Buch lesen: «Protected In His 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
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.
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