“I want to talk to you. Two minutes,” he added before she could protest. “Alone.”
Predictably enough, the males protested, but in the end Meredith was alpha and the rest of them headed toward to the kitchen.
“I’ll only be on the other side of the door,” Michael warned.
Isaiah inclined his head in understanding.
Meredith waited until they were all gone before turning back to him. “We’re alone. What do you want?”
He shifted until they were so close they were almost touching. He could feel the heat from her skin, see the way her pupils dilated and the pulse in her neck beat faster. There was a slight hitch in her breathing as he invaded her space.
They weren’t touching, not quite. He raised his hand and lightly brushed the curve of her cheek with the back of his knuckles. She sucked in a breath and the movement had her breasts touching his chest. Even through the layers of their clothing, he could feel the hard tips of her nipples.
Need roared through him. Raw desire pumped through his veins. He wanted Meredith more than he’d wanted anything in his life, as though she was somehow necessary to him.
He leaned down, his lips practically caressing hers as he answered her question. “You, Meredith. I want you.”
A wounded cop. A frightened woman. A desperate race to save a child in danger…
The Midnight Effect
© 2009 Pamela Fryer
In a single phone call, Lily Brent’s entire life—past and future—becomes foggy with confusion and danger. Her estranged sister is dead, and the body is lacking one definitive mark: a surgery scar from the kidney Lily thought she’d donated to her sister long ago.
There’s more than a mystery on her hands. There’s a niece she never knew she had, and a madman on her trail who’s hell-bent on getting the child back.
When a beautiful woman crashes her car into his remote mountain gas station, followed closely by a man with a silencer-equipped pistol, three years of inactive duty fall away as Miles Goodwin springs into action. He saves Lily and her golden child, but nothing can save him from the painful reminder of the family he lost. Retreating to his emotional coma, however, isn’t an option; they’re far from safe.
There’s something strange about a six-year-old girl who’s never eaten a hamburger or heard of Tinkerbell—and who seems to be the source of psychic phenomena so powerful, someone’s willing to kill to get her back.
Warning: Contains heart-pounding suspense, a charm-your-socks-off kid, and a compelling romance that may inspire you to combine your DNA with someone you love!
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Midnight Effect:
Miles Goodwin tipped his chair back as he took a slug from his beer. Across the tree line the remainder of the day was a bloody smear on the horizon. The setting sun drifted away mockingly. Another day and you’re still here because you don’t have the courage to put your revolver in your mouth.
He smacked at a mosquito on his neck. The bugs were relentless at dusk, but this was Miles’ favorite time of day. Swallowing darkness was moments away, when he wouldn’t recognize each agonizing minute in the passage of time. Night was limbo in the personal hell his life had become.
It was a chore to drag himself out of bed every morning, painful to endure every endless minute. The mark of each sunset brought him one day closer to the end he longed for. Closer to the end he didn’t have the courage to seek on his own. Suicide was a sin, and if there was a sweet hereafter, he wouldn’t join Sara and Michelle there if he took his own life.
The roar of an engine pulled his attention to the dark tunnel of Northern pine where the highway wound out of sight. The front legs of his chair fell onto the porch with a thunk. He rarely saw a customer at his little gas station after six. By now most of the tourists were already in town at the expensive restaurants, sipping their second martinis.
A classic Mercedes two-seater raced around the bend and went into a drift on squealing tires.
The car fishtailed before regaining traction. Clouds of white smoke poured from the exhaust as though it had blown a head gasket. As it barreled down the highway at breakneck speed, chunks of rubber flapped at the right rear wheel. The car was out of control, but the driver wasn’t trying to stop.
Sparks flew from the rim as the last shreds of the tire disintegrated. The car careened down the embankment on the side of the highway and launched itself off the incline, headed directly for his small station.
“Jesus!” Miles leapt to his feet and dove off the porch, narrowly missing the rusted edge of a twisted bumper as he hit the ground. He scrambled to his feet and ran, still clutching his foaming beer bottle, as the car crashed into the pumps.
A dull whuff pressed on his eardrums as the pumps exploded. For the space of a heartbeat the dusky forest was as bright as high noon.
Miles hit the emergency shut-off lever at the side of the garage and the tanks sealed off, but the car was already on fire. There were no sprinklers at the historic station’s stand-alone island.
Nobody could have lived through an explosion like that. At that horrific moment, he knew there was at least one dead body at Goodwin’s Garage.
The irony hit him—there could have been two. What had made him run? He’d been longing for death for three years, aching for it more with each day that passed. Yet at the first sign of danger he’d been on his feet, preserving his sorry ass. It had been instinct as much as police training.
Dammit to hell.
Momentum had taken the car past the worst of the flames. The windshield was a shattered milky spider web, but still held.
Conditioned by police training, he ran toward the car without thinking, more concerned for the driver than for himself.
Movement shifted behind the white-green kaleidoscope of safety glass. A hand passed over the steering wheel, and Miles knew it was a woman in the car.
She’s alive—there must be a God in Heaven.
The driver’s door opened as flames burst across the hood. She staggered out and fell to her knees.
A second explosion rocked the quiet mountainside. Still running, Miles threw up his arm to block the intense heat.
His heart caught in his throat as he rounded the coupe’s door and saw she had a little girl clutched under her arm.
The woman braced herself on the ground with her other hand as she tried to get away from the burning car. He grabbed her by the forearm and hauled her to her feet. She wobbled unsteadily as he pulled her arm over his shoulder. The child scrambled past him, headed for the backside of his garage.
A confusing mixture of past and present rocked him like a punch to the gut. She wasn’t his beloved daughter, but the sight of her blond hair tossing as she ran ahead of him sent coherence spinning away.
The woman moaned and her weight sagged on him, bringing him back to the here and now.
“Help…”
He dragged her away from the car. “Jesus, lady, what the hell? Are you trying to get killed?”
He was practically carrying her by the time they arrived at the corner of the building where the little girl waited, shielded from the scorching heat.
“Aunt Lily!” She threw her arms around her aunt’s waist.
The woman knelt and gripped the child by her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, sniffing.
“I’m so sorry.” She pulled the child close. “It’s okay, Annie. We’re going to be okay.”
“Not if you keep driving like that,” Miles growled. “You just blew up my gas station.”
The woman glanced at him. The horror in her eyes made him flinch. A trickle of blood ran down the woman’s temple and spattered her blouse.
“You’re hurt,” Annie said. Her voice trembled with the precursor to tears. She reached out and touched the woman’s face with tiny, hesitant fingertips. The gesture caused his shriveled heart to jerk.
Without removing those wide, brown eyes from his, Lily took her niece’s hand and stood. Only th
en did she glance past him.
“Is that your truck?”
His mouth fell open. “Lady, you need an ambulance.”
Would the phone still work, or had the destruction of his station knocked out power and phone lines? Services were finicky enough up here without being rocked by a two-megaton blast.
“He’s coming,” Annie whimpered.
The horror in Lily’s eyes deepened. She glanced at the child and started past him.
“I need your vehicle.”
Before he could have guessed this night would get any weirder, she snatched up a rusted sliver of metal and whirled around, pointing it at him.
“Give me the keys.”
She’s robbing me with an old antenna? “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Aunt Lily,” Annie persisted with greater urgency.
Slivers of wood exploded from the corner of the building above his ear. Miles heard the muffled chirp over the roar of the fire. He knew what it was even before a second shot whizzed past his head. The sound sent him careening back to his eight years with the Seattle PD.
Silencer.
A Touch of Magick
N.J. Walters
If you go casting love spells, be careful what you wish for.
Spells, Secrets and Seductions, Book 1
Rhiannon Sparks admits she’s not a very good witch—she can’t even light a candle without a match—but she keeps trying. At least her talent for business has made her magick shop a huge success. Now if only there was even the faintest flicker in her nonexistent love life.
During a night of eating and drinking, she and her girlfriends cast a candle-magick spell for hot sex. All in good fun, of course. Except Rhiannon accidentally mixes up the words. Instead of a lover, she asks for true love.
Deputy Ryland Stone’s past keeps him firmly rooted in reality. Then he meets Rhiannon and sparks literally fly. One date leads to another, and then they’re practically setting the bedroom on fire…until she reveals the deal breaker.
Though love and magick have found Rhiannon at last, getting a handle on her newly unleashed power is the least of her problems. Unless Ryland accepts that magick exists, he will never accept her for who and what she is.
Warning: This book contains a simple candle-magick spell, which you use at your own risk, a disastrous date, phone sex, and enough sizzle to practically set the sheets on fire.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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A Touch of Magick
Copyright © 2010 by N.J. Walters
ISBN: 978-1-60928-240-0
Edited by Heidi Moore
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First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: November 2010
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