Going Down: Holding Out for a Hero, Book 1 Read online

  She watched his lips move, and licked hers. This wasn’t really happening. This way-too-gorgeous man was not in her bedroom holding her favorite toy and standing close enough to taste. She should wake up from this fantasy before she embarrassed herself. The click and ensuing hum of the vibrator close to her ear was real, though. She met his eyes again. He nodded slowly and dragged Bob’s tip along her jaw line.

  “Let me.” It could have been a question, but it sounded more like a statement, or maybe an order. “Tell me it’s okay. Tell me you want this.”

  She tried to think. If this really was happening, she needed to think straight. The vibrator hummed a path down her neck. He deftly slipped it beneath the fabric of her robe and farther down her chest. She let her arms drop to her sides.

  “You have to understand. I get called on an assignment like today and I can’t think about anything but my target. I can’t be distracted. I can’t think about the woman who opened her door to me wearing a flimsy ass robe. I’ve got the lives of innocent people and my fellow officers to consider. I’m stressed out enough with that. I usually relieve myself afterward with a workout in the gym, followed by a solo in the shower, but I’ve never been presented with the likes of you when I’m feeling this.”

  “The likes of me?” Mari surprised herself with her ability to speak clearly. His words puffed against her lips, and Mari could even taste his breath. Coffee.

  “A fucking sexy as hell woman like you,” he continued, dragging her vibrating dildo around her breast. “Aroused. Naked…”

  “I’m not…”

  “Take this off and you will be.” He used his free hand to peel her robe off one shoulder.

  Mari shut her mouth with a click. She’d been about to say she wasn’t a sexy woman, but she wasn’t a stupid one, either. She didn’t even shiver in protest when her robe slithered to the carpet to pool around her feet. Why should she? This was all a crazy dream that she’d awaken from any second now. She wasn’t really standing naked in front of a cop in her hallway.

  “Tell me it’s okay,” he repeated. “I can feel the heat coming off of you. I can even smell your arousal. Let me take care of it for you. Tell me it’s okay.”

  But Mari couldn’t say the words. She could barely wrap her mind around the fact that this was real, let alone say something. The vibrator teased the skin below her navel, but he wouldn’t go farther.

  “Touch me,” he panted against her lips before she could answer. Her lids drifted closed in anticipation of a kiss that never came. “Please, touch me. Pull my shirt out. Let me feel your hands on me.” He simply rested his mouth against hers while he spoke.

  At that point she realized her arms hung limply at her sides. She laid both hands on his stomach. Just as she thought, he was in exquisite shape. His abs tightened beneath her fingers. She indulged in the first touch of his body. Hard male. A wall of muscle and man, wrapped in this thin T-shirt. She gripped it and slid the hem from his pants. He hissed when her hands met his bare skin.

  “Fuck, yeah. Tell me. Tell me it’s okay.” He planted his elbow by her ear and leaned against her, caging her to the wall.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I want it. I want you.”

  “Goddamned beautiful…” He wasted no time in sliding the vibrator inside her. His moan blended with hers in a tuneless harmony. He didn’t move it once the vibrator was firmly seated deep in her channel. “Don’t come yet, baby. I need one thing from you first.” He didn’t continue until she lifted heavy lids to meet that electric blue stare. “Tell me your name.”

  Mari’s legs almost gave out on her. Marc caught her and pressed his body against hers to hold her up against the hallway wall. She whimpered and tried to grind against the humming intrusion. He switched it off. The sudden silence drew another whine from her throat.

  “Tell me.”

  Mari slid her tongue along his lips. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to quit fucking around and make her come. She moved her hands around to his back, reaching up to trace the indentation of his spine. She nipped his lower lip and squeezed her channel around the vibrator.

  “Huh-uh.” He turned his head enough to press his cheek against hers. “Tell me your name or I walk out right now.”

  He wouldn’t dare. “Please…does it really matter?” She scraped her fingers back down and around to his abdomen, until she held the waistband of his pants and belt in a tight grip.

  “Yes. It matters. What’s your name, sweetheart? I want to shout it out when I come for you.”

  “Oh, my God. Marienna. Marienna Elena Valdez. But you can call me—” She gasped.

  He pulled out the vibrator, flicked it on, then slid it back inside with a twist. “Marienna,” he breathed, and then he kissed her.

  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 then 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.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  It’s all about the story…

  Action/Adventure

  Fantasy

  Historical

  Horror

  Mainstream

  Mystery/Suspense

  Non-Fiction

  Paranormal

  Red Hots!

  Romance

  Science Fiction

  Western

  Young Adult

  www.samhainpublishing.com