The Renegade (The Moorehouse Legacy #3)(28)

While she caught her breath, she waited for the pain to tell her what, if anything, had been broken. The dull thudding in her upper leg suggested she was going to be bruised, but she was able to move her foot, and there was no awful feeling of wetness as blood welled.

Thank God for her long underwear and her jeans. The two together had saved her from getting torn up.

Planting her palms on the floor, she tried to lift herself out of the hole and failed. After a day spent popping boards off the wall, her shoulder and back muscles were spent and she couldn’t get much leverage, not with her free leg splayed out behind her. The layers she wore were also part of the problem. All that fabric was crammed into the hole, trapping her.

She eyed the window. The sun was almost down. What little heat there was in the house was evaporating quickly, the temperature dropping inside and out.

Taking a deep breath, she yelled, “Alex! Alex! Can you hear me?”





Chapter Eight




Alex looked up from the desk and frowned. Something was off. Something…

He cocked his head to the side, trying to loosen his neck. His nape was tingling as if someone were standing right behind him, even though he was by himself.

His witchy sense was kicking in, although damned if he knew why. He looked around the workshop. Everything was in order and his phone wasn’t ringing with some kind of emergency.

Maybe it was just a draft.

As he bent his head the other way, he smiled a little. His crew hated whenever he started cricking his neck. Usually it meant trouble was coming. Or had arrived but just hadn’t introduced itself yet.

He looked back down at the sailboat design he was working on. He’d finally decided to stop fighting the urge to play around with his father’s old plans. And after having gone through all of them, he’d decided they were really good. With some tweaking, a few of them could be spectacular.

Sometime later he took a stretch and checked his watch. Seven o’clock. Time to eat again. He went over to the little refrigerator and started lining up the cans of Ensure. With those, plus the three chicken breasts he’d boiled that afternoon and some pre-washed lettuce he had, he’d pull down about twelve hundred calories. Not bad, but he was going to have to squeeze in a couple more PowerBars before he went to bed.

He was rubbing the back of his neck, annoyed by the persistent twitchy feeling, when his cell phone went off. He checked caller ID before answering.

“Hey, Libby. What’s up?”

The older woman’s voice was edgy. “Have you seen Cassandra?”

“Isn’t she home with you?”

“She should have been. About two hours ago.”

As his nape went into a crazy spasm, fear condensed in his chest cavity. He looked out the window at White Caps. The lights were off and he couldn’t see where she parked her car from this vantage point.

“I’m going over to the house,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

He grabbed his parka, clicked on a flashlight and headed out as quickly as he could. The Range Rover was parked where it usually was, but there were no sounds from inside the house. The silence made the cold air seem so much colder.

Pulling back the plastic, he called out, “Cassandra?”

“Alex?” Her thin, ghostly voice drifted down to his ears.

He flipped the flashlight up. Her leg was dangling out of the kitchen ceiling.

“Cassandra!” Punching his cane into the floor, he went upstairs, cursing his cast and the way it slowed him down.

He found her in one of the bathrooms. In a space that was as frigid as the outdoors.

“Th-thank God.” She shuddered. “Alex…”

Without nailing her eyes with direct light, he did a quick assessment of her. She had one leg stretched out behind her, the other through the floor up to her hip. A parka was wrapped loosely around her upper body, but it was so cold, the thing obviously wasn’t doing much good. Her teeth were chattering, and the color was sucked out of her cheeks.

He kneeled down, carefully positioning his lower leg. “Does anything feel broken?”

“I can bend my knee a little. Ankle, foot and t-toes flex without pain. I think all the layers I’m w-wearing helped me from getting cut, too. I’m just not strong enough to p-pull myself free.”

“Any problem with your spine?”

She shook her head. “I have f-feeling everywhere. Or I did before the c-cold took it away.”

He put the flashlight down. “Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to grab you under your arms. I want your hands on my shoulders, but don’t pull yourself up, let me do the work. You’re going to go limp, understand? The less tense you are, the easier this will be. Any questions?”

Cassandra looked up at him. “You’ve rescued people b-before.”

Yeah, but not like this. His hands were shaking so badly he had to hide them from her.

“Any questions?” he repeated.

“No,” she said in a small voice.

He got close to her, slipped his hands under the parka and gripped her body. God, she was so small. His palms spanned her rib cage.

“You ready?” he said into her ear.

“Alex?” she whispered.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go slow. I’m going to try not to hurt you.”