Protected In His Arms. Suzanne McMinn
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