Read At Home in Stone Creek (Silhouette Special Edition) for Free Online

through the kitten,as though it were a conduit between the world around him and another, better one.
    Crap. He was really losing it.
    â€œAre you hungry?” Ashley asked, as though he were any ordinary guest.
    A gnawing in the pit of Jack’s stomach told him he was—for the first time since he’d come down with the mysterious plague. “Yeah,” he ground out, further weakened by the sight of Ashley. Even in jeans and the flannel shirt he’d left behind, with her light hair springing from its normally tidy braid, she looked like a goddess. “I think I am.”
    She approached the bed—cautiously, it seemed to Jack, and little wonder, after some of the acrobatics they’d managed in the one down the hall before he left—and set the tray down on the nightstand.
    â€œCan you feed yourself?” she asked, keeping her distance. Her tone was formal, almost prim.
    Jack gave an inelegant snort at that, then realized, to his mortification, that he probably couldn’t. Earlier, he’d made it to the adjoining bathroom and back, but the effort had exhausted him. “Yes,” he fibbed.
    She tilted her head to one side, skeptical. A smile flittered around her mouth, but didn’t come in for a landing. “Your eyes widen a little when you lie,” she commented.
    He sure hoped certain members of various drug and gunrunning cartels didn’t know that. “Oh,” he said.
    Ashley dragged a fussy-looking chair over and sat down. With a little sigh, she took a spoon off the tray and plunged it into a bright-blue crockery bowl. “Open up,” she told him.
    Jack resisted briefly, pressing his lips together—he still had some pride, after all—but his stomach betrayedhim with a long and perfectly audible rumble. He opened his mouth.
    The fragrant substance turned out to be chicken soup, with wild rice and chopped celery and a few other things he couldn’t identify. It was so good that, if he’d been able to, he’d have grabbed the bowl with both hands and downed the stuff in a few gulps.
    â€œSlow down,” Ashley said. Her eyes had softened a little, but her body remained rigid. “There’s plenty more soup simmering on the stove.”
    Like the kitten, the soup seemed to possess some sort of quantum-level healing power. Jack felt faint tendrils of strength stirring inside him, like the tender roots of a plant splitting through a seed husk, groping tentatively toward the sun.
    Once he’d finished the soup, sleep began to pull him downward again, toward oblivion. There was something different about the feeling this time; rather than an urge to struggle against it, as before, it was more an impulse to give himself up to the darkness, settle into it like a waiting embrace.
    Something soft brushed his cheek. Ashley’s fingertips? Or the mutant kitten?
    â€œJack,” Ashley said.
    With an effort, he opened his eyes.
    Tears glimmered along Ashley’s lashes. “Are you going to die?” she asked.
    Jack considered his answer for a few moments; not easy, with his brain short-circuiting. According to the doctors at Walter Reed, his prognosis wasn’t the best. They’d admitted that they’d never seen the toxin before, and their plan was to ship him off to some secret government research facility for further study.
    Which was one of the reasons he’d bolted, conneda series of friends into springing him and then relaying him cross-country in various planes and helicopters.
    He found Ashley’s hand, squeezed it with his own. “Not if I can help it,” he murmured, just before sleep sucked him under again.
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    Their brief conversation echoed in Ashley’s head, over and over, as she sat there watching Jack sleep until the room was so dark she couldn’t see anything but the faintest outline of him, etched against the sheets.
    Are you going to die?
    Not if I can help it.
    Ashley overcame the