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him? He’d made choices along the way, including ignoring Walker’s third rule and asking her out, but she was an innocent bystander. Now that he’d gotten her caught up in the web of his fucked up life, he owed it to her to try and save her.
    The thug knocked the pistol into his head again, hard enough this time that he forced back a groan. “Clock’s ticking. It’s your call, rich kid. What’s it going to be?”
    Beneath his leather jacket, Josh felt the sweat running down his ribs. Without answering, he stuck the key in the ignition and turned it clockwise.
    Just his luck, old Betsy fired to life on the very first try.

    T HE ANNUAL D ELINSKI Christmas Day open house was a twenty year and counting tradition looked forward to year-round by the hundred or so persons counted as guests. The doorbell had started ringing promptly at two o’clock, and by two-thirty the narrow row house was all but splitting at the seams with family members and friends and neighbors, many of whom showed up with covered dishes of their own. Mandy’s mother pulled out all the stops, serving up turkey with all the trimmings as well as signature Polish dishes like kielbasa and dumpling soup and stuffed cabbage with mushroom sauce. There was enough food to feed the proverbial army and yet every year Mandy’s mother fretted they might run short.
    For one of the few times in her life, Mandy was too excited to eat.
    Stationed near the door in case the bell rang again, she felt someone watching her. Afraid it might be her old boyfriend, Lenny, she quickly looked up, relieved to see not Lenny but her mother marching across the packed living room toward her.
    Materializing at her side, she gestured to the untouched food languishing on the paper plate in Mandy’s hand, a frown lining her high forehead. “You’ve been carrying that plate around for the past hour like it was luggage. You on one of your crazy diets again or what?”
    “Nah, Ma. I’m just not hungry.”
    “Not hungry!” In the Delinski household, lack of appetite counted as an eighth Deadly Sin. One of the hazards of being born into a family for which eating was the antidote to every ill was that nearly all Mandy’s relatives were stout as barrels. “But it’s Christmas. After morning mass, what is there to do but eat?”
    Mandy could think of a few other things to do, several of them fairly aerobic and all involving getting a certain blue-eyed, blond-haired hunk naked and horizontal. Feeling her face heat, she ducked her head and forked up a bite of stuffed cabbage.
    Predictably, her mother relaxed. “That’s better. I’ll thank you to remember you’re an attractive Polish girl with a beautiful full figure and you ought to be proud. Not everybody likes skinny-skinny, you know. Lenny, for one, appreciates a girl with a healthy appetite.” She nodded toward the far side of the living room to where Lenny Borkowski hunched over his plate, shoveling food into his mouth.
    Skinny as the proverbial rail, Lenny could never seem to get enough to eat—especially if the meal was free. If he was the type of man her full figure attracted, Mandy had better start on a juice fast straightaway.
    Catching her eye, he smiled over at her, food rimming his front teeth and red sauce dribbling his chin. Disgusted that she’d been desperate enough to date him even after the investment fiasco, Mandy sent him a halfhearted nod and turned back to her mother. “That’s because he eats like a pig and looks like Ichabod Crane.”
    One eye monitoring the food table, no doubt to determine if replenishments were required, her mother asked, “Who?”
    “You know, Ma, the skinny schoolmaster who got his head lopped off by the Headless Horseman.”
    Her mother drew back, expression horrified. “Really, Amanda, I’ll thank you to remember it’s Christmas. Can’t you keep from bringing your violent work home with you one day out of the year?”
    Mandy started to explain that Ichabod Crane was a