’s just get this done. I’ll worry about fixing things if we managed to get rid of her.”

“We might save some damage if you try to peer behind the lath with the flashlight. Chances are any place she used for hiding something would have been easy for her to get to, so it’s likely to be easy for us, too.”

“We wish.” She jumped a little as the tree limbs tapped on the glass again and realized they had lost the sunshine. Well, so what? Picking up a flashlight and a crowbar, she started where Ian indicated.

For a long time, the only sounds were the creaking of nails being pried up, and the clatter of boards being moved, along with the protesting groans of the roof as it was battered by the growing wind. Ian stopped once to take a drink and peer out the huge round window.

“Storm’s brewing,” he said.

“So what’s new?” She had her nose tucked into a small crack and was wishing there was some way to bend light so that she could get illumination in behind one of the thin boards.

“It’s a coastal climate,” Ian remarked. “We get more sun than Seattle, but we get our share of rain, too.”

“There’s been an awful lot lately.” At last she succeeded in figuring out that there was nothing in the small crevice. “It would sure help if we knew what we were looking for. A ring could be hidden almost anywhere. A diary, on the other hand—” A loud rumble of thunder made her look up. “More of that, too, I guess.”

“Yep.” There was a creak as he yanked up another board and a clatter as it fell aside. Wind gusted again, and for an instant it sounded as if hail were rattling against the windowpanes.

All of a sudden, lightning flared and thunder cracked deafeningly, the strike so close that the house shook and Honor felt her hair stand on end. At just that moment the attic stairs snapped up and closed with a slam nearly as deafening as the thunder.

Honor and Ian looked at each other across a space turned gloomy by the falling light. Neither of them wanted to comment on the stairs’ closing without human assistance. After a moment Ian turned his attention back to the hole he had just opened in the floor. A hollow drumbeat of thunder sounded again.

“Honor?”

She turned to look at him. “Yeah?”

“I found it.”

 

It was a diary, the cardboard cover mildewed, many of the pages stuck together from humidity and age. Neither of them even thought of going downstairs and getting comfortable with a beer. They sat cross-legged on the floor and used both flashlights for illumination.

“I’m almost scared to see what’s inside it,” Honor said as Ian used the tip of a penknife to pry pages apart. “I mean, if she could murder her husband, I hate to think what else she might have done. And there must be something she really wants to hide.”

A loud clap of thunder shook the house with its force as Ian lifted the flyleaf and gently folded it back.

“At least the atmosphere’s right,” Honor remarked, trying not to notice the way the shadows were deepening. “If we had candles, they’d blow out right about now.”

He answered with a soft chuckle, but kept his attention glued to the diary. These were the answers they needed, and everything else would have to wait. “Reading this could take a while. But at least it looks as if she didn’t write a whole lot on most pages.”

Nor was it a very thick or large book. It was, in fact, a fifty-page marbled black composition book of the kind that Honor had used throughout elementary school. The first page was given over to the rather childish inscription My Diary, Mary Jo Schmidt.

Inside, the pages were dated, and it was soon apparent that Mrs. Gilhooley had started this diary while she was still a little girl. And it was soon equally apparent that the horrors had started early. There were tales of mutilated frogs put in other children’s lunches. Later she wrote how she had drowned a little boy’s new puppy. And on each page there was more.

Honor shuddered inwardly. “It looks as if she only wrote down the terrible things she did. There isn’t anything else in here.”

Ian nodded. “A listing of her crimes, as if they were triumphs. And look how she gloats that no one ever suspected her.”

That was just as chilling as anything else, the way the child understood that her actions were wrong, hideously cruel. They weren’t simply acts of petty, childish vengeance, but instead were carried out only for the pleasure they gave her.

More than once Honor looked up and met Ian’s eyes, sharing their recognition that Mrs. Gilhooley had been twisted all her life.

The storm was drawing closer, growing worse. Rain rattled like machine-gun bullets at the two windows, and each gust of wind made the house groan. Neither of them noticed. As they turned the pages, one by one, they journeyed deeper into the darkness of an evil mind. Whatever had been wrong with Mary Jo Schmidt as a child had grown into something far deadlier as an adult. The incidents became rarer, but grew worse, until at last they found her description of killing her first husband.

Honor edged closer to Ian, instinctively wanting to offer comfort, even though the scars were a lifetime old. He already knew all of this, and there couldn’t be any unpleasant shocks for him here, but still she wished she could make him feel better.

He didn’t seem to notice the gesture, though. He just kept turning pages and scanning them while the storm raged and the light faded to almost nothing.

“There,” he said suddenly. “I knew there was something else to that. I wondered if the old woman ever knew the truth of that, or if Maggie lied about me on her own.”

Honor peered over his shoulder, squinting to read the faded ink by the yellow beam of the flashlight.

“Bill?” Honor asked. “Her stepfather?”

Ian nodded. “Bill Gilhooley. Damn, that explains a whole lot, her knowing about that.”

There was more, a lot more, about finally forcing Maggie to swear it was Ian who had gotten her pregnant. Forcing the girl to swear that Ian had “witched” her and made her do things against her will. Bill Gilhooley himself helped with the “persuasion” that forced the girl to lie. It was hardly to be wondered that she killed herself. Or that Mrs. Gilhooley, her very own mother, had given her the rat poison to do the deed.

Ian closed the composition book. “I guess there’s no question what she’s been trying to keep hidden.”

“I guess not. It kind of makes you wonder, though, what kind of mind would do such things and then become so obsessed with hiding them, even after death.”

Ian just shook his head. He’d seen plenty of the worst people could do, things that made Mrs. Gilhooley’s activities seem like minor peccadilloes, but he didn’t claim to understand such people.

“Well,” he said, “it seems all we need to do is get this diary out of here and turn it over to the police. Then she won’t have anything to hide anymore, and maybe you can live here in peace.”

Instead of feeling relieved, Honor felt a piercing sense of impending loss. She could live in peace, and he could go back to his undisturbed solitude once he no longer felt honor-bound to protect her. The prospect was grim. And another thought occurred to her. “Won’t she get mad now that her secret is out?”

“Probably. But only for so long as it takes us to expose it.” In one smooth, easy movement, he rose to his feet and extended a hand to help her up.

“Want to celebrate?” he asked, a sudden, unexpected sparkle in his eyes.

The expression made her breath catch, and she ignored a deafening explosion of thunder. “Celebrate how?” Her mind threw up a whole series of exotic, erotic images.

“Exactly like that,” he said. “Each and every one.” Catching her to him, he initiated a deep, hungry kiss that promised a night filled with sensual delights. “Oh, baby,” he whispered roughly, “just you wait. Now, let’s get out of here so we can have fun.”

Releasing her, he walked over to the attic ladder and stepped on it. The ladder, which was sprung like a fire escape, should have swung down beneath his weight. It didn’t. He jumped on it a couple of times, then looked at Honor. “Has this ever gotten stuck before?”

She shook her head. “There’s no way it can get stuck. If the springs were broken, it would just fall open. And it only locks in the open position.”

He jumped again, harder, with no success. “Well, hell,” he said disgustedly.

That was when Honor smelled the smoke. Ian smelled it, too, at almost the same instant. Bending, he touched the stairs with the palm of his hand. As soon as he looked up, Honor knew the worst.

They were trapped in a burning house.

 

Whenever it had started, the fire was seriously out of hand by the time they discovered it. A look around the shadowy attic revealed wisps of smoke that had been gathering in the air, seeping up from the floors below. Even as they looked around the attic, flames burst up between a pair of joists that Ian had left uncovered as the ceiling material below went up in smoke.

Oh my God, Honor thought numbly. Of all the ways to die, she would have picked anything else in the world. Smoke stung her eyes, and she coughed, watching with disbelief as Ian put the floorboards back over the exposed areas.

“To slow it down,” he said. Reading her mind again. Then he grabbed a crowbar and went to knock out the beautiful round window at the back end of the attic. When only jagged pieces remained in the frame, he yanked off his T-shirt and used it to protect his hands as he pulled the last of the glass away.

Honor found herself standing right beside him, watching the play of his muscles as he let in the fresh, stormy wind and prepared a hope of escape for them.

“People jump,” she said. “When the heat gets to be too bad, they jump rather than burn.”

His strange green eyes met hers. “I know, honey. I know. If it comes to that, we’ll jump together. We’re only on the third floor. We’d have a shot.”

Suddenly she was more scared of losing him than of dying in a fire. Much more scared. “Ian…Ian, I never said…I never told you—oh, God, I’m so glad I met you!”

He caught her in a brief, bone-crushing embrace and muttered something in her ear that sounded like, “You’re the only person on earth who’s ever felt that way.” Then he released her and went back to clearing the window frame of glass.

It seemed to take forever, though it probably took only a few moments. Finally he hoisted himself up and leaned over the edge, taking stock of the situation. A muffled explosion below was followed by a tinkle of glass, telling him the fire downstairs had reached flashover. It would be a raging inferno now, and the only way out would be through this window.

But the branches of the oak that had been rapping against the window were slender, bony fingers without the strength to bear even Honor’s weight, and any sturdier branches were beyond their reach. Trying to jump would offer only a slim chance of success.

All of a sudden, he reached for the snap of his jeans. “Give me your jeans, too.”

Confused, she didn’t move immediately. She was still trying to cope with the idea that they might burn alive.

“Honor, your jeans. I’m going to make a rope.”

Understanding at last, she quickly stripped them off, then watched as he slashed both pairs in half with his ever-present hunting knife. Then he tied the strips together into a rope that, while not quite long enough, would make it possible for them to get down to the first story before jumping.

“Okay, grab the other end and pull as hard as you can,” he said. “See if the knots hold.”

The smoke was getting thicker in the attic, and her eyes burned like fire from it. Doing as he said, she leaned back with all her might and weight to test the knots.

Suddenly the attic stairs fell open, and flames fountained straight up, almost instantly igniting the lath above it.

“That does it, babe,” Ian said roughly. “Options all used up. You go out that window first. I’ll hold the rope.”

He was tugging her to the open window, but she resisted briefly. “How will you get down?”

“I’ll nail the rope to the wall. Don’t worry. I’ve been in tighter spots.”

She didn’t doubt it for an instant. But she very definitely wanted him out of this one now.

It was like being in gym class again, she thought wildly as she watched him wrap denim around his forearm so that it wouldn’t slip. Then he was helping her over the window ledge and she was perched dizzyingly, her feet against the siding, her hands hanging on to the denim rope for dear life.

“Come on, sweetheart. You can do it. Just back down slowly. Go on.”

Reaching back for skills she hadn’t used in years, she inched her way down, ignoring the shrieking of her muscles, ignoring her fear, ignoring everything except the fact that the sooner she got down, the sooner Ian could come down, too.

And then she reached the end of their makeshift rope.

“Jump, Honor. Go on. It’s not eight feet to the ground. The worse that’ll happen…”

Is a bruise, she thought, and let go.

As soon as she hit, she knew she was going to have a football-sized bruise on her hip. But that didn’t matter. Scrambling to her feet, she backed away from the burning house and looked up at Ian.

Only he wasn’t there. The denim rope hung down the side of the house, but there was no Ian to be seen. And where he should have been, there was nothing but flames.