Page 115 of Strangers She Knows

Something slammed into her, stopped her, dragged her back and away from the precipice.

She gasped, robbed of breath by the familiar weight and warmth of—

“Damn you, Kellen, are you trying to get yourself killed?”

Max. It was Max, his brown eyes furious, his deep voice snapping, his shaking hands holding her close against his body.

He had survived. His weary face was battered, but he was alive.

She clung to him, his warmth, his vitality. “Max. Max. Thank you. You saved me.” He was here, so he had to have saved Rae, too. “You did it. You saved Rae! What about Rae? How’s Rae?”

“She’s alive. She’ll be fine. She is fine. In the hospital. She sent me back for you.” He patted her, brushed at her back. “You’re still smoldering. Literally. My God, you women have turned me gray.”

“I’m sorry.” She smoothed his hair back from his forehead, then anxiety caught her by the throat. “Is Mara for sure dead?”

“She’s obliterated,” Max assured her, “and every piece of her and the truck that wasn’t blown all over the island went off the cliff and into the ocean.”

They were prone and tangled in the grass. Kellen couldn’t see anything. “Are you sure?” She clasped his collar in her right hand. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Come on.” He crawled forward a few feet and parted the grass.

The ground disappeared, a sheer drop onto the rocks, the beach, the ocean.

The F-100 lay shattered, burning in pieces and clumps and bits, and out on the sand a headless human shape burned.

Mara.

“She’s not coming back,” Max said.

“You’ll make sure. You’ll check her DNA.”

“I will. But Kellen—you killed her.”

49

Max pulled Kellen closer, kissed her face, looked into her eyes, and in a tone of absolute exasperation asked, “Damn it to hell, if you got the F-100 running, why didn’tyoudrive Mara into the ground?”

“I didn’t get the truck running.” She shoved at his shoulder with her right hand. “You did.”

“No.” He sounded sure. “I never got it started.”

“That last time, you did fix it, and if you’d had time to try, you would have been driving it all over the island.”

He thought about the past few days, reconstructing them in his mind. “I was working on it when Rae came up screaming that Dylan was covered in blood.”

“Right.”

“I put it together right at last.” Max’s voice rang out with incredulous pride.

“Yes! But you didn’t know and I didn’t know. What Ididknow was that if Mara thought she could chase me into the ground, she would try, for the pure joy of it. So I set a trap. I taped the dynamite, the blasting cap, and a long fuse onto the gas tank and frame.”

“Of course you did.”

“To lure her into the garage, I tried to start the truck, to make enough engine noise that she would think I’d failed to get it running.”

“It didn’t start when you tried it because it didn’t have gas in the line.”

“That has to be it. While trying to start it, I brought gas up to the motor. All Mara had to do was push the starter button, and the motor was running and so was I.” Kellen sighed in exhaustion.

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