LITMIR.BIZ

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dammit!”

      Eyes flew open, stark and surprised, first confused and then intense in the glow of her flashlight. There was something riveting about them. Something familiar. And then she realized what it was. They held that same wary, mistrusting look she’d seen in the stray dog’s eyes. And they were just as brown.

      “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

      It seemed the eyes widened after an unnatural time, as if it took extra beats for her words to make their way through his mind. Then he leaped out of the bed, stark naked.

      God, he was thin. Beautiful, and painfully thin. He’d been muscled once; she could still see the remnants, the lines sculpted in his flesh, just rapidly losing definition. Shrinking.

      He glanced down at himself, then at his clothes on the floor near his feet.

      “Go ahead, get dressed. But don’t try anything.”

      He reached for the pants. They looked to be part of some sort of uniform—white pants, as if he worked in an ice cream parlor or a hospital or something. Not warm, that was for sure. He pulled them on, did them up. His feet were bare. He pulled on a T-shirt, then a white uniform shirt over it.

      “I…umm…I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

      His words were slurred, as if he’d been drinking, but she didn’t smell alcohol on his breath. His hair was messy. Dark, too long, as if it hadn’t been trimmed in a long time. And his face had the dark shadow of beard coming in, as if he hadn’t shaved today or maybe yesterday, either. She lowered the gun, tucked it into the back of her pants while he finished dressing, knowing she could handle him fine without it. He was in no shape to fight her and win.

      He took a step toward the bedroom door.

      “No, just a minute,” she said, shining her light on him. “You’re not going anywhere—not until you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.”

      She saw the hint of panic in his eyes just before he lunged for the door. She stepped into his path, the heel of her hand slamming him square in the chest. The impact put him flat on his back and sent her flashlight crashing to the floor. It rolled to the fallen man, came to rest with its beam in his eyes.

      “I’ll ask you again,” she said, standing over him. She was a little breathless, but it was from excitement, not exertion. She loved her work—especially this part of it: the rush of adrenaline, the certainty of a win. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?”

      He got to his feet, picking up her flashlight on the way. She took a step backward, and let him, even while reaching behind her to snug a hand around her handgun, just in case.

      He lifted the light, held it high and shone it on her face, so that she had to shield her eyes. “This was a mistake,” he said, and it seemed to Jax he had to focus intently on each syllable. He was trying hard not to slur his speech. She thought he might be on something. “I’m going now. Y-you’ll n-n-never shee me again.”

      Then he turned the flashlight off, flipped it over and handed it to her. She could see him in the moonlight, standing there, holding her light out to her. It trembled in his hand. He was shaking. She released her grip on the handgun, reached out to take the light, lowered her guard.

      He moved closer, one step, and even as he shoved her chest with the flat of his hand, his foot hooked behind one of hers, ensuring she would go down, and she did. And dammit, she landed on the handgun and bruised her tailbone to hell and gone, which resulted in her barking a stream of cuss words as the man fled. His feet pounded down the stairs.

      She surged to her feet, pulling the gun and rubbing her ass with her free hand. Then she grabbed the light and limped into the hall after him as she flicked it on.

      The sounds of his retreat were clumsy. He didn’t go out the front door, but through the back, through the kitchen, where she thought he might have fallen down once. She raced through the house, but by the time she reached the kitchen, he was gone.

      The back door stood wide open, and as she swung her light around the room, she noticed the broken pane of glass, its sharp fingers pointing inward, while other bits of glass lay on the floor. His point of entry. There were a pair of socks there, too, and puddles where shoes must have been standing.

      He’d run out into the Vermont winter night with thin pants, no socks, and no coat that she knew of. And he’d held that flashlight on her in a very telling way. Overhead, above eye level. And in his left hand. He held that flashlight like a cop held a flashlight.

      She still had her boots on, no coat, but she’d survive. She had to see where he had gone. So she stepped outside, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, and studied the footprints in the snow.

      He’d headed around the house, and she followed the tracks. She had no intention of chasing this guy down, just wanted to see where he went, whether he had a vehicle or not, and if so, get the stats on it. Make, model, plates.

      But she didn’t see a car. The tracks vanished at the neatly plowed driveway. She walked around a bit more, and when she heard a sound, she crossed the street and moved off the road a bit, trudging past trees to the large, flat, snow-covered meadow that lay just behind them.

      She shone her light around that meadow, looking for footprints, but there were none. She was sure he had come this way. She took a few more steps, shining her light this way and that.

      “Why are you running away?” she called. “What is it you have to hide?”

      She took a few more steps, then stood still, just listening. The night wind blew softly, whispering and even whining now and then as it blew past the naked limbs of wintry trees. And then there was another sound, a sharp creaking, cracking, snapping sound that seemed to grow louder. She swung her head left and right, because the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

      And then she felt the icy rush of water over her boots, and snapped her head down. The snowy meadow on which she stood wasn’t a meadow at all. It was a pond. A frozen pond. She’d wandered almost to its center, and the ice was giving way beneath her feet.

      3

      “Oh, hell,” she muttered, and then the ice gave way completely, and her body plunged into the freezing water. The shock of the cold engulfed her, made her go rigid, drove the breath from her lungs as the water closed over her head. And then she forced herself to move, to struggle for the surface. She kicked with her legs, reaching above her head with her arms, flailing in search of a handhold. Once, she felt the edges of the ice above her, and tried to grab on, but the ice broke away in her grip.

      She tried again, her lungs nearly bursting with need. And this time, something gripped her. Someone gripped her, a slick hold on one wrist, then the other, and then she was being pulled steadily upward. Her head broke the surface and she sucked in greedy gulps of air even as she blinked her eyes.

      The man lay on his belly on the ice beside the hole her body had made. His eyes met hers and held them, clearer than they had been before, but still…off somehow. “Try not to move. I’ll get you out.”

      She nodded, the motion jerky. God, she was so cold her entire body was shaking with it. He crept backward on his belly, drawing her with him. Her upper body slid up onto the ice. But then the ice crumbled and she went into the water again. Still the man didn’t let go. He held on to her and kept moving backward, steadily, constantly, until he’d pulled her onto the ice again. This time, she made it farther, but when the ice gave yet again, it gave utterly, and she realized as she went under for the third time that he was in the water, too. Beside her in the hellish cold. God, they were both going to die.

      He put his hands on her waist, thrusting them both up to the surface again. With a solid boost, he shoved her up and out of the water. From the waist up, she was on the surface of the ice. He gripped her backside and pushed her up higher, and she helped, pressing her palms to the ice to pull herself along. She drew her legs up beside her, shivering so hard she could hear her teeth chattering as she looked back at him. He was still in

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