There was no cell coverage-there were no houses- until they came to a small lake on the notch road north of the village of Cold Ridge. Even then, Ty barely got the words out to the dispatcher before service dropped out on him.

He clicked off the phone and looked over at Carine. "I'm serious," he said. "Why haven't we ever dated?"

She managed a smile. "Because I've always hated you."

He grinned at her. "No, you haven't."

And she was lost. Then and there.

By the time state and local police arrived on scene, the shack was burned to the ground and the shooters were gone. According to various law enforcement officers, Carine had likely stumbled on to a smuggling operation they'd had their eye on but couldn't pinpoint. They smuggled drugs, weapons and people into and out of Canada and were, without a doubt, very dangerous.

Everyone agreed she was lucky indeed she hadn't been killed.

Even if the pictures she took of the shack were the reason the shooters came after her, they didn't tell her anything. She'd printed them out in her tiny log cabin while she and her military trio had waited for the police to get there.They'd been and gone, taking the memory disk with them. She still had the prints. A shack in the woods with a crooked metal chimney. It looked innocent enough to her.

Ty cleaned and treated the cut on her forehead. She kept avoiding his eye, aware of her reaction to him, aware that, somehow, everything had changed between them. She'd known him forever. He'd always been a thorn in her side. He'd pushed her out of trees. He'd cut the rope on her tire swing. Now, he was making her tingle. It had to be adrenaline-a post-traumatic reaction of some sort, she decided.

Hank and Manny built a fire in her woodstove. Hank, she learned, was a newly announced, dark horse candidate to become the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He was a former air force rescue helicopter pilot, a retired major who'd received national attention on his last mission a year ago to recover fishermen whose boat had capsized.