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shout had sounded closer—hadn’t it? Where was he? Were those his footsteps she heard thudding behindher now that the damned telltale phone had finally stopped ringing? Or was it her own pulse pounding?
    Unable to resist a lightning glance back that showed her exactly nothing except a whole lot of night, she stumbled over a root. She’d felt the flashlight being jarred looser and looser with every step; now it fell, hitting the ground beside her feet. It rolled, she stepped on it, and suddenly she was about as stable as a hog on ice. Hugo, taking despicable advantage of the situation, chose that moment to push off against her side with a powerful thrust of his hind legs. Thrown even more off balance, she snatched after him and came up empty. Plumy white tail waving triumphantly, he shot away from her.
    “Hu—oomph!”
    Windmilling, calling after Hugo, she never even heard it coming: something hit her from behind with the force of a speeding truck. Slamming nose first into the soggy ground at the foot of a stand of dripping live oaks, she realized that she had been tackled.
    By the man with the gun. His arms locked around her hips, his head thudded like a dropped bowling ball into the curve of her back, and the crushing weight of his torso pinned her legs to the ground.
    Carly screamed. Well, squeaked was more like it, because right at that moment she couldn’t draw enough breath into her flattened lungs for an honest-to-God scream. Her flight or fight instinct, now that flight had been so rudely eliminated, switched to fight in an instant. Fueled by adrenaline, she twisted violently onto her back and in the process almost succeeded in dislodging him. Almost was the operative word, though, and it wasn’t enough. A hard-breathing, featureless shadow in the dark beneath the trees, he grabbed her again before she could wriggle away. Locking one hand in her waistband, he gave an almighty yank. Thank God the metal button held; snug to begin with—she had never thought she’d live to be grateful for having gained seven pounds from the stress of the divorce—the jeans didn’t budge. But she did. Her whole body slid several inches in the wrong direction, and suddenly his head was at the approximate level of her crotch. She was excruciatingly aware of his hand, warm and rough as it slid across the silky bare skin of her stomach. A wave ofhorror hit her; it didn’t take a genius to figure out what he had in mind.
    “No, no, no!” Carly went into a frenzy, beating at his head and shoulders with her fists, ramming her knees into his chest, digging her heels into the rain-softened earth. She had borne much over the last few months, but she couldn’t bear this. She had to get away, had to get away, had to get away… .
    “Let me go! You let me go! Help! Sandra! Somebody!”
    The volume of her gasping cries would have shamed a cornered mouse, she realized with despair. He said something, the tone of it harsh and guttural, but she was beyond making sense of mere words. Her heart pounded so hard that it could have been playing drummer for Ozzy Osbourne. Her throat was dry as cat kibble. Terror tasted like aluminum foil in her mouth. She was facing rape, death, probably both together, and she didn’t know why she was even surprised. Her life had been in the toilet for at least the last two years, and every time she thought things couldn’t get worse it took a header into an even deeper, smellier part of the pit. But this—this was crossing the line. It was too much. It was the proverbial straw that broke the poor, pathetic, long-suffering camel’s back. God or fate or whoever was running the circus up there was hereby put on notice: Carly Linton was mad as hell, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore.
    Summoning her last reserves of strength and determination, she channeled her inner Mike Tyson and contorted like a pretzel as she went for his ear with her teeth. He dodged in the nick of time, and what she got for her