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finger deeper in the ring. Who was it? What did they want?
    A fine, familiar chill snaked down her spine. She arched into it, vaguely aware that the man on top of her responded by grasping her tighter with every unrelenting muscle he had.
    She ignored him, stroking the gold and coaxing her sixth sense forward.
    Like a black-and-white slide show, the images came as stills. Rain. Asphalt. Tires. Not a cat, a silver hood ornament. Darkened windows. The crash. A guardrail giving way. The free fall into blackness. Glass and rain and blood. The end.
    She slipped her finger from the ring and the slide show stopped.
    But she had the answer she sought. Directly above them, tearing her trailer apart, was a murderer.
    “Chase,” she whispered, but he smacked his hand over her mouth again, forcing her desperate breaths from her nose. In a minute, the trailer door closed and booted feet appeared again, jogging down the steps.
    She had to know who it was. She squirmed and made a tiny moan into his hand. The feet froze. He’d heard her! She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for gunfire.
    Suddenly, the intruder jogged to the golf cart, flipped the ignition switch, and in less than two seconds the beam of headlights disappeared into the darkness of the studio lot.
    Only then did Chase release his seal over her mouth.
    “He’s the murderer.” Arianna blew out the words. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
    Slowly, he rolled off her. “What?”
    “I had the vision. That person is a killer, and you just let him drive away.”
    “Yes, I did. Because my job is first and foremost to keep you alive. What was I going to do? Leave you here? That won’t happen, Arianna. Ever. You never risk a principal to get an assailant. Protection 101.”
    “He’s a murderer, ” she insisted.
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Yes. I. Do.” She bit the words out.
    His expression melted into disbelief and disgust. “Let’s get out of here.”
    She opened her mouth, but he placed his hand gently over her lips, to make a point. “We do this my way. No debate.”
    “You aren’t going to go into the trailer? He tore the place apart.”
    “It won’t look much different,” he said. “But, no. I’m not. I’m going to check to see if the area is clear, then I’m going to get you off the premises as soon as humanly possible.”
    “But what was he doing in there?”
    “He was looking for something. That was obvious. Copies of the e-mails, maybe. Something incriminating. Something of value. Do you have something someone might want enough to shoot at you, so that you run away and leave your trailer unlocked?”
    Her heart pounded against a soft velvet pouch. “No,” she lied. “Nothing I can think of.”
     
    “Brace yourself,” Arianna said as she pushed open the six-foot-high wooden gate that led to the steep stairs along the side of her house. “It’s eighty years old, tiny as a shoe box, but it’s—”
    “A bodyguard’s nightmare.”
    “Home,” she finished.
    He reached the edge of her pine deck, looking at the surrounding brush and the direct drop down the hillside that overlooked Chateau Marmont and the never-ending stream of car lights that snaked along Sunset Boulevard.
    “It was good enough for Judy Garland,” she said defensively, sliding her fingers into her front jeans pockets. “She lived here when she was starting out.”
    He didn’t look impressed. In fact, he shrugged as if only an idiot would take up residence somewhere so precarious. “There’s no railing and a direct drop down a steep hill. One drink and somebody could topple right over.”
    “I keep my drunken guests inside,” she said. “And avoid the edges.”
    “The brush should be cut back. It’s a fire hazard.”
    “It gives me privacy.”
    He pulled her keys from his jacket pocket. “Alarm code?”
    Oh, boy. “It’s, um…I keep meaning to get it changed. It kept going off in the middle of the night, and it’s disabled right now.” Stupid