They were lost. People kept shooting at them. Someone wanted her dead.
Mary worked really hard at not having a full-blown panic attack.
âItâs dark,â Gideon said flatly. âIf we keep driving around, weâre going to run out of gas before we find our way out of here. Letâs wait for morning. Hole up.â
Hole up? Was this actually her life, or one big, freaky nightmare? This morning, sheâd just been Marysia OâHurley, reclusive widow. Tonight, she was the target of multiple killers for reasons she didnât understand, and on the run with a sexy federal agent who was scaring the pants off her. And that was almost literal.
Sheâd been shot at three separate times, she couldnât go home, and she had the audacity to think âsexâ 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 OâHurley 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 couldnât resist creating a story just for her. In Secrets Rising, she played at being a psychic and discovered that Havenâs 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 itâs not only the hot, sexy federal lawman who needs her to help him find a missing little girlâMarysia needs him because the kidnapper is after her, too.
Welcome back to Haven, West Virginia!
Love,
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.
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 judgeâs six-year-old granddaughter had been discovered missing. Sheâd disappeared on Gideonâs watch.
The threatening message had arrived in the judgeâs 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 hoursâdestroying along with it all evidence of its origin. It was as close to foolproof as had ever been seen.
âYouâre supposed to be out of here already.â
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.
âGo home,â Darren Tucker said. âSome rest will do you a world of good.â
âIâm not tired.â
âThis isnât your case anymore. I know thatâs hard to accept, but thatâs the way it is.â
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 heâd ever expected. Maybe she reminded him too much of what heâd lost, but this wasnât 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 wouldnât 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.
âGo home,â Tucker repeated.
âSeventy-two hours,â 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 Mollyâs life hung in the balance?