As the trembling in my body eases, I feel a swell of anger slowly rising. My fingers grip the upper rung on the ladder so hard my knuckles show bone white. The sound of the engine fades.

As it has before.

“I’ll get you,” I vow, my words hoarse but at least intelligible as I glare at the retreating vehicle, its taillights blinking red through the trees, reflecting blood-like on the snow. “You’ll never get away with this.”

I’ll make sure of it.

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Cascade Mountains
December 1

“You prick!” Fighting tears, Megan pounded the steering wheel of her Toyota, then hit the gas. The tires spun, snow and gravel spraying as she backed up, threw the car into gear, then, the beams of her headlights splashing on snowy landscape, tore down the long lane leading away from James Fucking Cahill’s farmhouse. And then, as if he were seated in the passenger seat, she kept ranting. “How could you? How the hell could you?”

She shouldn’t have been surprised.

Once a cheater, always a cheater.

So why had she expected him to be her boyfriend, the man she thought was the love of her life, her soul mate, the goddamned “one,” if you believe that rot? Of course, he’d shown his true colors and had turned out to be a two-timing dick.

She blinked hard, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks as she reached the county road, cut in front of a snowplow clearing the roadway, and sped through the night toward town. Angrily, she dashed the offensive tears away, while fence posts and fields of white passed by in a blur. At the stop sign, she slowed, then cranked the wheel and headed west, circumventing the heart of Riggs Crossing and speeding through the near-empty side streets of this little backwater town that purported itself to be an honest-to-God, year-round Christmas village. But then she knew as well as anyone how appearances could be deceiving, didn’t she?

Out of the corner of her eye, she spied an elderly woman walking a little black Scottie dog in a sweater. Gray curls poking out from a red beret, the woman, in the glow of a streetlamp, shook her head and wagged a finger before making a “slow down” gesture by patting the air.

Megan didn’t care. It was all she could do not to make her own gesture by flipping the woman off. But she didn’t.

No reason.

Other than her heart was broken, her mind mush.

Why, why, why had she been such an idiot as to fall in love with James Cahill? She should have known better. “Crap.” She had known better. In her rearview, she saw the old lady now on her cell phone, probably dialing 9-1-1 and reporting an erratic driver terrorizing the usually serene, almost bucolic streets of this little town tucked into the mountains of Washington State.

Too bad.

But she eased off the accelerator.