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She was about to ask what the heck he was doing when, to her horror, he pulled out a box that seemed to be a remote control.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” she yelled.

“Oddly enough, you are not the first person to ask me that question. Now, run!”

Tildi ran. She covered her head with her arms to protect herself from flying debris. She was no athlete, but the onlything that really hurt was her ear when she smacked it with the handgun she’d forgotten she held.

A tremendous boom crashed through the air around her, and tiny particles of who knew what pelted her skin. She couldn’t hold back the scream that erupted from her. Luckily, the explosion probably covered it up.

Hoping against hope Boone had escaped the blast, she glanced back just in time to see him hurtling through the air. The force of the explosion rocketed him almost all the way across the yard, nearly to the buried tank.

Without breaking her stride, she angled toward him. He’d landed face down in the grass and wasn’t moving. Giving a very unladylike grunt, she managed to roll him over to his back. His head lolled to the side, and he didn’t open his eyes. With trembling hands, she pulled his now grass-stained and torn shirt open and placed her ear to his chest. She couldn’t hear anything at first, probably because of her proximity to the blast. But finally, the thumping of his heart told her he was alive. That had to count for something.

She collapsed by his side and rolled over onto her back, using his arm as a pillow. She forced her tears back, though she wanted to cry. On second thought, what she really wanted to do was smack him.

What had he been thinking? He could have been killed. That thought filled her with a way greater sense of loss than it should have, considering she’d only known him for an hour or so.

Sitting up, she scanned the area for guards. The last thing they needed right now was to get shot. His bag lay on the ground close to the stone wall of the house. Right where he’d dropped it before he blew up part of the freaking building.

Yeah, she was also glad he wasn’t dead because that meant she could kill him herself for giving her a coronary.

Boone coughed and tried to sit up, an effort that did him no good. He settled for asking, “You all right, Bluebell?”

She wanted to yell at him, but his voice was funny. He must be in pain, which tended to happen when a person was catapulted half the length of a football field from the second story. Okay, so not that far, but pretty doggone far.

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “But we are going to have a conversation about reckless regard for safety.”

At that, he grabbed her arm and yanked her back down so her face was close to his. “You’re damn straight we are,” he growled. “The next time you run with a gun pointed at your own fucking head, you won’t sit down for a month.”

She struggled to get off him, but he wouldn’t let her go. “You can’t threaten to spank me,” she said. “And I did not point a gun at my head.”

His scowl did not improve. “Did you, or did you not, just run across the grass with your hands protecting your head?”

“Of course I did,” she answered immediately. “Because someone was about to set off a bomb!”

“I waited until you were clear of the blast zone,” he snapped right back. “Where was your gun while you were racing across uneven ground? In the dark, no less, where visibility was limited?”

Darn it. She’d hoped he hadn’t noticed that. Unconsciously rubbing her ear, she said, “It was in my hand.” Well, crap. “Okay, so maybe in my stark raving terror, I might have lost track of what I was holding.”

“Right. That’s three.”

Uh oh. “What do you mean three? Three what?”

Boone ignored her and grabbed the pistol from where she had dropped it on the ground beside him. After scanning the area, he turned his attention back to her, which she wasn’t sure was a good thing. “Okay, Bluebell. We are heading away fromthis compound before the guards show up. But when we get to a stopping point, you and I are going to have a chat.”

Hmm, she wasn’t sure that was a good idea. He didn’t wait for her to voice her opinion, however. He retrieved his bag, grabbed her hand, and proceeded to drag her toward the tree line.

After stumbling for three thousand years beside him through a dense forest of bamboo and scrub brush the perfect height to keep smacking her in the face, they broke through another tree line on the edge of a small meadow of tall grass. On the other side lay a cliff that, by all appearances, was very, very high.

Turning to him, she asked, “Why did you lead us to a dead end?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” he said. “First, we have that chat.”

“Aren’t there people chasing us?”

“This won’t take long.”

“Oh, okay. Well, you certainly know more than me, Mr. Gummy-Security-Not-Commando guy, but I would have thought we were kind of in a time crunch.”