Everything within her had been precariously balanced on high-alert status ever since she had run from the man who had tried to kill her. The edgy fire of Drake’s kiss sent her over the edge.

She clutched at his shoulders and threw herself into the embrace with ferocious abandon. She was frantic for release, any kind of release. She needed something, and in that moment she did not care if it came in the form of an act of violence or an act of passion. She just wanted to be free of her invisible prison, if only for a short time.

If Drake was startled or taken aback by her fierce response, he did not show it. There were a few seconds—the span of a couple of fast heartbeats—during which he seemed to be adjusting to the unexpected development in their short acquaintance. And then, like a driver who thought he was going to be getting behind the wheel of a compact car but discovers that he is piloting a turbo-rezzed sports car instead, he took back control of the kiss and floored the accelerator.

With a low, husky groan, he whipped her around and pushed her up against the nearest concrete pillar, caging her in. He deepened the kiss, giving her the kind of wild, over-the-top intensity that she wanted and needed. She fought him for the embrace with a passion that bordered on violence.

Until that moment she would not have believed that she was capable of such a response to a man. She could feel the hard shape of Drake’s heavy arousal and knew that she was not going into the wildfire alone.

Drake finally broke free of her mouth to kiss her throat. He flattened one hand against the pillar, leaning into her, and started to unfasten the front of her jacket. She found his belt buckle with her fingertips and fumbled with it until she got it undone.

The sound of an approaching car shattered the overcharged atmosphere.

Drake surfaced first. His fingers stilled on her jacket. He wrenched his mouth free and rested his damp forehead against hers.

“Damn,” he said. He was breathing hard. He used his hand on the pillar to push himself away from her. Quickly he refastened his belt. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Good grief,” Alice whispered.

She was stunned. Her legs were shaky. She was breathing too fast, and her senses were sparking and flashing, leaving her thoroughly disoriented.

A car turned the corner and entered the aisle in which the rental was parked, the driver cruising for a free space. Drake bundled Alice into the front seat, closed the door, and went quickly around to the driver’s side. He got behind the wheel.

Together they both sat silently, staring straight ahead through the windshield, as the innocent sedan moved slowly past the rear of the rental.

When the sedan disappeared around the corner, Drake made no move to start the car. Instead he continued to focus on the view of the shadowed garage. Alice did the same. Her brain seemed to have gone blank.

“Are we going to talk about this?” Drake asked evenly.

Alice took a deep breath. “Probably better if we don’t.”

“Maybe, but sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it.”

“Stress,” she said. “It’s been a tough year.”

“That’s your excuse,” he said. “What’s mine? I was about to have sex with you in a parking garage.”

“I take it you don’t do that on a regular basis?”

“No,” he said. He gave that some thought. “Not that I’m against sex in a garage, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

The laughter welled up from out of nowhere. It swept through Alice in a cathartic kind of hysteria. She laughed until she cried. Houdini jumped down onto her lap and made soft little sounds. She clutched him close and sobbed into his fur.

Drake sat quietly until the tears stopped flowing. When it was over he handed her a tissue without saying a word.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

She blotted up the last of the moisture from her eyes. An unfamiliar sensation came over her. It took her a moment to identify the feeling. She finally came up with the right words.

“This is going to sound weird,” she said, “but I feel much better now.”

“Good to know.” Drake started the car and reversed out of the parking space. “Speaking personally, I may never recover.”

She laughed again, but this time the laughter sounded right, at least to her ears. Drake flashed her a quick, wicked grin and drove out of the garage onto the street.

Houdini hopped up onto the back of Alice’s seat and bounced up and down a little, unable to contain his excitement.

“You’re such a little speed junkie,” Alice said.

Chapter 8

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THEY DROVE THROUGH THE gates of a private airfield. A sleek, unmarked jet stood ready and waiting. Drake’s overnight bag and Alice’s two suitcases were removed from the trunk of the rental and stowed aboard.

“Are we going to fly all the way to Rainshadow?” Alice asked as they walked toward the plane.

“No,” Drake said. “There’s no landing strip on the island. No strip long enough for the jet on any of the neighboring islands, either. We’ll use the jet to get as far as Cadence and take a floatplane from there to Thursday Harbor. I’ve arranged to have a company boat waiting for us there.”

“Why not take the floatplane all the way to Rainshadow? I remember seeing floats landing in the bay.”

“The last I heard from my brother is that it’s not safe to fly anywhere near the island now,” Drake said. “The energy in the atmosphere is screwing up the instruments and creates mirages that are so bad a pilot can’t rely on visual cues.”

“Why isn’t any of this information about Rainshadow in the news?”

“Because the last thing we need are a lot of curiosity seekers trying to crash through the psi-fence into the Preserve. If that happens, we’ll end up wasting valuable time rescuing trespassers instead of locating the crystals.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Alice said.

Drake escorted her up the steps into the cabin of the jet. He paused to speak briefly to the pilot and the copilot. Then he took the seat across from Alice. They fastened their seat belts.

Drake took the file he had confiscated from McCarson out of a briefcase and immediately became immersed in the contents.

Houdini tried to ride out the takeoff perched on the back of one of the seats so that he could see out the window. Alice grabbed him and held him in her lap until they were safely airborne. Then she released him. He bounded onto a seatback and gazed, enraptured, out the window.

“He likes to ride in anything that goes faster than he can,” Alice explained to Drake.

Drake did not look up from the file. “Who doesn’t?”

She smiled. There was something oddly endearing about Drake Sebastian when he was focused the way he was now. After a time he took out a pen, made a few notes, and closed the file.

“Find anything of interest?” she asked.

“Not much.” He handed her the folder. “But it’s your life. Maybe you’ll see something that looks wrong or weird.”

She opened the file and saw several photos of herself. A few had been shot while she was on stage. Those did not bother her. But most of the pictures had been taken when she was completely unaware of the camera. They sent cold chills down her spine. There were pictures of her coming and going from the various places she had lived in the past year as well as shots of her walking out of a grocery store, boarding a city bus, and sitting on a park bench, watching Houdini climb a tree.

“Geez,” she whispered, shaken. “I knew she was stalking me, but actually seeing the pictures her investigators snapped makes me feel sick to my stomach.”

“Don’t look at the photos,” Drake said quietly. “Read the file.”

She flipped through the handful of printouts with a wistful feeling. “Not much to my life, is there? No family. No permanent address after the orphanage. A bunch of different jobs. Several failed attempts at finding a husband through a professional matchmaking agency. One failed Marriage of Convenience. One MC husband dead under suspicious circumstances.” She looked up. “It’s kind of awful to see your whole life boiled down to a few pages like this.”