Page 103 of Threat of Danger
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I always wondered why he took you too. At first, he was mad that you were there.”
Derek remembered. “He adjusted on the fly.”Fine. You’ll be the audience, then, Crane had said. “He wanted the third day of the third month. He didn’t take us because we were at the cabin. He would have taken you no matter where you were. He only needed a moment to catch you alone.”
She stared at him as she processed that. “My birthday is the ninth of September. My date of birth was in my school records. The ninth day of the ninth month.” She groaned. “Didn’t he used to be a math teacher?”
“You never had him?”
She shook her head.
“He came in as a substitute a couple of times in algebra.” Derek racked his brain to see if he remembered anything from back in high school, something that hinted at the man’s evil core, but he couldn’t.
The fire crackled between them.
A couple of seconds passed before Jess said, “Thank you for saving me.”
He watched her as she huddled near the flames, her arms folded over her pulled-up knees. He’d seen grown-ass soldiers cry after an attack. But she was holding it all together. She had an incredible core of strength—solid steel.
“I’d walk into the burning fires of hell for you. You know that, right?”
When she didn’t comment, he said, “Why did you jump? You could have died.”
More silence before she responded at last. “I was OK with dying. I thought if he was no longer in the world, no longer able to hurt anyone, and if getting hurt was the price, I was OK with that.”
Her voice was steady and determined.
“You didn’t think that up, on the cliff. You had ideas about something like this when you came home.”
Tension stiffened her bare shoulders. At least a full minute ticked by before she said, “I’d thought about it. For years, I struggled with nightmares. I would dream about being back in the camper in the woods, then wake up screaming, drenched in sweat. To fall back asleep, I would think about getting stronger, good at fighting, coming back, finding him ...”
“Killing him?”
She looked into the flames. “Sometimes. Yes.”
“Did you come home for this?”
She turned her gaze back to him. “I came back because my mother broke her hip.”
“But you would have come back eventually? To try to draw him out?”
She hugged her knees tighter. “I don’t know. I wanted to, at first. Then life got better. He no longer ruled my every waking moment, and every nightmare.”
Derek waited her out.
Eventually, she said, “When you found Hannah’s bones, I knew he was still here, and he wasn’t going to stop unless somebody stopped him. Nobody even believed that the disappearances were connected.”
“You didn’t lose your cool in front of Maxwell. That video was no accident.”
She shot him a dark look. “Iwasmad at you for that book.”
“Was?”
She held his gaze. “Time to let go of the past.”
A decadelong tension left his chest. His lungs expanded. Possibilities opened up. New plotlines formed, paths to the story of their future, a shared future he’d barely dared hope for.
He held her gaze, despite how distracted he was by the way the light from the flames played on her breasts.
“So, how friendly are you with this Lorelei chick from the bookstore?” she asked out of the blue.
