Protected In His Arms
Suzanne McMinn
He had only 72 hours… With the clock ticking, U.S. Marshal Gideon Brand knew a little girl would die unless he could convince genuine psychic Marysia O'Hurley to help him. But he never planned to enlist Marysia's help with bullets flying in the background and her as his unwilling hostage! She wanted a lifetime…Now the two are on the race of their lives to discover the link between the plane crash that killed Marysia's husband and the disappearance of a judge's granddaughter. And as Marysia learns to embrace–and not curse–her ESP, she's about to discover another more passionate side to herself in the sexy lawman's arms….
They were lost. People kept shooting at them. Someone wanted her dead.
Mary worked really hard at not having a full-blown panic attack.
“It’s dark,” Gideon said flatly. “If we keep driving around, we’re going to run out of gas before we find our way out of here. Let’s wait for morning. Hole up.”
Hole up? Was this actually her life, or one big, freaky nightmare? This morning, she’d just been Marysia O’Hurley, reclusive widow. Tonight, she was the target of multiple killers for reasons she didn’t understand, and on the run with a sexy federal agent who was scaring the pants off her. And that was almost literal.
She’d been shot at three separate times, she couldn’t go home, and she had the audacity to think “sex” every time she looked at Gideon Brand.
She was stuck in a car. In the middle of nowhere. Till morning. With six feet of big, bad, sexy male.
Some women would label that last bit lucky. Mary found it terrifying.
Dear Reader,
Marysia O’Hurley started out as the best friend of one of the main characters in my first HAVEN book, Secrets Rising, and she was so much fun, I couldn’t resist creating a story just for her. In Secrets Rising, she played at being a psychic and discovered that Haven’s earthquake had turned her power from pretend to real. In Protected in His Arms, follow Marysia as she deals with the dark side of her unexpected power and is forced to find the good in it when a U.S. Marshal needs her special skills. And soon, Marysia realizes it’s not only the hot, sexy federal lawman who needs her to help him find a missing little girl—Marysia needs him because the kidnapper is after her, too.
Welcome back to Haven, West Virginia!
Love,
Suzanne McMinn
Protected in His Arms
Suzanne McMinn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SUZANNE MCMINN
Suzanne McMinn is an award-winning author of two dozen novels, including contemporary paranormal romance, romantic suspense and contemporary romantic comedy as well as a medieval trilogy. She lives on a farm in the mountains of West Virginia, where she is plotting her next book and enjoying the simple life with her family, friends and many, many cats. Check out her upcoming books and blog at www.suzannemcminn.com.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 1
Step down from the bench in seventy-two hours or the little girl dies.
U.S. Marshal Gideon Brand ran his hands over the rough stubble of his face. It had already been twelve hours since a federal judge’s six-year-old granddaughter had been discovered missing. She’d disappeared on Gideon’s watch.
The threatening message had arrived in the judge’s inbox an hour later, time stamped 7:21 a.m. Eastern Standard, and all the forces of federal law enforcement were hard at work attempting to unscramble its path. They would fail. The nascent technology of the heavily encrypted e-mail bypassed central servers and would automatically erase itself in a matter of hours—destroying along with it all evidence of its origin. It was as close to foolproof as had ever been seen.
“You’re supposed to be out of here already.”
Gideon pivoted in his seat to find the head of the West Virginia judicial security division watching him with expressionless eyes honed from his military special ops background. A look that caused Gideon to believe, far too often, that he was still in special ops.
“Go home,” Darren Tucker said. “Some rest will do you a world of good.”
“I’m not tired.”
“This isn’t your case anymore. I know that’s hard to accept, but that’s the way it is.”
Tucker was now assuming direct supervision of the operation.
Gideon was tempted to tell him where he could stick his case, and his pseudosympathy. Molly was more than a case. She was a human being and he had come to care for her more than he’d ever expected. Maybe she reminded him too much of what he’d lost, but this wasn’t about him. It was about Molly.
Unleashing his anger on Tucker for his insensitivity and authoritarianism would do nothing to save her life. But the statement Judge Alcee Reinhold was in the process of preparing likely wouldn’t save her either. Kidnappers rarely returned their victims, and the judge had a recent history of deadly intimidations against him that was believed to include the bombing of a small plane and the death of a federal agent.
“Go home,” Tucker repeated.
“Seventy-two hours,” Gideon said harshly as he stood. His chest hurt and his hands fisted at his sides.
Go home? Do nothing?
On any given day, he was responsible for investigating, analyzing and assessing threats and other inappropriate communications to sitting judges, as well as supervising protective detail, round the clock if necessary. He had a record of apprehensions and successful cases longer than his arm and he was being dismissed like a child who needed a nap.
Did they actually think he could just go home and suck his thumb while Molly’s life hung in the balance?
“And there are only sixty of them left,” Gideon added pointedly.
Darren Tucker knew when to keep his mouth shut. There were no platitudes to ease the awful fact that a man who may have killed a planeload of thirty-four innocent people in one fell swoop wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter one more.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Gideon said, speaking the platitude for the commander. He heard the emotion he’d sworn to control come out in his voice. “Except not.”
Bitterness stung deeply. He didn’t agree with the media blackout on information regarding Molly’s kidnapping.
“Go home and go to bed,” Tucker said flatly. “You have five minutes, then I’ll have you escorted from the building.”
The commander left the room. Tough love, that’s what he’d said to Gideon when he told him he was dismissed from the case. More than dismissed from the case. Sent on forced leave. He’d taken the case too personally, become too emotionally involved. According to Tucker, this made him a danger to himself, other agents, even to Molly. He didn’t agree, but he didn’t get to choose.
Gideon left the building with nothing. The truth was he had no personal belongings at the office.
And the same was true of his apartment, he thought wryly as he parked his car and got out. His apartment was cold, with an overhanging sense of emptiness despite being marginally furnished. He looked at a photo of a smiling, bubble-blowing five-year-old Lizzie on the mantel over the fireplace where he’d never burned a log. Frozen in time, weeks before his daughter had died. Innocent, her life shining ahead of her, then gone in a blink.
Six months later, his marriage had fallen in line as if her murderer’s second victim.
He pushed away the feelings that photo always inspired, the guilt and loss so deep, they couldn’t be borne, and focused on the reason he kept it there, to remind himself of his purpose in life. Without that purpose, he’d have given up long ago.
Even with it, he swirled the sink drain a lot of days. He hadn’t been able to save Lizzie. He hadn’t even had a chance.
But Molly…
He had a chance to save her. It wasn’t too late. Not yet. And there was no way he was walking away.
No one knew for sure why someone wanted Judge Alcee Reinhold off the bench. It could be revenge for a case on which the judge had already ruled or preparation for a case yet to come before the court. A case someone didn’t want to have come before Judge Reinhold. Specifically, it was possible the intimidation against the judge was related to the Pittsburgh mafia infiltration of West Virginia and attempts to nail the ringleaders. The judge dealt with search warrants, wiretaps, secret grand jury testimony. Bribery for tip-offs was mafia stock in trade.
If the judge wasn’t cooperating, they’d want him replaced. It was Gideon’s current working theory, though no direct link between the attacks and the mafia had been made.
Stacks of files staggered in piles on the kitchen table. None of the materials were classified. They were mostly notes in his own hand, ideas, questions, scraps of random ideas and newspaper clippings about the Pittsburgh mafia.
He got a glass of water from the kitchen, sat down at the table and stared at the folders. He made himself feel nothing as he pored over his notes and every article, again. He could let emotion drive him, but he couldn’t let it stand in his way.
The pile on the bottom contained clippings and notes from the plane explosion. It had been a dramatically deadly act. Suspicion from the beginning had centered on threats to Alcee Reinhold, who hadn’t made the flight. Unfortunately, Robbie Buchanan, the federal agent assigned to escort him, had already been on board. If the bombing had indeed been intended for the judge, the Marshals couldn’t prove it. They only knew how the perpetrator had gotten access to the plane to plant the bomb. The perpetrator had most likely masqueraded as a member of the construction staff and gotten through using a stolen ID. The bomb had been planted in the twin-propeller passenger plane’s cargo hold.
But the investigation into the explosion had long ago grown cold, as had any clues to the identity of its mastermind. Agents had pored over security tapes, looking for the face of a killer, attempting to identify each person.
Gideon sat in the growing dusk of his apartment staring at the pile of clippings related to the attack on Flight 498. He read through them, one by one, for the four-thousandth time.
There was nothing new.
Except his level of desperation. Something wasn’t right. He just didn’t know what it was.
He grabbed the phone off an end table in the small living room and phoned Tucker.
“Brand here. I want to know what came out in that interview with the psychic,” he clipped out. Impatient? Hell, yeah.
“What?”
“That psychic from Haven who called the airport, said Flight 498 was going to explode. There was a tracking ID for an interview outcome report, but I never received the file.”
“Get some sleep, Brand.”
“Did anyone actually talk to Marysia O’Hurley?”
“Yes, we talked to her. Dammit, Brand. Do you not see—”
“What was the outcome?”
“—you are obsessed! And you aren’t thinking clearly!”
“What was the outcome?”
“She was an hysterical wife! Get a grip. Her husband was taking that flight. She admitted she was afraid of flying herself. Do you know how many crank calls they get at the airport every day? She’s a whack job, and she didn’t have anything to do with the bombing. She was thoroughly checked out. Get some sleep!”
The grainy photo in the newspaper clipping showed a slender, dark-haired woman with grieving eyes. She looked lost, even in the crowd of mourners photographed that day at the airport. Her eyes hit the camera dead-on, and there was nothing hysterical about them, even in the midst of shock.
“You remember what they said about Haven after that quake,” Gideon said, and even as he spoke the words, he felt foolish. The tiny town of Haven, West Virginia, had been hit by an earthquake the year before and the aftermath had included a cable media circus of claims about “positive ions” triggering paranormal activity.
Earthquakes were uncommon in West Virginia, but the event itself wasn’t all that had been strange about the four-point-three shock. The news had been full of panicked homeowners reporting bursts of horizontal light and a reddish haze in the air. Fire trucks had responded to a variety of locations, but had found no flames to douse. One resident had called in a paranormal detective after a young boy was found, scratched and confused, along a roadside claiming to have been trapped inside a red ball of light.
A spokesperson from the Paranormal Activity Institute had called the quake, in combination with existing atmospheric conditions of low pressure and dense moisture at the time, the “perfect storm,” labeling the bursts of reddish light “foundational movement” for oncoming supernatural incidents.
Anything can happen in Haven now, the PAI spokesperson had stated.
It had been quite an eye-rolling interview, and it had played over and over in news reports. Even Gideon hadn’t missed it, despite the small amount of television he watched. The furor of the story had eventually died down, and if anything genuinely paranormal had ever happened in Haven, Gideon didn’t know about it. He certainly hadn’t taken any of it seriously.
Following the kidnapping, he’d returned to headquarters and requested the files on all the interview outcomes going back to the plane bombing. He’d gotten every file, immediately, except the one on Marysia O’Hurley, the supposed psychic from Haven.
This evening, he’d made a specific request for her file alone.
Twenty minutes later, he’d been suspended.
“Do you hear yourself talking, Brand?” Tucker asked simply.
“Yeah. I do.” Gideon was silent for a heavy beat. The something-wasn’t-right feeling in his gut itched at him.
He heard a very subtle click on the line. Suspended and…wiretapped?
His pulse went dead still.
Slowly, he held the phone away from his ear. He could hear Tucker, distantly now, asking him if he’d lost his mind. He used his pocketknife to quickly take apart the bottom of the receiver and found the tiny listening device nestled inside.
Putting the phone back to his ear, he snapped, “Did you wire my phone?”
“What the hell are you talking about now? Of course we didn’t wire your phone.”
Gideon punched the Off button.
Either the commander was lying—in which case, he was done talking to him—or someone else had wired his phone.
A perpetrator who was an expert at bombs and security infiltration and high-tech communication.
As he raced out of the apartment, Gideon wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the same perpetrator who could be behind both a bombing and a kidnapping could be one of his own.
Gideon was in and out of the southern district office in under seven minutes, breaking all the rules, bypassing all security except at the gate. Security was sometimes not much more than a facade when you knew your way around. It was late, and the guard at the post didn’t realize Brand had been put on leave. Maybe he didn’t get the memo.
The door to his office was closed and locked, though the lock had not been changed. He powered on the desktop unit, found he still had access to the databank on the network.
He typed in Marysia O’Hurley’s name, did a search. There was nothing there. No interview outcome report file tracking ID. An ID had been in the system mere hours earlier. He’d used the number to request the file from the secure records room.
The computer screen went sharply black, then a white screen with black letters appeared: You are attempting to access an unapproved area.
The hair prickled at the nape of his neck. Network usage was tracked and his access had just been cut off from somewhere inside the building.
He scraped back his chair, headed for the empty, night-lit hallway. Someone opened fire and he heard the audible rush of a bullet past his ear. Blood pounded in his veins as he evaded and struck back. He fired in the direction of the blast in the same second he leaped for the door to the stairs, took them in flying bounds to the underground parking.
The guard at the gate reached for the phone inside his booth.
Reaching the gate, he had his window down and his gun out, and before the guard could speak or attempt to draw, Gideon pointed his GLOCK.
“Open the gate.”
He was through.
For the first time since he’d heard that shot, he felt his hands shake, reaction kicking in. No internal alarm had gone off in the building. He’d been shot at inside headquarters. He forcibly shut down the part of his brain that registered emotion, firmed his grip on the wheel as he steadied his pulse, his Impala speeding through the maze of dark streets. He braked at a light long enough to see that the cross-street was deserted, then zoomed through it and up the interstate on-ramp.
He’d gotten away clean, but there was no going home. And he had a real bad feeling whoever had shot at him inside the building had no need to follow him. All he could do now was hope he got there first—and alive. By pulling that gun on the guard, he had just become a wanted man.
Armed and dangerous. His fellow Marshals would be ordered to shoot to kill. His life had just taken on the value of dirt.
Molly’s life was on the line. His own was only important in that context. As was, now, Marysia O’Hurley’s.
When he flicked the headlamps on as he sped up I-79 North, the sign whizzing by read, Haven, 22 miles.
Chapter 2
Somebody was going to get into that Impala tonight and have sex. And that somebody was her.
For one wild, panicky breath, Marysia O’Hurley wanted the fever dream of delicious lust that hit her with the flash of perception to be real. Hot ripples scorching her skin. His fingers teasing inside her. Her muscles clenching around him. Her voice, sobbing at the shock wave of pure pleasure…
No, no, no. She blocked the sensory images assaulting her so hard that her knees nearly collapsed under her.
The man getting out of said Impala that had pulled into the parking lot next to her car was tall, built, effortlessly sexy. She’d just bet he was as good with his hands as she imagined. It was all she could do to not stare at his ropey-sinewy body and go right back to fantasyland.
And it was fantasy. Not any projection of soon-to-be reality.
First off, she was hardly Miss America, and despite the see-all way his gaze pinned her, she didn’t have a history of come-ons by rugged, sexy, impossibly erotic strangers in parking lots as if she was living out some kind of True Confessions story line.
Second, she was crazy, certifiable, wasn’t she? The cacophony of uncomfortable intuitive flashes that had taken over her life made her feel like a satellite picking up too many signals—most of which were likely products of her ridiculous imagination.
Maybe somebody was going to get lucky in that Impala tonight. But it wasn’t going to be her.
She hadn’t gotten lucky in a long time.
Not that she cared.
Marysia averted her gaze from the man now standing by the Impala. She felt the man grab her arm.
“Are you all right?”
No. Not really.
Not at all.
She refused to meet his eyes, stared down at the lean chest of the so-sexy stranger. Even his voice was sexy. Wow, he’d moved fast. Not that the parking lot was huge. Haven’s one tiny grocery store had just a row of parking in the front and another row along one side. And that this was the biggest store in town said a lot about Haven, West Virginia. It served as everything from grocery store to hardware and feed store to fast-food deli, not to mention game checking station, movie rental and community gossip hub.
“I said, are you all right?” he repeated.
“I’m fine. Thank you. Excuse me.”
An older lady and a boy came around the corner of the store, heading toward their car, packages in hand.
He let go of her arm and she ran, actually ran, around the side of the building and into the grocery store. Her heart hammered like mad.
She needed cinnamon. Not sex. Cinnamon.
Baking. She loved to bake. Baking was normal.
She just wanted things to go back to normal.
Normal was a town in Illinois. At least that was part of the pep talk she’d been trying on herself lately. There was no such thing as normal. Not for anyone, much less for her, and if she stopped telling herself that normal was something she needed, then she’d be able to relax. Deal with things. Accept life as it was. Crazy was the new black.
She was half Polish, half Italian, and she’d been married to an Irish guy. What did people expect from her anyway?
It was nearly closing time. She raced through the store, grabbed a small jar of ground cinnamon, some flour, then a bag of apples, and headed for the checkout. No. She needed ice cream. She definitely needed ice cream. She picked out a gallon of vanilla bean from the freezer case, juggling it with the other things until she got up front.
“Looks like somebody’s makin’ something good tonight,” the Foodway checker said as she rang up the items. “Yum. Wish I was going to your house.”
Mary tugged a ten out of her wallet.
“Pie,” she said.
There was nothing more normal than apple pie and vanilla ice cream. She handed the bill to the girl behind the register. She looked like she was about nineteen. Mary hadn’t seen her before, so Keely must have just hired her.
She could see her friend coming up the aisle from the back of the store. Keely had spotted her.
The girl made change. She dropped the coins in Mary’s hand. The all-too-familiar-now snap of what sometimes felt like electricity jolted her. Mary met the girl’s eyes, the coins hot in her fist now.
She was a pretty girl with big, trust-me eyes, and she was going to get fired tomorrow for stealing.
“Hey,” Keely Schiffer said, reaching the checkout. “I thought that was you I saw whizzing through the store like somebody shot you out of a cannon. Not planning to stop and say hey to your best friend tonight?”
“I was in a hurry. And you looked busy in your office, so I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Was that two excuses for the price of one?”
Mary didn’t argue the point her friend drove home all too well. Yeah, so she was a little antisocial and a lot in denial.
She looked away from her friend’s piercing eyes, her gaze landing on the stack of weekly newspapers sitting next to the register. She focused on the headlines as if she was interested. Construction was starting on a new field house at the high school. The mayor was up for reelection. A mobile home fire was under investigation. The deer population was on the rise.
“I was thinking we should get together, go shopping or something,” Keely said. “I hardly see you—”
“I can’t,” Mary said. She gathered her packages. “I’m sorry.”
She thought about telling her the new checker was a thief, but then Keely was going to find out on her own pretty soon if that were true, wasn’t she? Just like the librarian was going to find out she was pregnant next week, and somebody was going to get in that Impala in the parking lot and have some superfabulous sex tonight.
Or Mary was just crazy like everybody said. Either way, keeping her lip zipped seemed like a good choice. Even if Keely was maybe the only person in Haven who might, just might, not call her crazy. But Mary knew Keely herself had kept her own experiences after the earthquake close to the vest, even if she had shared one of those experiences with Mary.
Or maybe it was Mary who didn’t want to talk about it and she was projecting, wrongly. A piano teacher by trade, she’d spent ten years hobbying as pretend psychic at community fairs and school carnivals. Until the earthquake had changed everything. The real thing wasn’t quite as much fun.
And what was the point because nobody believed her? People thought she was crazy, other than the occasional crackpot who, thanks to the media circus surrounding her husband’s death, called her for the “psychic” services she no longer offered.
She gave Keely a quick hug. “I’m sorry. I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”
“No, you won’t!” Keely called after her.
No, she probably wouldn’t.
The man was still there, now leaning against the Impala and watching her.
She walked between their cars to her driver’s-side door, juggling packages along with her oversized purse.
“I’m sorry about your husband.”
She dropped the bag of apples.
“What?” She stared at him over the top of his car. It had been nine months since Danny had died. She was used to sympathetic platitudes, even from strangers. But how this stranger knew who she was…She’d never seen him before, she was certain of that.
“I know how it feels to lose someone. I know you know how it feels, too.”
“How did you—” She broke off, stared at him again. A floodlight on the building revealed his features. Square jaw, intensely jade eyes, planed cheeks, a full, straight lean mouth. Dark, thick, almost military-short hair.
How could she forget him if she’d met him before today?
He was the epitome of hot, his mile-long legs clad in worn blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, untucked yet stretching over impressive pecs, revealing forearms tightly muscled. His pose was lazy like a coiled cat. He wore the bearing of a man who did nothing while he looked as if he could do anything.
Leap tall buildings in single bounds, for example. Action hero material. Definitely.
He belonged on a movie poster with curling flames as his backdrop.
Any woman who got into that Impala with him would be a very lucky woman, indeed.
She felt jittery, sweaty.
It took everything in her to block the sensory assault again. Could she be more lame? Fantasizing about sex with a stranger in a parking lot. Stranger danger, that’s what he was.
And he certainly looked dangerous. Intelligent, street-tough, almost ridiculously gorgeous—but gorgeous like a long, sharp knife. Nope, she didn’t need any of that.
She struggled to get her breathing and her nerves under control.
“How do you know me?” she asked, repeating the question she’d only half managed to get out before.
“I lost a friend on Flight 498.”
Could they have crossed paths at the airport that day? She’d gone there, too, just as had all the other passengers’ family members. They’d stood around, waiting for official information as if some miracle was going to be announced.
She’d known everyone. In her mind.
Lots of people were scared of flying, especially smaller planes. But just because she’d had a severe and highly imaginative panic attack the day her husband had gotten on one, and just because his plane had ended up actually blowing up, didn’t mean she was a real psychic. It just meant she was an hysterical wife.
Coincidence. Nothing more.
It was safer to think that way.
She’d been scared to read anything about the crash victims later. Crazy, that’s what she was. No need to confirm it. And if the victims had matched up to those whose lives had flashed before her eyes that day…She didn’t want to know that either.
She tried to speak to the stranger, to tell him she was sorry for his loss, to speak those empty platitudes of sympathy she knew so well. But her throat felt too tight because suddenly he was right there, in front of her.
He picked up the bag of apples, held them toward her. She stared at him. She didn’t want to take the apples from him. She didn’t want to touch his hand as he handed them to her. Hot instinct ripped through her, even stronger than her so-called psychic flashes. This was women’s instinct.
She just wanted to get out of there. Why did the parking lot feel so empty suddenly?
There was no one else outside the store. The air carried the scent of a coming storm. Wind rustled in the trees behind the building. The occasional car moved down the two-lane highway that led to the restored town square with its beautiful courthouse, cobbled sidewalks and quaint shops and restaurants. Haven, West Virginia, one letter short of Heaven, the cheerful welcome sign coming into town boasted. Surrounded by thick woods of oak, maple and walnut, and the sloped pastures and Gothic-style farmhouses of the Appalachian Mountains, the simple, sleepy scenery backed up the town’s claim.
The pace was no different. Simple. Sleepy. It was a typical early summer night. Time for businesses to put up Closed signs, kids to be tucked into bed, Mary to go home to another lonely evening.
Action-movie-poster man didn’t belong here.
“How do you know me?” she repeated warily.
“I went to your house, but you were leaving. I followed you here. We need to talk.”
Her throat completely closed up.
Screw the apples. Get in the car, drive away. Her pulse thumped and she had trouble thinking.
Was he stalking her? What if he followed her home? Wild possibilities tumbled through her mind. Maybe she was being hysterical.
Maybe she should go back in the store, get Keely. Keely could call the police and—
“I need your help,” he continued. “And you don’t know it, but you need mine. We don’t have much time.”
What?
“I can’t help you.” And the only way he could help her was to go away.
“I think you can. And I think you’re in danger.”
Yes, yes, so did she. From him. He was gorgeous, but a lunatic.
Very, very sad for the women of the world.
She had to get around him to get back to the store. How was she going to do that? Her mind ran jagged, panicky laps, trying to figure out the best way out of the spot she was in.
“I forgot something I meant to get. I have to go back into the store.”
“No.”
No? Her heart jumped with both feet into her throat when he set the apples down on the top of her car.
Relief socked her hard when another car pulled into the parking lot.
She was saved. Thank God.
The dark car screeched to a stop and a window rolled down. Bullets sprayed as the world rocked into slow motion and she screamed.
Chapter 3
Horror gripped Marysia but there was no time for that. The stranger pushed her, and her knees hit the asphalt as she slammed to the ground, her shopping bag flying. Panic roared through her veins and she could barely think, just crawl, desperately.
Run! She wanted to run. More gunshots cracked over her head and her heart boomed in her ears.
She heard tires screeching and a distant shout from the direction of the front of the store, the jangle of the store’s bell over the door. She whipped her head around, saw the dark car gone as quickly as it had come, scrambled up from her hands and knees.
Run! But before she could, he was there, the stranger, ripping open the door of his Impala, pushing her inside as from the corner of her eye she saw the dark car screeching back.
It hadn’t gone away. It had merely turned around in the parking lot, was coming back for more.
Diving, she took cover inside the car as more shots blasted the air. She heard a crash, then nothing. Desperate breaths clawed her lungs. Before she could do anything, breathe, think, move, the stranger was inside, shoving her over to the driver’s seat.
He had a gun. Oh, God.
He had a gun!
“Drive,” he grated.
She blinked, panic and shock drumming wildly inside her. She saw the attacker’s car in the rearview, crashed into a building at the side of the parking lot where Keely kept propane and tanks for sale.
“Drive!” He shouted this time. His hot jade eyes seared her. “Get out of here before he gets out of that car and comes back!”
“The store—My friend—”
“He doesn’t want your friend. He wants you.”
His words registered, but she couldn’t process them. Why would anyone want to kill her?
And yet…Those bullets had been nothing if not incredibly real.
The Impala sprang to life as she turned the key, tires screaming backward. The shoulder strap of her purse tangled across her chest, the bag heavy in her lap, wedging between her body and the wheel. She saw Keely and the checkout girl run back into the store, saw the attacker’s car door push open, a shadow escape, then the world behind her turned bright orange. The Impala hit the highway and she floored the gas, raw horror tearing through her.
Hardly in control of the car, she swerved to miss an oncoming vehicle. The car spun on gravel at the shoulder, and she braked to a skidding stop.
Breath backed up, harsh and cold, in her lungs.
Huge billows of black smoke filled the air behind them. Flames—
“We’ve got to go back! It exploded!” What exploded, she wasn’t sure—the attacker’s car, the propane. The store! Oh, God, the store. “We’ve got to make sure everyone is okay!”
Keely was back there! A killer was back there, too. But he was gone, he’d run away….
And there was a crazy stranger right here in the car with her.
A crazy stranger with a gun.
He’d protected her back there, though. Protected her from the attacker, protected her by forcing her to drive the car away from the blast.
“They went back in the store. They’re fine. And we’re not. Not yet. I need to talk to you. I’ll explain everything. But not here! Drive!”
Her head reeled. He was, she realized, pointing the gun at her.
“Don’t hurt me,” she breathed harshly.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m trying to save your life. Dammit, drive!”
She hit the gas. The car slammed forward, back on the road. They were driving with no lights. She didn’t know where the lights were. She fumbled madly for a switch, not finding it, following the road in the lights from roadside buildings, from memory.
Stay calm. He just wanted to talk, that had to be it. He wanted to talk. He was crazy, maybe, and he wanted to talk. She’d talk to him, then he’d let her go. Or kill her.
But she couldn’t let herself think that way. She had to think of ways to escape. She’d drive to the police station.
She was in control of the car, wasn’t she? Except for that gun thing.
“Turn there.”
She didn’t want to turn there. That was a back road. A country back road twisting out into the boonies. He wanted to explain. Fine, she’d love an explanation. But she wanted to talk somewhere safe, like the police station.
He grabbed the wheel when she didn’t slow down and they careened while she nearly had a heart attack, grappling for control, hitting the brake, barely missing a guardrail as they swerved over a bridge that spanned the river.
Dark woods whizzed past as she regained control of the car. There was no regaining control of her wildly pounding pulse.
She was getting out of this car!
She screeched to a stop, tried to grab open the door. His grip held her fast. She slapped at him with her other hand, not caring, let him shoot her. God, what would he do if she didn’t get out of this car?
He had her with both arms, both of them half falling out of the open door of the car, him on top of her. Her harsh breaths seared her lungs and his fiery eyes slammed her.
“I’m not going to drive anywhere else! I’m not going anywhere with you!” she spat out breathlessly. She was going to die anyway.
Was that fear or one of her nutso psychic flashes? She didn’t know anymore. She struggled again and must have caught him in a weak moment because she managed to kick at him sideways, scrambling to her feet as she pushed out the door.
She was off and running.
For about two seconds and he was on top of her and she was down, the asphalt biting into her knees again, tearing through her denim capris, then she slammed face down. She barely registered the physical pain.
“Just let me go. Please. Let me go home.” She was begging and she didn’t care. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Rape her. He was going to rape her. That was the deal about sex and his Impala! She’d just misread her impressions, probably because she was sex-starved.
Oh, God. This was no pleasure fantasy. Panic flooded her.
“Stop it!” he demanded roughly, holding her down, her arms pinned, his hard body making her attempts to kick backward at him useless. Exhausted, sobbing, she realized she was out of control, so far out of control.
She tried to get her breathing in order, tried to think. She had to use her brain. That was the only hope she had.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
He’d said that before. She didn’t believe him. She couldn’t see more than a half view of him from her position, cheek down on the hard road.
“Yes, you are!” she cried wildly. “You kidnapped me. You held a gun to me. You’re pinning me down. You forced me down this deserted road. You’re hurting me right now!”
“I’m trying to save your life! Listen to me!”
Out of control. She was still out of control.
She swallowed hard. Stop panicking! The order to herself was all but useless, but she faked it.
Calm.
Act calm. “Okay. I’m listening.”
Use your brain, she reminded herself. Find out what he wanted. She tried to breathe, in, out, calm. Not calm at all. And her brain…
Fried.
“What—What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” Her voice came out ragged, a sob choking her throat. He wanted to save her life? She hadn’t needed any lifesaving until he’d shown up, him and whoever was after him.
There was no reason, no reason at all, anyone would be after her.
“There’s a little girl. Six years old. She’s missing.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say, and she couldn’t think straight.
“I’m sorry. You should call the police. They have people who do that, find missing children.”
“They can’t help me. You can. You knew about that plane bombing, didn’t you?”
She went dead still. Stunned. Again.
He suddenly moved off her, twisted her around, pulling her up to face him. He held her shoulders with both hands. He wasn’t letting go of her and she was scared to try to run again. She shook like a leaf.
The night closed in dark around them, seeming to swirl with shadows. Thunder banged. She felt sick, afraid of dying, and he—
He looked fearsomely in control. Action hero on the set.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. Maybe you know more than you think you know. Maybe someone else thinks so, too.”
Pain, palpable pain, seemed to radiate off him in waves, wrap around her, and she struggled to push it back from suffocating her.
She was in pain. She was in danger—from him. She didn’t know anything about any little girl.
She couldn’t just decide to know something. The things she knew, they hit her, like wild shots in the dark. Images, impressions, sometimes smells and sounds. Truths and lies. It was nothing she could control. Nothing she wanted to control.
And she was wrong, mostly wrong, she was sure of it, and even if she was right, it was too little, too late. And she couldn’t handle her own pain much less anyone else’s.
Maybe you know more than you think you know. Maybe someone else thinks so, too.
What was he saying? That the attack at the store had been someone after her? Because she knew something? And what did that have to do with a missing girl? The plane bombing had been nine months ago.
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. Please let me go!”
“I can’t do that,” he persisted. “And trust me, you don’t want me to. That shooting back at the store? That was about you.”
No, no, no. That wasn’t possible. Until he spoke, she didn’t realize she’d said those words out loud.
“It is very possible. In fact,” he went on grimly, “it’s probable.”
“Why?”
“There is a little girl who is going to die in less than three days if we don’t find her. And there is a very good chance the person holding her is the same man who killed your husband and thirty-three other people on Flight 498.”
Information overload. She couldn’t put it all together.
His eyes on her were bright, sharp, searing her in the thick night. She suddenly felt almost disembodied. None of this could be happening. None of this made sense.
What could that bombing have to do with a little girl’s kidnapping?
“I don’t understand.”
“You can’t go home. If you go home, you’re going to die.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Yes,” he said quite seriously. “It is crazy.”
The increasing humidity of the night seemed to close in on her, suffocating her. Crazy. The whole world had gone crazy.
“Are you—Are you some kind of police or something?” she demanded.
Suddenly the deadly capable way he had of handling himself, handling gunfire, hit her. She’d have been killed back there if not for his quick actions and reactions. He’d gotten her out of the way before the explosion, too. He was like a well-trained machine.
But he’d also held a gun to her head and forced her down this lonely road, nearly killing them both. He claimed that was to save her life, too.
“Who are you?” she repeated thinly when he didn’t respond.
“My name is Gideon Brand. Until a few hours ago, I was a U.S. Marshal investigating threats to a federal judge that we believe started with that plane bombing. The latest threat came to life with the kidnapping of that judge’s granddaughter. A six-year-old girl I was sworn to protect. I failed her. I won’t rest until I find her, and I’m going to find her alive if I have to move heaven and earth to do it. And right now, that means moving you, whether you like it or not, whether you believe me or not. Whoever blew up that plane and kidnapped Molly thinks you know something.
“They want you dead now,” he went on. “I want to know why. And they want me dead now, too, because I asked the wrong questions. Questions about you.”
She swallowed hard.
“I don’t know anything about a little girl! I don’t know anything about the bombing!” She didn’t. Truly, she didn’t.
“Someone thinks you do. Something you said when you were interviewed after the bombing made someone think you do. But as long as nobody took you seriously, that was fine.”
She could barely even remember the interview after the bombing. Officials had talked to her, yes. They’d blown off her initial call to the airport, to the police, and hadn’t taken her seriously afterward either. She was glad. She’d been in shock and the craziness of her sensory projections hadn’t done anything to help. They hadn’t saved Danny anyway, so what good were they?
That someone actually thought she knew something, something that could point to a killer—
Terror wrapped her tight and she had the intense urge to run right into those woods behind her and never stop. But the wilds around Haven were home to bears and wolves, not just pretty deer. And tonight, maybe a murderous madman, too.
The madman who’d run out of that car in Haven right before it exploded. They hadn’t driven that far away.
Her nerves felt like they were going to blow up. What had happened to apple pie and ice cream? Another quiet evening in almost Heaven?
“Nobody should take me seriously!” she raged at the stranger, anger suddenly boiling up inside her. “I’m a fake! I’m hysterical! I’m crazy! Haven’t you heard? I am not a psychic!”
She pushed to her feet and he let her go. She saw her purse, lying in a heap on the road where it had slung off her shoulder in her escape from the car. She reached down, picked it up, scooping back into it the items that had fallen out—the cell phone that only got a signal when she was in the city, the flavored lip gloss that was just about all she ever wore for makeup, a pen from the bank. Her mother had given her mace a couple of years ago. Why, oh why, had she decided when she’d cleaned out her overweight purse the last time that the mace was what had to go?
She backed a step at a time from the stranger.
He stood, and even from several feet away, she felt as if he towered over her. Six feet of scary male. She was not a small woman, but she was no match for him. The woods behind her felt thick and ominous. The attacker was out there, somewhere.
Not that this stranger should be any less frightening to her and yet—
The world around her, the world gone mad, was scaring her even more than he was.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said.
“If you don’t think I’m crazy, then you’re the crazy one.” Her voice broke. God, don’t start crying. She willed herself not to let a tear fall. “I want to go home.”
She wanted her little two-bedroom house wrapped with perennial gardens and just enough space from neighbors to feel secluded on its small acreage. Home.
She felt a sob filling her throat, but crying wasn’t going to fix anything.
“You can’t go home. You’ll end up dead. And so will Molly.”
And she heard it in his voice again, the pain. Whatever was or wasn’t true here, that was real. He cared about this missing girl. His energy was strong and the signals bouncing off him now nearly knocked her down.
“Then I want to go to the police.”
“You can’t do that either. It’s not safe.”
Going to the police wasn’t safe?
“How do I know anything you’re saying is the truth? How do I even know you’re a U.S. Marshal?”
He reached into his pocket, flashed open his credentials. She had to take a step toward him to see them in the last bit of light streaking through the dark clouds. There was an identification card with a badge that looked like a star within a circular ring.
Very Wild West-looking.
She lifted her gaze to his hard, deadly one, and shivered. Oh, God. That had really looked like an official badge, but she was scared to believe it. For all she knew, he’d bought it on the Internet. Or at a Western wear store.
“If you’re a U.S. Marshal, then why were you taking me down this back road instead of to the authorities?”
The storm that had been coming hit and hit hard. Her clothes instantly soaked to her skin. Droplets of water rained down the stranger’s face.
Gideon’s face.
He had a name: Gideon Brand. His face shadowed hard and uncompromising in the wild night. Long, sharp knife, that’s what he was. He was like a walking lean, mean, killing machine. And yet he said he was one of the good guys.
Her heart clanged in her chest, fear returning full force. He looked scarily intimidating, but his energy kept slamming her with the opposite impression, that he was one of the good guys. That he was telling her the truth.
And when he spoke, she’d never more in her life wished she could think someone was lying.
“Because,” he said, “I have reason to believe the person who blew up that plane, the person who’s holding Molly, the person who wants you and me dead tonight is also a U.S. Marshal.”
Chapter 4
“I tried to get the record of your interview,” Gideon told her. “Then I was put on forced leave and somebody tried to kill me. And now someone wants you dead, too. I don’t think this sequence of events is a coincidence.”
Marysia O’Hurley watched him with frightened, dilated eyes. Blue eyes. Startling blue that the black-and-white newspaper photograph hadn’t done justice. Rain soaked her clothes to her slender body, revealing every fragile tremor and sway, but she’d already shown him she was strong. She was scared, too, and he wished to God he could take that horror out of her eyes, but it was there because she was starting to believe him.
He had to hold on to that tenuous faith or even now, she’d cut and run. He’d catch her again. He had no doubt of that, but in the process he might hurt her again. And for some reason he didn’t want to hurt this woman.
“I need you to believe in me,” he said, afraid to take a step toward her, still afraid she’d run. “And I need to believe in you. We need each other, or Molly’s going to die.” He couldn’t let himself forget that this was all about Molly. “I don’t think you’re hysterical. I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you do know things and I think you’re afraid it’s true. I think it’s true. And that is a huge leap of faith I’m taking here because I am believing the unbelievable, and I’m doing it for Molly because you’re the only hope I’ve got. I need you to take that leap with me because I think I’m your only hope, too. If you go to the cops, if you go to the Marshals, you’re going to end up dead.”
She was shaking her head at him, wildly.
He took a chance, reached for her arm.
“Let’s get back to the car,” he shouted over the growing noise of the wind and rain. “We have to get out of here.”
“I can’t help you!”
Her voice came out low and broken, hardly audible over the storm.
He was close to her now. She hadn’t bucked at his hold. Not yet, anyway. He could feel the trembling of her body through his grip on her arm.
“Yes, you can.”
“I’m not a real psychic!” Her eyes blazed at him, vulnerable and bright. Broken. Something about her was so broken.
He didn’t want to see that. He didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to be touched by her.
“I think you are. I think you think so, too.”
“No, I don’t!”
He realized she was crying. That wasn’t just rain streaking down her face, it was tears.
His heart, the one he didn’t want to have anymore, ripped just a bit.
Molly. He had to focus on Molly. What emotion he had left inside him had to go to her. He had a job to do. The clock was ticking, and he had nothing to go on but what he had to hope and pray was in the mind of the woman in front of him.
“Get in the car!” he shouted over the wind. “Please,” he added, softer, because she was still ripping at his heart or because he didn’t want to scare her any more than she was already, he couldn’t have said for sure. Or didn’t want to say, even to himself.
If things were different, if he wasn’t the shell of a man that he was, if she wasn’t terrified out of her mind, if their situation wasn’t so desperate, he might have noticed the perfect package that she was with her wild, dark hair, luminous skin and candy-sweet body.
But he was a shell of a man, she was terrified and their situation was desperate. And that made her nothing but part of the job.
She stood there staring at him, her hair plastered to her head, shivering, shaking, scared still, dammit, but there was no more time to waste. They had to get the hell out of here, and fast.
He tugged her arm, prodding her to move then run. He opened the passenger-side door and she slid inside. He got in, turned the key in the engine, flipped on the lights.
“I don’t know what you think I can do,” she said. “I don’t know anything about any little girl. I can’t tell you where she is, who’s holding her. I can’t just, snap, come up with information. It doesn’t work like that.”
He swung his gaze to her, let a tight beat pass. Was she admitting it did work, that she did have some kind of psychic ability? He let a second beat pass and it was one beat too many.
Lights strobed across the rearview mirror. A car had turned down the road.
Adrenaline surged, sharp. Run or deal.
He reached for the woman beside him, shoving her head into her knees, grabbed his GLOCK, slammed down the driver’s-side button for the passenger window as the other car screeched to a stop. One second for recognition of the driver and his intent. Two to fire.
Jimmy Guarino’s skull thunked hard against the headrest before he slumped forward over the wheel, the gun still in the mafia underling’s hand.
Rain pounded.
He’d studied the face of every known mafioso in the Pittsburgh family. Organized crime involvement in the case was no longer a working theory. And within the space of hours, a federal agent and a mafia gun had tried to take him out.
He yanked the car into gear even as Marysia O’Hurley sat up, took one look out the window in the second before he hit the gas, saw blood and screamed. The Impala flew down the narrow road.
“You killed somebody!” she shouted.
“It was him or me,” he said grimly, gaze locked on the road. “And you.” They’d almost gotten killed, again. He didn’t have time to sort it all out now. Or calm her down. “We have to get out of here.”
The windshield wipers slapped against the glass. She was silent now. He shot a glance her way. She was silent and shaking.
The road was narrow, so narrow that if two cars were to pass, one would have to move off onto the shoulder—or what passed for a shoulder on this country road. The blacktop was rutted and, in places, the bank dropped off steeply. There was a creek somewhere below. The road rolled up and downhill, at times low enough to see the dark water streaming parallel to the lane. Typical West Virginia backcountry, complete with blind curves and other narrow roads shooting off, some paved, some not.
“Where are we going?” Fear threaded through her voice.
At least she’d stopped screaming.
Closed in the car with her, he could smell the scent of her herbal shampoo, hear the soft panting gasps of her breath, see the damp tangle of her hair around her neck.
“I don’t know.” For the first time, he thought about gas. He’d been in too much of a hurry to get to Haven—and then get out of Haven—for the status of the gauge to register until now.
Obviously, he hadn’t been planning to go on the lam today. That was almost funny. Except not.
Jimmy Guarino didn’t work alone.
“That’s not making me feel better! I don’t even know if you’re really a U.S. Marshal! You just killed somebody!”
“He was a mafia hitman.”
“He was what?”
That, apparently, had not been the right thing to tell her.
“I don’t have time to explain now.”
“Of course. You know what? Nobody was shooting at me before you came along! How do I know anything you say is true? Some little girl was kidnapped. Somebody’s threatening a judge. Somebody in the U.S. Marshals is involved. Now it’s the mafia! Maybe you’re just a lunatic and the cops are hunting you down! Maybe you took me as a hostage! Maybe you’re a serial killer. Or a rapist!”
She was starting to sound hysterical and he couldn’t blame her. People kept trying to kill her.
And she wasn’t completely convinced he wasn’t one of them.
“I’m not going to hurt you. That guy back there? He was trying to kill you. I’m trying to save your life.”
“I don’t know that!”
Trust. He needed her trust.
She’d had a few more minutes to think now and she was re thinking going with him. And as he slowed for a low-water bridge in a sharp turn, she grabbed the handle, opened the door.
He skidded to a stop, barely keeping the car from going over the concrete bridge into the creek raging with rainwater now, grabbed her before she could make good her escape.
“Let me go!” she screamed.
He had hold of her and he wasn’t letting her get away, not this time. They had no time to waste.
“Dammit, stop it!” he ordered, her efforts futile but panicked and strong.
Always stronger than she looked, this Marysia O’Hurley.
“You have to trust me,” he grated roughly, reached over her with his free hand to yank the car door shut again. His arm brushed her soft, round breasts. Her innocent herbal scent swirled his nostrils, stronger. For a second, he nearly stopped breathing. A twitch of sharp, hot awareness blindsided him.
He was suddenly, unbelievably, aroused, desire pumping along with adrenaline as she fought him. The only explanation he could come up with was that it had been a hell of a long time since he’d been laid.
Her eyes, wild, met his, and he slammed down on his ridiculous reaction to her. His needs had no place here, none at all. People were trying to kill them. Sex was not on the agenda.
“You won’t even tell me where we’re going!” she yelled at him.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” he admitted. “Right now, tonight, in this minute, I’m just trying to keep us safe.”
And sitting here on this low water bridge wasn’t his definition of safe. Still holding her with one fist, gripping her hand too tightly but afraid to let go, he reached for his gun again.
Reached and, slowly, handed it to her. She dropped her gaze from him to the gun to him again. She didn’t take it.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
“Giving you my gun.”
He could only pray he wasn’t making the biggest mistake of his life. As long as she felt vulnerable—and God knew he understood why she did—she’d keep trying to run. He had to give her some sense of power, control. He had to earn her trust.
And hope she didn’t use it to blow his head off.
“I need you to trust me,” he said grimly. “We need to trust each other. Take it,” he said when she still didn’t pick it up.
He let go of her, giving himself the distance he desperately needed.
“Just don’t run,” he went on. “Take the gun. I don’t want you to be scared of me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I don’t know much about guns,” she said, almost blankly, as if she were in shock. And she probably was in shock.
“I’ll teach you sometime. For now, just remember that it’s loaded.”
“So I can shoot you?”
“So you’ll trust me, I hope.”
He saw her throat move in the darkness illuminated only by the dim light of the dash and the headlights reflecting back at them where they struck the rushing water. He’d stopped the car pointed straight at the creek in the sharp curve. Tree branches swayed with the gusting wind.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll shoot you?”
“Yes.” He hit the gas, getting out of there.
He glanced her way. She gripped the forty-caliber GLOCK, lifting it a few inches, keeping it warily pointed downward.
“Kind of a dramatic gesture, don’t you think?” she said, eyeing him carefully.
Suspicious still.
“Kind of a dramatic situation,” he replied carefully.
“I don’t like drama,” she said. “I don’t like danger. I don’t like guns.”
His life in law enforcement involved a lot of danger, a lot of guns and a lot of drama, too, although it was usually other people’s drama. He stepped in to enforce the law, enforce order.
Now he was part of the drama.
“I don’t like it much, either,” he said, and he realized in that moment that he didn’t just mean the drama. He was tired of people shooting at him. Tired of wondering when he’d die. Being a part of the Marshal Service with its unique and proud history had been a point of pride to him, but the purpose it had also given was tarnished now.
Justice, Integrity, Service. The Marshals’ motto rang hollow. Marshals were supposed to be the good guys, not the bad.
Shocking, this feeling of wishing suddenly he had something else, some other reason to get up every day. Or maybe it was just good timing since his career might well be over.
Or maybe it was just the moment at hand. He’d get over it. If he proved what he believed, nailed the traitor in the Marshals, found Molly…
He would still have a career, still have a life. Maybe. Or he’d die in the process. If he saved Molly, it would be worth it.
She set the gun on the dash. “You don’t need that to kill me. You could kill me with your bare hands before I figure out which end is up. Thanks for the dramatic gesture anyway.”
Did this mean she was ready to trust him? Or that she’d given up?
“I promise you I’m not driving you out in the country to hurt you or harm you in any way,” he said. The Impala flew around a curve. “I’m trying to save your life. I’m trying to save Molly’s life. Is there a back way to one of the main roads, without going through Haven?”
For a long moment, he wasn’t sure she’d answer. Relief socked him when she spoke.
“Yes.”
“How?”
She pointed to the road. “This is Showens Creek Road. If we keep going the way we were headed, take a couple of turns, it’ll get us there eventually.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/suzanne-mcminn/protected-in-his-arms/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.