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“Claire!”
“I’m on the floor. What happened?”
“Put your clothes on, but stay close to the floor. I have to get my bags from the other room.”
“Wait! There’s fire, and my clothes aren’t in this room.”
“Stay on the floor and cover your face with the sheet. I’ll be right back.”
“Mike! No!”
Crouching low, he put his T-shirt over his head and charged out of the bedroom. He collected a few of Claire’s things from the room across the hall and ventured into the living room to get his bag of money and weapons and his computer.
Hot spots of fire dotted the room and flames engulfed the ceiling above the front door. He clasped his bags to his chest and loped back to the bedroom where he’d left Claire. The room where they’d just spent a morning exploring each other’s bodies and an afternoon wrapped around each other in satiated sleep had suffered the least damage—but he knew there was more to come.
He burst into the room and tossed Claire’s clothes in her direction. “Get dressed.”
“C-can we get out that way? Through the front door?”
“We’re not exiting this cabin through the front door.”
“What? Is it so bad? The back? Can we get out through the back?”
“Enough questions, Claire. Put your clothes and shoes on. Take whatever you can in those plastic bags.”
He hurried into his own clothes and whipped back the carpet on the wood floor. He ran his hands across the planks until he felt an edge.
He slipped his knife from his jeans pocket and jimmied it into the space between two boards. Then he slid them apart and lifted them, exposing an open space.
Hovering over him, Claire gasped. “We’re going down there?”
“It’s the escape route. Every one of our safe houses has one.”
“Why do we need an escape route?” She glanced over her shoulder, her wide eyes taking on the color of the gray smoke billowing around them.
“They’re waiting for us.”
Her face blanched but she didn’t hesitate when he nudged her toward the gaping space in the floor.
“Once through, there should be some steps but then you’re going to have to crouch down and probably army crawl.” He kissed her forehead. “Can you do that, Claire?”
She nodded and dropped into the hole, the plastic bags crinkling against her chest.
Mike lowered himself after her, dragging his bags with him. He dropped them into the space and then pulled the carpet back over the entrance to the escape route and then reset the planks of wood. Unless Tempest had also gotten the blueprint of the cabin, they wouldn’t know where to look.
When he covered the opening, blackness descended on the space around them and Claire trembled beside him.
He flicked on a small but powerful flashlight. “We’re good. It’s going to be okay.”
Two feet into the tunnel they had to drop to their bellies and move single file, pushing their bags in front of them.
Claire choked. “I don’t think I can handle this.”
“Sure you can, snow queen. Just keep crawling. They’re not going to come after us down here.”
“But they’re waiting for us up there, outside the cabin?”
“That text I got before our world got rocked? That was Jack warning me that our safe houses along the East Coast had been compromised.” He tickled her ankle above her boot. “Keep movin’.”
She scrambled forward. “How did that happen?”
“It’s the spy business. We get intel on them, and they get intel on us. We have to stay one step ahead of them.”
Which he may have done if he hadn’t succumbed to his desire for Claire. What had Jack told him? Don’t get taken in by the widow’s beauty? If it were just her beauty, he could resist.
He’d met a kindred spirit in Claire. Who would’ve figured a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks and a society babe would have so much in common? But they’d both been starved for love and had tried to fill that void with other obsessions.
Her gasping breaths filled the tunnel, and he squeezed her foot. “Are you okay? Try not to breathe so heavily.”
“Easier said than done. How much farther do we have to go, and where are we going to end up?”
