LITMIR.BIZ

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stranger herself.

      Kasey ventured a glance at the stranger’s face. He didn’t look like a bad guy, she thought. And if he did turn out to be one, well, it wasn’t as if she was completely defenseless. There was a gun inside the largest canister on her kitchen counter, right beside the ones containing flour, sugar and tea.

      She’d actually practiced getting the weapon out under adverse conditions—just in case. Jim would have laughed at her if he could have seen her.

      But then, she thought ruefully, as sadness strummed through her again, if he could have seen her, there would have been no reason to have a loaded gun hidden in the largest canister on her counter.

      The stranger’s eyes were still closed.

      And he was still bleeding.

      Kasey made up her mind. She had the training and she could help him, the way she couldn’t help Jim.

      Unlocking her door, she gingerly stepped over him to enter her house. Once inside, she turned around. She was going to bring him in.

      “Okay, mister, this is your lucky night. But I promise you, if you try anything—anything at all—it’ll also be your last night.”

      The stranger opened his eyes again and looked at her. She couldn’t begin to fathom what he was thinking. The next moment, he tried to struggle to his feet. Kasey had the feeling that if she blew on him, he’d fall backward like a stack of cards.

      “Hold it,” she cautioned before he could do any damage to himself. “This is going to be a team effort.” Tossing aside her purse, Kasey squatted down beside him. “Give me your arm.”

      Not waiting for him to comply, she draped his arm around the back of her neck herself. Holding tightly on to it, she placed her other arm around his waist as best she could. To gain a better grasp, she slid her fingers through the belt loop of his jeans. She hoped the loop would hold when she needed it.

      Kasey took another deep breath, bracing herself. “Okay, on the count of three, I want you to try to get up, understand?”

      He made some kind of noise in response. “I’ll take that as a yes.” Ready to push off, she counted, “One, two, three.”

      She only managed to get a couple of inches off the ground before the stranger threw her off balance. Caught off guard, she fell over on him.

      Instantly, Kasey drew back. Had he done that on purpose? She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but trusting no longer came easily to her.

      “You’re going to have to do better than that,” she told him.

      There was no answer. She realized that the stranger was unconscious again and deadweight. She sighed. “Not going to make this easy for either of us, are you?”

      She needed another approach. Rising to her feet, she got behind him and put her arms around his chest. She laced her hands together and pulled him across the threshold and along the floor.

      Progress was made by inches but she had always prided herself on her strength and even in these dire times—or maybe because of them—she worked out religiously, concentrating on weight training and building up her upper body strength.

      Finally getting all of him inside her small house, Kasey felt like collapsing. Not only was the man deadweight, he was rock solid. But rather than take a breather, she straightened up and turned on the closest light. No way would she voluntarily stay in the dark with this man. Closing the door, she turned around to face her uninvited guest. There was a very disconcerting trail of blood leading from the threshold to the living room.

      She was going to have to clean that up before the bloodstains set in permanently. But first, she had to stop the blood at its source.

      Kasey glanced over her shoulder. Her sofa was only a few feet away from the back door, but it might as well have been in the next county. Even if she managed to pull him the distance, she wouldn’t be able to get him onto the sofa. At least, not without going through extraordinary contortions and she was much too tired for that.

      Which meant she had to treat him on the floor. Everything in her training balked at that, but you couldn’t always pick your settings.

      “Not exactly the ideal conditions,” she murmured to herself. She laid him flat on his back. “Who are you and why are you here?” she couldn’t help wondering aloud.

      Well, there was time enough to learn that later, once she stopped the bleeding and sewed up his wound. Despite the situation, a small thrill raced through her. It had been much too long since she’d done anything close to her profession—and she missed it. Missed her life. Missed a lot of things.

      She hurried off to the bathroom to wash her hands and to get what she needed in order to take care of this man that fate, with its sardonic sense of humor, had deposited on her doorstep.

      She couldn’t help the dry laugh that rose to her lips. The way her luck had been going this last year and a half, the man on her floor would probably turn out to be a serial killer. Wouldn’t take much for her to be his next victim.

      Drying her hands, she started throwing things she was going to need into the small, pink rubber basin she kept under the sink: alcohol, swabs, a scalpel and sutures she kept in a small blue container on the top shelf of her medicine cabinet.

      Being his next victim might not be so bad, she mused. It might even be a blessing in disguise. She was weary of hiding, weary of looking over her shoulder so often. Maybe, if he repaid her act of kindness by killing her, at least this awful game of hide-and-seek would be over and she’d finally know some peace. Know what it was like not to have her heart leap up, hammering wildly with anxiety every time the door to the bookstore opened, or she looked up to see someone looking her way. She was tired of all the paranoia. If she couldn’t have her life back, she didn’t want any life at all.

      You’re just tired and not making any sense, she chided herself ruefully.

      If she meant any of that, she wouldn’t be doublelocking her door, or taking all those precautions every day. Maybe this life she led wasn’t so great, but it certainly did beat the alternative. At bottom, she wanted to live. And live long enough to get the person who had killed Jim and tried to kill her.

      After checking to make sure she had everything she needed, for now she focused on her patient. Kasey didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that, as uneasy as she was, she was still smiling.

      The smile faded the moment she stepped out into the living room again.

      There was no one lying on the floor by the back entrance.

       Chapter 2

      For one frantic moment, Kasey thought the stranger had either left, or, worse, lay in wait for her somewhere in the house.

      But then she saw him. It took a second for her heart to stop pounding as she realized that the stranger had just moved. He was still on the floor, but now closer to the kitchen. She guessed that he must have come to, tried to get up and collapsed when he found that the effort was too much for him.

      But why the kitchen? Why hadn’t he tried to go out the door?

      “You were probably disoriented,” she said under her breath as she crossed to him. She knelt down, setting the basin with its supplies next to her. “I can certainly relate to that.”

      Every day, when she first woke up, she had to take stock of where she was and who she was. There were times when it all felt so jumbled up in her brain, she wanted to give up running, give up hiding and just return to her old life.

      Which, she guessed, she’d probably be allowed to live for a total of ten minutes before word got around that she was back and among the living. And someone decided to do something about the latter.

      Was that who this man was on her floor? Someone running from something?

      Or was this an elaborate plan to flush her out, she wondered,

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