Protected In His Arms

“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