All Night Long

divorced, she decided. Interesting men his age had usually been married at least once, and Luke Danner was nothing if not interesting. Make that fascinating.
    He’d barely spoken to her over the course of the last hour and a half of all-news-all-the-time television. He’d just sat there beside her, sprawled in one of the massive, ancient armchairs, legs stretched out o he worn rug, and contemplated the unnaturally cheerful reporters and anchors with a calm, stoic air. Something about his attitude suggested that he had already seen the worst the world had to offer an as not particularly impressed with the televised version.
    “I’ll be fine on the path,” she said. She removed a penlight from the pocket of her coat. “I’ve got a flashlight.”
    “So do I.” Luke ducked briefly out of sight behind the reception desk. When he straightened he held a large, heavy-duty flashlight. In his big, capable hand it looked disconcertingly like a weapon. He eyed her little penlight. Amusement gleamed briefly in his eyes. “Mine’s bigger.”
    Ignore that remark
, she told herself, opening the door before he could do it for her.
    The bracing night air sent a shiver through her. She knew that it rarely snowed at this elevation. The Ventana Lake resort region was in the mountains, but it was not far from the moderate climes of wine country. Nevertheless, it was still early spring, and it could get very cold after dark in this part of northern California.
    Luke whipped a somewhat battered, fleece-lined leather jacket off a coatrack that had been fashioned from a set of deer antlers, and followed her through the door. He did not bother to lock up, she noticed. But then, crime had never been a big problem in the town of Dunsley. She knew for a fact that there had been only two murders here in the past two decades. They had occurred on a summer night seventeen years ago.
    She stopped at the edge of the stone-and-log entranceway of the lodge. It was seven-thirty but it migh s well have been midnight. Night hit hard and fast in the heavily wooded shadows of the mountains.
    She pulled up the collar of her trench coat and switched on her small flashlight. Luke fired up the giant, commercial-grade torch he had retrieved from under the reception desk.
    He was right, she thought wryly his flashlight was definitely bigger. The wide beam it projected swallowed up whole the narrowly focused rays of her dainty penlight and leaped ahead to rip large chunks out of the dense night.
    “Nice flashlight,” she said, reluctantly intrigued. No one appreciated a good flashlight more than she did. She considered herself a connoisseur. “What kind is it?”
    “Military surplus. Got it on eBay.”

    “Right.” She made a note to check out the military surplus shopping sites online the next time she was in the market for a new flashlight. That wouldn’t be long. She upgraded regularly.
    Luke descended the three stone steps beside her, moving with a lithe, comfortable ease that told her he certainly had no qualms about facing the night. She got the feeling that very few things scared Luke Danner.
    She surveyed the path. “Not just a couple of the path lights out, I see. Looks like none of them are functioning.”
    “Got some new ones on order down at the hardware store,” he said, unconcerned.
    “Be wonderful if they got installed by summer, wouldn’t it?”
    “Is that sarcasm I hear in your voice, Miss Stenson?”
    She gave him a brilliant smile. “Heavens, no.”
    “Just checking. Sometimes you sophisticated folks from out of town are a little too sharp for us locals.”
    Don’t play the small-town rube with me, Luke Danner. I didn’t just fall off the
bach of the turnip truck, myself.
True, she didn’t know much about him—wasn’t sure she wanted to learn more—but she could see the gleam of diamond-hard intelligence in his eyes.
    “Something tells me you don’t belong in Dunsley any more than I do, Mr. Danner.”
    “What makes you say that?” he asked, a little too politely.
    “Call it a wild, intuitive guess.”
    “You do that a lot?”
    “Do what a lot?”
    “Make wild, intuitive guesses?”
    She thought about it. “Sometimes.”
    “Personally, I don’t like guesswork,” he said. “I prefer facts.”
    “No offense, but that sounds a bit obsessive.”

    “Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”
    They crunched along the gravel walk that linked the lodge’s twelve individual log cabins. Or rather,
she
crunched in her