He stood at the foot of the bed frowning right back at her, hands on his hips.

She jammed the frames on her face and focused in the dim light coming from the living room lamp. Which might just have been a blessing in disguise, because now she wouldn’t be able to witness her own death.īut then the tall shadow bent and scooped up her glasses and… Instead, her hands connected with her glasses and they went flying.

His voice was low and husky, sounding just as surprised as she, and with a deep breath, she lurched upright to a seated position on the bed and reached out for her handy dandy baseball bat before remembering she hadn’t brought it with her. “Hey,” he said, blowing that hope all to hell. Like the newly brave woman she was, she threw the covers over her head and hoped he hadn’t seen her. Up until right this second when a shadowy outline of a man appeared in her room. She’d been working for Wilder Adventures for a week now, the best week in recent memory. Local outdoor adventure and expedition company seeking temporary office manager, adventurous spirit required. Loved the huge wide open sky, loved the way her breath crystallized in front of her face, loved the way the trees smelled like Christmas. And yet after all her nightmares of heat and flames, she loved it. When she stopped for dinner in a tiny old west town named Wishful, she’d nearly froze her fingers and toes right off. None of LA’s lightweight weather where flip-flops were risky for a few weeks in January, but the real deal complete with snow piled high in berms on either side of the roads and frost on her windows. She’d gone north because Hwy 5 had been the only freeway moving faster than fifteen miles per hour and she’d needed to move fast, needed to get as far from her old, staid, boring, careful life as the tank of gas could get her.Įight hours later, she’d found herself in the Sierras, where it was real winter. She didn’t know what adventures were ahead of her exactly, but the not knowing was part of the plan. After the accident, she’d gotten into her brand new used car and left town to fulfill her “balls out” motto. Not prone to hysterics or drama, she shook her head in the dark. Because most likely it hadn’t been an it, but a someone. There was a fatal flaw with this logic, of course. And whatever it was, she wanted to kill it for interrupting the first solid sleep she’d had in four months. Which meant something else had woken her. She wasn’t screaming about the bridge collapsing, about being trapped in her car, hanging upside down by her seatbelt fifty feet over the side of a cliff with flames licking at her… So when she opened her eyes in the middle of the night, she felt … confused.

Tonight she’d miraculously been nightmare free. Death and destruction and horror still dogged her every single sleeping breath.

Instant attraction by jill shalvis