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wasn’t lost on Vanessa, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Not when she was busy trying to slow her breathing and quiet her heart while simultaneously scrambling to keep pace with him.
    She felt the darkness closing around her like a hot fist, squeezing her, trying to cut off her air.
    Good grief, Van. Keep it together, or you’re gonna make an even bigger fool of yourself than you already have.
    Of course, making a bigger fool of herself might prove difficult, considering she couldn’t think of anything more idiotic than climbing the poor man like a light post when that weird bird took flight. She still wasn’t quite sure how that happened. One second she had her eyes and flashlight glued to his jungle boots, concentrating everything she had on not thinking about the darkness surrounding her. And the next second? Well, the next second she was on his shoulders.
    And, here you are trying to convince him you’ve come to save him. Fat lot of help you’ve been so far…
    Blowing out a dismayed breath, she focused on putting one foot in front of the other, skirting around the ankle-grabbing vines and giant tree roots. She didn’t know how much time passed—it could’ve been minutes or hours—but suddenly Rock stopped. She lifted the beam of the flashlight to his face only to discover his head thrown back, his gaze focused overhead.
    Oh, gosh, I hope it’s not another one of those birds…
    Hesitantly, she traced the penlight up a huge tree until she saw what had snagged his attention. The distance diffused the beam of light, but even so, she had no trouble making out the proportions of the framework overhead.
    Um, okay, so he called that a tree house?
    He must have seen the astonishment on her face. “I didn’t know how long I was gonna be livin’ here, so I reckoned I better get comfy.”
    Comfy. Right.
    The mammoth wooden structure spanning the gap between two huge trees came equipped with shuttered windows, a rope bridge, and was that…? Yep, that was definitely an outdoor shower she spied on the landing. It was fed by one of the big plastic rain barrels bolted above the thatched roof.
    And here she’d been feeling sorry for him, thinking he’d been huddled in a crude little shack for the last six months. Shack? What a joke. This place looked like the Hilton Hotel of tree houses, like Robinson Crusoe Gone Wild.
    “Does it come with cable TV and broadband?” she asked dryly, still frowning up at the structure, marveling at his ingenuity.
    “Nothin’ that fancy.” He led her around the wide, flat, bacon strip–shaped roots of the tree until they came to a long ladder affixed to the trunk with thick steel bolts. “After you,” he gestured with a jerk of his whiskered chin.
    Vanessa bit her lip and once again shined the penlight up, waaayyy up, the trunk of the tree. Now, normally, she wasn’t afraid of heights. Then again, she’d never been required to cling like a spider monkey to side of a giant rainforest hardwood without benefit of a safety cable and harness either, so… yeah …
    Forty feet. That’s how high she estimated she’d have to climb before she reached the tree house.
    Gulp.
    Of course, after the snake episode and that weird bone-rattle bird and the subsequent shoulder-straddling thing, she sure as hell wasn’t going to let him see her trepidation. She hoped there was still a chance to salvage at least some of her whole girl-races-to-the-rescue-of-doomed-operator mojo so, nodding with far more confidence than she felt, she shoved the penlight between her lips and grabbed the first wrung.
    Eyes on the prize, eyes on the prize, she mentally coached herself as, hand over hand, she scaled the ladder. By the time she reached what she thought was the half-way point though, that mantra switched to don’t look down, don’t look down, just don’t look—
    Ah, crap. She looked down.
    And as high as it’d seemed while looking up, it appeared a whole hell of a lot higher while looking