An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense)

by Bridgeman, Hallee

  Years later, Aria inadvertently uncovers a sinister plot that threatens the very foundations of a nation. Now, stalked by assassins and on the run, her only hope of survival is in trusting her very life to a man who has been dead for years.

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  A CAROL FOR KENT

  BOBBY Kent's name is synonymous with modern Country Music and he is no stranger to running from over zealous fans and paparazzo. But he has no real idea how to protect his daughter and Carol, the mother of his only child, from a viscous and ruthless serial killer bent on their destruction.

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  A HARMONY FOR STEVEN

  CONTEMPORARY Christian singing legend, Harmony, seeks solitude after winning her umpteenth award. She finds herself in the midst of the kind of spiritual crisis that only prayer and fasting can cure. Steven, the world renown satanic acid rock icon who has a reputation for trashing women as well as hotel rooms, stumbles into her private retreat on the very edge of death.

  In ministering to Steven, Harmony finds that the Holy Spirit is ministering to her aching soul. The two leave the wilderness sharing a special bond and their hearts are changed forever.

  They expect rejection back in their professional worlds. What neither of them could foresee is the chain of ominous events that threaten their very lives.

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  EXCERPT FROM A MELODY FOR JAMES

  A Melody for James was voted the July Clash of the Titles WINNER and voted The Book Club Network's August Book of the Month in 2013. If you missed A Melody for James, buy it now in Paperback or eBook wherever fine books are sold.

  PLEASE enjoy this special excerpt from the upcoming full length Christian suspense novel, A Melody for James, Part One of the Song of Suspense Series.

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  ANGELA Montgomery nearly missed it. She had lost herself in memories of her recent birthday celebration marking the passing of her 30th year on earth. Her husband, James, her junior by 2 short years, had gone all out. Being "much" younger, he had decorated the entire house with black balloons and held a surprise "wake" for the passing of her late youth. Daydreaming and lost in feelings of love and adoration for her beloved groom, Angela nearly failed to recognize the moment when it happened.

  When her consciousness shifted from her reverie back to the present, for several breaths she simply stared at the smart board in front of her and ran through the calculations again. Then she tried to ignore the little shivers of nervous excitement that danced up her spine.

  "Heeyyyyy …" Donald Andrews clicked a few keys on the laptop in front of him, magnifying the image on the smart board screen so that it covered the entire wall. "Did we just …"

  Angela rose, her legs feeling uncharacteristically stiff, and walked forward while staring at the screen. "You know what, I'm cautiously going to say yes. Yes, we did."

  Alvin Berry let out a loud, "Whoop!" He removed the ever present knit cap from the top of his head and tossed it into the air. The group collectively looked at each other and grinned. Years of work, and the breakthrough sat right there on that smart board, staring back at them.

  "We should celebrate," Lorie Frazier announced. She pulled her glasses from her nose and casually tossed them onto the stack of papers in front of her. "We need to celebrate, then we need to call a press conference. But only after we get to the patent office."

  Angela looked back at the screen. "We have to be sure."

  "We're sure," Alvin said. "Look at that beauty. It is so simple yet so elegant."

  "Call James," Lorie said. "Tell him to make us a reservation in the most ridiculously expensive restaurant Atlanta has to offer. Tell him we're going to celebrate."

  Despite her naturally conservative nature, Angela started to let the feeling of giddy excitement take over. She laughed and hugged Don as she pulled her cell phone from her pocket.

  Her husband would probably jump up and down or do a little dance of celebration. She felt like she might just as easily be making a call to announce that she was expecting their first child instead of the conclusion of this long project.

  For five years, she and this amazing team of engineers had worked to perfect this revolutionary data storage solution. For five years, usually working six days a week, usually not less than twelve hours a day, they'd toiled in this basement lab in her inherited home. While she'd hoped and prayed for all that time, now that the reality of what they'd accomplished actually shone back at her from that beautiful smart screen, she realized she hadn't ever really been certain they'd succeed.

  But they had.

  She got James' voice mail. "Darling," she purred, knowing he'd hear the smile in her voice, "We did it. We're done. I cannot wait to show you. Come home. Come see. We need to celebrate."

  As soon as Angela hung up, she gave Lorie a hug and said, "I vote for cheesecake."

  "Copious amounts," the nearsighted genius agreed. "Oh! With strawberries! And really good coffee."

  Angela felt her heart skip when the red security light started flashing. Her eyebrows crowded together in confusion. Why was the intruder alarm going off now?

  Angela had inherited the farmhouse from her late uncle at the age of 17 and lived there throughout her lengthy matriculation at Georgia Tech. For a brief time when this venture was just beginning, she and her brand new husband, James, as well as their business partner and his best friend, Kurt, had all lived there under the same roof.

  During the initial months and years, Kurt and James had renovated the basement entirely; installing a T1, a two post rack of networking gear, a four post rack of high performance servers; and most importantly, a state-of-the-art security system, designed and built by her brilliant husband himself. For the last five years, they had hardened the basement into a panic room with steel reinforced doors, magnetic locks, and pinhole security cameras. It took two-factor authentication to even get into the room.

  When the magnitude of the fact that the security alarm was still sounding sunk in, Angela whirled around until her eyes met with Don. When she spoke, she hated the shrill edge of panic she detected in her voice. "Back it up to the Snap."

  His fingers clicked on the keys with the speed of machine gun fire as spoke. "There's no time. We didn't do an incremental yesterday because the waffle was running a defrag."

  "Right. Execute a differential and encrypt it." She waited a few heartbeats while Don's fingers played out a staccato percussion on his laptop.

  With confusion clouding his eyes, he looked up and announced, "Our hard line is down."

  Alvin pressed a series of keys on his computer and several small screens appeared on the smart board, all showing different angles of her home. Men in masks moved through the empty house with military precision, high powered and very deadly looking carbine rifles tucked tightly into their shoulders at the ready. They stared around every corner through the sights on the short rifles.

  Lorie gasped and said, "What is going on? Who are they?"

  Fear and panic tried to take over. Her stomach turned into ice and Angela felt like her breathing wasn't productive, like she could never get a deep enough breath. Focus, she said to herself. You will have time to be scared when it's over.

  "Can you remember how we got here since the last backup?" Angela asked Alvin, her hand pointing in his direction like a knife blade. If she'd ever met anyone whose memory rivaled her husband's, it was Alvin.

  His voice sounded flat, emotionless. "Yes. Of course I can."

  She watched a crouched figure outside the entrance to the lab tape two liter plastic bottles filled with water to the hinges of the security door. The security that James and Kurt had installed was tight, state-of-the-art even, and the door was sealed. But no seal in 100 miles would withstand the blast of a shaped charge pushing water ahead of a supersonic shock wave. It would slice through the steel door faster than the world's most powerful cutting torch.

  Whomever these people were, they had known the defenses they would have to overcome. They were prepared. They h
ad planned. They had obviously even rehearsed as was apparent in their staged and perfectly timed precision movements. And the most dangerous thing Angela and her team had for protection once that door came down were a few custom computer viruses.

  She'd known the risks. The success of their project was potentially worth upward of a hundred billion dollars in the first year alone, and that was on the conservative side. The long term applications of the soon to be patented technology could not even be calculated. The reason they worked out of her home instead of in some downtown lab was for the secrecy of the project, a vain hope of security by obscurity.

  They'd taken additional precautions which Angela belatedly realized she had characterized as "paranoid." A commercial exothermic incendiary device much like a military grade thermite grenade perched atop each server array that would, when detonated, melt their way through the machines at over 4 thousand degrees Fahrenheit, effectively destroying everything in a completely unrecoverable fashion. They would burn 3 times hotter than molten lava and the crew would have to be careful not to look at them since the radiant energy was bright enough to blind them without a welding visor.

  "Then destroy it. Destroy it all."

  Lorie's finger hovered over a steel pin. "You're sure?"

  The explosion above them shook the room. Alvin rushed to the inner door and made sure the panic room door remained bolted on all four corners. Angela closed the lid on her laptop and slid it into the 2 inch air gap between network switches. Then she draped her hand on Lorie's shoulder and whispered, "Do it."

  She closed her eyes and started to pray as the room around her grew suddenly very hot and smoke started billowing up to the ceiling. "Lord Jesus, if I live through this, let me remain in Your will. But if I come home to you, sweet Jesus, please watch over my husband. Let him feel your comforting love and let him find the destiny you have in mind for him."

  Smoke alarms went off and the lights flickered. Then she felt herself being picked up and thrown aside, riding on the wave of a perfectly timed blast. As she flew backward from the shock of the multiple explosions blowing open her steel door she prayed even harder — she prayed for courage, for protection, for strength.

  As she landed and fell against the tower of computer drives, she watched the thermite spill and splatter like lava, setting the entire area on fire. Her last thought was of pain as a spray of burning powder fell on her chest.

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  EXCERPT FROM A CAROL FOR KENT

  PLEASE enjoy this special excerpt from the upcoming full length Christian suspense novel, A Carol for Kent, Part Three of the Song of Suspense Series.

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  BIRTHDAY girl Lisa Mabry had selected her favorite pizza parlor for her seventh birthday lunch, as she had every year since she could pronounce the word, and brought best friend since kindergarten Amy Bradford along with her, as she also always had since the day they met. The two little girls giggled and whispered as they ate green olive pizza with extra cheese, and Assistant District Attorney Carol Mabry intentionally let the go of the memory of her morning spent at the funeral parlor.

  She forced herself to focus entirely on her daughter while they were in the restaurant. By the time they piled back into her Jeep, she had mentally left murder and autopsy reports behind, and transformed from A. D. A. Carol Mabry into just Carol, just Ms. Mabry, just Lisa's mom.

  The drive to the ranch took twenty minutes, and the girls sat in the back seat, continuing their whispered conversation. The whispers got louder until they were full-fledged yells, and Carol finally interrupted them. "Girls! What are you two arguing about?"

  "Ms. Mabry, who do you think is cuter? Tim McGraw or Bobby Kent?" Amy asked. Carol felt her stomach tighten.

  "I told you, Bobby Kent is way cuter than Tim McGraw. Besides, Tim McGraw is married and has like a dozen kids. Bobby Kent isn't married, so that makes him even more cute," Lisa said. "Plus, he has the same name as my grandma and grandpa. That's even more extra points."

  "What do you think, Ms. Mabry?" Amy asked again.

  Carol refused to get a headache on Lisa's birthday. Sometimes, tension and stress built up so that she would get headaches that made her have to lie down in a darkened room and fight back tears of pain. But it wasn't going to happen to her today. "I think you two should play rock-paper- scissors, and whoever wins is right," she said, turning onto the drive that led to the ranch house.

  The game brought on another bout of arguing, but by then, Carol was out of the vehicle and didn't have to listen to it. She looked around her, but it didn't look as if anything had been done to prepare for the party. Marjorie was so efficient that Carol usually had nothing to do by the time she came over. She began to get worried that something had happened to Robert. She turned to the girls as they got out of the Jeep. "Lisa, go look in on the new foal Lightning dropped yesterday. I'm going inside to see what grandma's up to."

  "Ok, Mommy. Come on, Amy," Lisa said, then they took off at a run toward the horse barn.

  "Don't go inside the stall without grandpa. Just look!" Carol called to them, then turned to go in the house. She had her hand on the door when Marjorie opened it and stepped out onto the porch. Carol immediately knew something was very wrong.

  "Carol," Marjorie greeted, then she stopped.

  "What's the matter, Marjorie?" Carol asked, taking the older woman's arm and guiding her back to the door. "What happened? Is Robert all right?"

  Marjorie put her hand over her face and burst into tears. "Oh Carol. I'm so sorry." Carol steered her through the door and into the kitchen. Marjorie sat in a chair at the table and buried her face in her hands, her body wracking with sobs. Carol looked and saw Robert seated at the table. He looked so frail, like a strong wind might just break him to pieces. He reached out to take his wife's hand.

  "Robert, what is it? What happened?" she asked. She started really feeling frightened.

  "Carol," he whispered, then cleared his throat and stopped. He cleared his throat again, then said in a stronger voice, "Whatever happens, whatever get's said, you have to know that we are truly sorry. Don't let this spoil Lisa's birthday."

  "What's going on?" Carol demanded, her teeth set. "Tell me right now. Right this second."

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  UNOBSERVED until this moment, international Country music superstar, Bobby Kent, studied Carol Mabry from the doorway of his parent's kitchen. The anger at his parents burned through his system slow and low, like an underground lava flow. They'd decided to tell him about two hours ago.

  His mind rejected the fact that he had a daughter; a seven-year-old daughter. It was too much to fathom at one time. How could two people who professed to love him have kept that information from him? He hadn't been able to get an explanation out of them yet. Both of them had been too upset to make any sense. But he assumed it had something to do with money. It nearly always did. He figured the woman standing over them at the table could shed some light on the subject for him.

  He'd known who they were talking about before they'd even said her name. The moment she spoke, he remembered her vividly. They'd met in a classical violin class at the University of Georgia four weeks before he received the call about his demo and packed his bags to leave. He had been amazed with her musical talent and impressed with her in general. He had asked her out and they had shared some lunches and a dinner and gone to a movie together on a double date. They had gone to one dance at the student center.

  The night he got the call, they had celebrated. They'd sat on the tailgate of his truck and eaten too many Krystal cheeseburgers with way too much champagne. The celebration had gone until dawn. Bobby assumed Lisa arrived a scant nine months later.

  He wanted to turn his anger to someone other than his parents, but he couldn't find it in him to force it onto her. The one thing his father, Robert, had been very clear about was that they had misled Carol all this time. All these years.

  Years!

  Carol believed that Bobby knew all about his daug
hter, Lisa. So Bobby ran his hand through his hair and prepared himself to face her righteous wrath. He had a feeling it would take some time to convince her that he wasn't the bad guy, here.

  He stepped fully into the kitchen, his boot hitting the linoleum, causing a sound that reverberated through the room. Carol stiffened, as if she knew who she was about to see, and turned to face him. He watched the recognition come instantly, and suddenly her hazel eyes filled with burning rage so powerful he almost wished he hadn't made his presence known.

  "Oh, of course! Should have known," she bit out through gritted teeth. "Exactly what are you doing here? Today of all days?"

  He didn't know how to begin, so he decided to start with his defense. From the look on her face, though, he wasn't sure she would even hear his words. "I didn't know, Carol."

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  THE JEWEL SERIES

  More Great Christian Fiction…

  The Jewel Anthology

  by Hallee Bridgeman

  Hallee Bridgeman's critically acclaimed best selling award winning Christian anthology, together in one book for the first time. The complete novel Sapphire Ice. Inspired by The Jewel Series, the all new novella Greater Than Rubies. The second full length novel Emerald Fire, and the final novel Topaz Heat. All works complete, uncut, and unabridged.

  Sapphire Ice

  The Book Club Network's July 2013 Book of the Month: Robin's heart is as cold as her deep blue eyes. After a terrifying childhood, she trusts neither God nor men. With kindness and faith, Tony prays for the opportunity to shatter the wall of ice around her heart.