Tall, Dark and Lethal. Dana Marton

      She would be told that it had been a gas explosion after all. Grenade launcher. Right. Could be that Cade was a crazy maniac who had blown up the house himself and concocted the whole story so she would willingly go with him.

      What did she know about him, anyway? He’d lived in the house for only three months. He claimed to be Frank Garey’s nephew, but she’d known Frank for nearly seven years and the retired truck driver had never mentioned any relatives to her.

      She glanced toward the diner’s entrance. A young couple came out, hugging and kissing for all they were worth, acting like they were madly in love. Bailey wasn’t sold on the idea of love. Both sets of grandparents had divorced before she’d been born. Her parents’ divorce was a mess she just as soon not think about. And now her brother’s marriage had fallen under the ax.

      The lovebirds outside the diner moved on without letting each other go for a second.

      She couldn’t see Cade. So far so good.

      He would be mad as hell when he found her gone. And she didn’t want to see Cade Palmer mad. She’d seen him annoyed, and that was scary enough. In a few minutes, she would be under the protection of the law, safe from him and whatever was really going on.

      Maybe they would never see each other again. That would be good. Bailey was pretty convinced that he was running from the law—otherwise he would have called the police after his house blew up. If fortune smiled on her, he would just keep running and never look back.

      She stepped gingerly on the hot, sharp blacktop, running on nerves as she approached the cop car. The officer inside was shutting off the engine and fiddling with the laptop on the dashboard. Computer technology had entered every aspect of life these days. Even she had experimented with some digital garden-art designs, and thanks to her nephew’s tips, had actually gotten better at it.

      Deep breath. She needed a moment to collect her thoughts so she could explain her situation coherently and the policeman wouldn’t think her a raving lunatic. She finger-combed her tangled hair one more time. Hi. My house exploded this morning. She bit her lip. How about Hi. I was kidnapped? Would that be putting it too strongly? Cade had said he only wanted to protect her. He’d done nothing to harm her so far—but he did have a gun. She filled her lungs with air again.

      She could see the screen and the scrolling images on the officer’s laptop. As she tried to figure out what she would say to him once he stepped out of the car, Cade’s picture flashed on, with a single line of text on top. She moved closer to read it, but the picture changed too quickly.

      She stared, rooted to the spot, as her own image scrolled onto the screen.

      Where did they get that?

      Her attention was quickly drawn from last year’s much-regretted experimental perm to the bolded message above her photo.

      WANTED BY THE FBI. And below that, another line: CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.