We bump over poorly maintained roads and Blake finally pulls into a dirt driveway in front of a decrepit looking two-story cabin. Thick pine branches overhang a steeply pitched tin roof, and some of the wooden shingles around the shuttered windows are falling off. A huge stone chimney up the front looks like the only thing holding the rickety structure up.

“What is this place?” Izzy asks.

“My family’s cabin,” Blake answers, sliding out of his seat. “I spent most of my summers here when I was a kid.”

I shoot him a glance. “I thought you were from Texas.”

“I am. But I spent time here with my grandparents every summer.”

“Looks sort of creepy,” Izzy says. “Like it’s haunted.”

Blake’s face is all nostalgia as he looks it over. “No one else comes up here anymore . . .” He glances at me. “. . . which is why I figured it would be safe.”

He lifts the tailgate and hands me my duffel bag. As everyone grabs their bags from the back, I notice sleeping bags, a few grocery bags, and an ice chest buried back there. We climb a flight of stairs to the front door, and Blake unlocks it. I step through into an open room, a dark leather sofa along the back wall and two leather and wood rockers in front of the massive stone fireplace that dominates the entire room. There’s an open archway to the right, where a wooden picnic table sits near a door beyond, which obviously leads to the kitchen. Up the middle of the room is a ladder, which goes to a loft upstairs. The curtains are drawn, so it’s dim, but there’s a thin coating of dust on everything, and cobwebs in most of the corners.

Blake sets his bag on a chair and pulls back the curtain on the window up front. He opens the window, pushes back the shutters, and the room is flooded with bright sunlight.

“You’re sure this place isn’t haunted?” Izzy says, eyeing her surroundings warily.

Blake shrugs. “No guarantees.”

After lunch we hike out on some trails that wind past rivers and meadows full of wild flowers, to a fire lookout, where we can see forever. All there is for miles is mountains, trees, and lakes. It’s so quiet.

As we meander back along the trails toward the cabin, I hook my elbow through Jonathan’s and slow our pace a little, letting the others get ahead of us.

“So, where is this safe house you’re at?” he asks, kicking a rock in our path.

“It’s—” I glance at Blake, on the trail up ahead. “I’m not supposed to say.”

He tugs me closer. “But they’re taking good care of my best girl, right?”

“Yeah.” I slow us even more. “So where were you, Jonathan? You had everyone totally flipping out.”

His eyes don’t leave the path. “I went looking for Marcus.”

“And . . . ?”

“He wanted to know what you were going to tell the narcs. I told him you didn’t know anything.”

I fix him in a hard gaze. “You were missing for, like, four days, Jonathan.”

He shrugs. “We had a few beers.”

He won’t look at me as he says it, which makes something in my gut tighten uncomfortably. “What’s going on?”

His eyes go all wide and innocent as he turns to me. “I got drunk, passed out, woke up, got drunker, passed out—”

“Stop!” I say, shoving him away. “You have no idea how scared everyone was. We thought Ben might have killed you.”

He rolls his eyes. “Ben’s cool with everything, Red.”

I feel my eyes widen. “He had someone shoot at us, Jonathan! That’s pretty goddamn far from ‘cool’ in my book.”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t him.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course it was him!”

He shakes his head again. “Marcus said no.”

“Then who?”

“No fucking clue,” he says with a shrug. “I’ve had boyfriends of at least twenty chicks threaten to kill me when they’ve caught me with their women. Could have been any one of them.”

“Be serious. That was not a jealous boyfriend.” I stumble on a tree root because I’m not watching the path, and Jonathan catches me.

“Think about it, Red,” he says, steadying me on my feet. “I’m the one that got shot, not you. Do you really think Ben’s guys would have shitty aim?”

I chew my lip as I think about that, and when I look ahead, I see Blake fire me a glance over his shoulder. Could he be wrong about all of it? Maybe Ben’s not after me at all. “I don’t know, Jonathan. I’m not buying the jealous boyfriend thing.”

He shrugs again.

When we stumble back to the cabin, Blake starts a fire in the outdoor fire ring near the driveway, then sets a grate over it. It’s not too long later that he’s cooking and we all have a beer in our hands. My job is to flip the corn while he grills burgers and dogs.

The sun drops behind the tall pines as we eat, and as we’re finishing, it disappears altogether, leaving us in the flickering glow of the campfire. We’re well into our third or fourth beers when Jonathan ducks into the cabin and comes out with his guitar. We talk and joke, and Jonathan plays, and I’m cracking up at something stupid he said when I realize this is the most I’ve let down since I got thrown out of my parents’ house over two months ago. My cheeks ache and I’ve given myself the hiccups from laughing so hard.

It’s only when I go to the ice chest near the stairs for another beer that I realize Blake has retreated to the Escalade, a good thirty feet away. He’s sitting on the hood, leaning back against the windshield, watching us. The faint hum of country music makes it to my ears over the cacophony of my friends, and I can’t help but smile.

He tips his head at me and I wave back, then head to the campfire and sit on a blanket on the ground.

Ginger is blowing the flames off her torched marshmallow as Jonathan wrestles the stick out of her hand. “You’re doing that totally wrong,” he says. “It’s supposed to be golden brown.”

“Not in my family,” she slurs, grabbing the stick back and nearly falling off the stump she’s sitting on in her inebriated state. “This is how we do it.”

Jonathan drops onto my blanket as Ginger sticks her marshmallow back into the flames. He picks up his guitar and starts plucking out the melody of his pizza topping song, making up new lyrics involving the carcinogens in burnt marshmallows.

We laugh and give each other shit, and after a few more beers, when Jonathan and Ginger start giving the rest of us a lesson in sex ed, we tell them to get a room and send them off to bed.

Izzy’s eyes shift to Blake, who’s still on the hood of his car, then back to me. She wraps her arms around me and props her chin on my shoulder. “So, what’s the real deal with you and Secret Agent Man?”

I shrug. “He says Ben was mixed up in a lot of bad stuff.”

“But none of that really has to do with what’s going on between you,” she says, nudging her shoulder into mine. “He’s been sitting on that car for the past two hours, staring at you.”

“Because that’s his job, Izzy.”

She shakes her head slowly. “There’s nothing ‘business’ about the look he’s giving you, girlfriend.”

As if he knows we’re talking about him, he kicks off the car and saunters over to the fire ring. He stomps at the embers with the heel of his boot. “You going to be up for a while? I’ll put some more wood on.”

Izzy stands and stretches. “Jonathan and Ginger are probably passed out by now. I think I’ll crash too.” She flashes me a secret smile as she heads to the stairs.

Blake settles onto a rock at the edge of the circle and pokes at the embers with a stick. He’s more causal than usual today, in jeans and a black T-shirt with an open flannel shirt over the top. He looks very woodsy. And it’s totally hot.

“What did Jonathan say?” he asks.

I hook my elbows around my knees and draw them closer. “He said he was just getting drunk with Marcus.”

“For four days,” he says, flicking me a skeptical look.

I nod.

He pokes at the fire again, then gets up and tosses another log on. “And you believe him?”

“I don’t know.” I want to. Jonathan’s never given me a reason not to trust him. “He thinks that guy who ran us off the road might have been a jealous boyfriend.”

Blake’s jaw tightens as gives me a doubtful tip of his head, like maybe I’m too naive to live. “He ran you off the road and shot at your after you told Jonathan you were testifying against Arroyo.”

I shake my head. “Think about it. Jonathan’s the one who got shot, not me. Do you really think Ben’s guys would have missed me?” I hear the defensiveness in my tone and stuff it down. I get that Blake is just trying to protect me. I need to cut him some slack.

He kicks at the log with the heel of his boot and it bursts into flames. “It was dark and you were a moving target. It’s an easy miss, even for a decent marksman.”

The golden firelight flickers off his features, softening some lines and making others sharper. He’s breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and my fingers dig into the blanket automatically, as if I need to tether myself to the ground or I’ll launch right into him. To keep from staring . . . and probably drooling, I lie back on my blanket and look up at the stars.

For the first few years after Mom married Greg, before the boys were born, he used to take us camping in Yosemite Meadows. That’s when I realized the sky is a flickering blanket of stars when you’re away from the city lights. Tonight, it’s as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. Maybe it’s nearly a month in captivity that makes my freedom feel so much bigger now. Or maybe it’s the vastness of it all that makes me feel so small. As I watch, a shooting star streaks across the night sky, and then another.