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left on her bathroom sink. She slung the backpack over her shoulder and walked outside, pushing the gun into her waistband. The heavy weight at the small of her back made her walk a little straighter.
    “Okay, Honey,” she said. “You can do this.”
    It was worse than she’d remembered. The crawl space hadn’t suffered any damage during the fire, but it was dusty, dirty, and small.
    Too damn small.
    The safe was all the way at the back. Honey took one deep breath, then another, struggling to fill her lungs with air.
    When she reached the safe, she found it undamaged. That was something.
    Reaching out, her fingers skimmed over the dial, making it spin easily. Four numbers. Not random, the combination commemorated the day that her grandfather had met her grandmother during World War II.
    What had started as a light flirtation had turned into a marriage that lasted five years and three days, until the morning her grandmother ran off to greener pastures. That was all the old man would say, that his first wife “ran off to greener pastures.”
    Six months later, he’d remarried, but the combination to his safe hadn’t changed.
    After wrenching open the safe’s door, she took a quick inventory. A sheaf of paper, some velvet jewelry boxes, and a black address book.
    Nothing to write home about.
    Certainly nothing to burn down a home for. It was the same odd collection of artifacts that had been there the last time she’d opened the safe, five days earlier. She tossed everything into the backpack, pausing at the last moment to open the address book. Her fingers fumbled with the heavy envelope she’d slipped inside the safe a week earlier. At the time, she’d thought hiding the envelope in the safe was overkill. Now she wasn’t so sure.
    She didn’t know what was inside the envelope, but it was important.
    Important enough to kill for?
    She tucked it into the backpack and tried to turn around.
    It had been too long. Her body didn’t work like that anymore.
    She was stuck, suffocating in a tiny little hole. For one long moment, her lungs burned. As she wriggled backward, her knees scraped over the rough gravel. She bit her lip to muffle a painful cry.
    “You need some help?”
    Honey’s head jerked upward and smacked into a wooden floor joist.
    “That’s got to hurt.” A warm laugh. “Think we match?”
    “Damn it, Jack.”
    Unbelievable. What the hell was he doing here?
    Honey squeezed her eyes shut. She reached around behind her to retrieve his gun before wriggling the rest of the way out of the crawl space.
    The backpack fell to the ground as she stood up and turned, swinging the gun upward in a smooth, powerful motion.
    Firearms were dangerous. Given a choice, she’d rather have a sharp knife and a running head start. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t shoot if she needed to. Her cousins had taken her out to the desert in old trucks with big tires, driving off the road to find someplace to shoot at cans until they got bored.
    Jack’s gun was a nine-millimeter semi-automatic. Heavier then she’d prefer, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. She took a perfect shooting stance—feet shoulder-width apart, hands wrapped carefully around the grip. It was only after she knew she was ready for whatever came next that she allowed herself to look at him.
    “You’re looking good,” she said.
    Freshly showered and clean-shaven, Jack gave her a cool smile. His sea green T-shirt clung to muscular arms and defined abs, and his blue jeans still had creases in them from where they’d been folded.
    In a sharp suit and button-down shirt last night—Jack’s detective uniform—he’d been the same rich kid she’d wanted so many years earlier, all grown up. Out of her league. But dressed like this, Jack was more accessible. The man of her dreams.
    She braced herself to meet his deep blue eyes.
    He wasn’t looking at her face. He wasn’t even looking at the gun. His gaze was locked halfway in between. What the