RUNAWAY by Christie Ridgway

was going to fall with him.
    He peered across the roof and through the smoke toward his friend. Maybe he could warn him. “Jerry! Jerry!”
    His gaze found the other man. Oh, God. His heart shuddered. Jerry was out of uniform! Instead of being protected by full turnout gear as Owen was, the other man was in jeans and a T-shirt. Were those flip-flops on his feet?
    Owen started yelling again through his mask. “Jerry! Get the hell off the roof! Jerry! Jerry!”
    His buddy looked up, finally heeding Owen’s frantic calls. A grin broke over his grimy, ash-darkened face. He gave Owen a jaunty salute, and then—

    The roof opened like the gates of hell and Jerry was gone.
    “Jerry!” Owen scrambled toward where he’d last seen his friend, but felt the surface beneath his feet give. He was going down, too. His stomach rose toward his throat as he fell. Bad, he thought. This was going to be—
    He jerked awake.
    Disoriented, breathing hard, he jackknifed to a sitting position. It was darkness surrounding him. Not smoke. Not fire.
    His bed. His bedroom. He’d survived.
    Only Jerry was dead.
    He fell back to his pillows and flopped his forearm over his eyes. God. His mouth was dry and he felt as if he’d just finished a five-mile run with Will and Jerry dogging his every step as they always did during physical training.
    But Jerry would never run another step.
    Owen groaned, squeezing his eyes tighter shut, though aware that couldn’t stop the replay of his dream and of Jerry, that second before he’d fallen through the roof. His grin. His happy-go-lucky wave.
    His death.
    Owen shoved the covers aside, needing to get out from under their suffocating weight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He needed more air, water, something.
    Before Bryce had left that night, he’d moved thefurniture to give Owen objects set at strategic distances apart so he could use them for support as he hobbled to the bathroom. He reached for the first, but instead of his fingers finding the edge of the bedside table, his cast swiped the lamp. It hit the floor with a deafening crash.
    “Damn!” he cursed, then dropped back to the mattress. There wasn’t much hope that Izzy hadn’t heard the noise. He had no doubt that she’d come running.
    The light in the hallway between the bedrooms snapped on. There was a pattering of footsteps, then his door popped open. “Owen!”
    “I’m fine,” he said, maneuvering himself beneath the blankets again. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
    She took a few steps inside the room. “What happened?”
    “I’m clumsy,” he said, glancing over at her. Then his heart stopped. He didn’t know what he would have thought Izzy would wear to bed. A T-shirt big enough for a linebacker? A granny nightgown?
    Even his libido couldn’t have come up with something like this. Below her tumbled hair, her body was mostly uncovered in a pair of babydoll pajamas—he knew the term from a long-ago former girlfriend who’d worked at a lingerie store—that was a filmy, spaghetti-strapped top worn over a matching pair of boy shorts.
    She must have noticed his sudden, tongue-hanging-out interest. Her bare feet shuffled a step back as one arm flew up to cover her chest. “I pack light and I pack, um, little,” she said. “I get, uh, hot at night.”
    “I’m not touching that remark. And don’t look so nervous, because I’m not planning on touching you, either,” he said, scowling. Just before he’d nodded off, he’d been glad he’d managed to keep his mitts off her, right? Though that was certainly the last of the sleep he’d get tonight, thanks to the disturbing nightmare followed by this chaser of an electrical jolt to his libido.
    “Can I get you something?” she asked.
    “Water, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said, trying to sound more human. “There’s a glass in the bathroom—and my robe on the back of the door.”
    In a few minutes she was back, and she handed him the full glass and then leaned