Die Before I Wake

Praise for

“Don’t plan to go to bed early.”

—
Romantic Times BOOKreviews
on
Point of Departure

“Breton skillfully balances the suspense and romance.”

—
Publishers Weekly
on
Final Exit

“Breton keeps the readers guessing from the first page to the last…a great read.”

—
Romantic Times BOOKreviews
on
Final Exit

“Gritty and realistic,
Mortal Sin
is a powerfully written story…a truly exceptional book on many levels.”

—
Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Breton’s way with characters—and

her knack for giving her tales a twist—

elevates this story above most.”

—
Romantic Times BOOKreviews
on
Lethal Lies
Also available from MIRA Books
and

POINT OF DEPARTURE

CRIMINAL INTENT

LETHAL LIES

MORTAL SIN

FINAL EXIT

®

For Grace,

who’s more than a boss,

but also a friend,

and who puts up with me

as graciously as her name implies

whenever I’m on deadline!

Thanks to my amazing editor, Valerie Gray, for the past six years. They’ve been great!

Thanks also to the members of the MIRA art department, who always give me awesome covers. And, of course, to everyone else at MIRA Books who’s involved in the process of turning words typed on a page into a living, breathing book.

Normally the most rational of people, I have trouble trusting any law of physics that expects me to believe that a fifty-ton aircraft loaded with two hundred people is going to stay in the air because of something having to do with lift and thrust and air currents. In my narrow world view, gravity wins out every time. Every ounce of common sense tells me that the only possible outcome to such a scenario is for the plane to plummet from the sky, carrying me, and 199 other passengers and crew members, to a fiery death.

The flight from L.A. to Boston had taken about eight hours, and somewhere around Pittsburgh, we’d hit turbulence in the form of a hurricane that was battering the Northeast. I’d been forced to close my eyes to keep from seeing lightning tap dance all around the 747’s wing tips. Eventually, the thunder and lightning gave way to rain, and I relaxed a little.

But it was more than the storm, more than my customary terror of falling from the sky in a ball of fire, that had my fingertips pressing permanent prints into the armrest of my first-class seat; it was the fear of what waited for us on the ground.

The plane began its descent into Boston. Beside me, Tom sat calmly leafing through an in-flight magazine as though he did this kind of thing every day. Thomas Larkin, OB/GYN, small-town New England doctor, widower, father of two and all-around heartthrob, was my new husband. And I still couldn’t believe it.

Julie Larkin. Julie Hanrahan Larkin.
I kept mentally trying out the name, just to see how it sounded inside my head. What it sounded like most was disbelief. We’d met on a cruise ship, off the coast of Barbados. The trip had been a birthday present from Carlos and the girls at Phoenix, the L.A. boutique I managed. Because thirty was a significant birthday, and because the last couple years of my life had been a complete train wreck, my bighearted coworkers had thrown me a birthday bash, complete with black balloons, a male stripper and a ticket for a Caribbean cruise. They’d joked with me about finding Prince Charming somewhere on that floating palace. He would look like Johnny Depp—

minus the eyeliner and the sword—and have more money than Donald Trump.

I’d gone along with the joke, even though I wasn’t in the market for a man. After the unimaginable losses of the last two years, I’d made it my mission to fill the empty void inside me with work.

I had no room—or desire—for romance. After my divorce from Jeffrey, I’d expected to take a lengthy hiatus from the dating scene. Like maybe the rest of my life.

But, as John Lennon so famously said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Eighteen hours into the cruise, I found myself seated next to Dr. Thomas Larkin at dinner. Tom fit all the romantic stereotypes: He was tall, dark and handsome. Smart and witty and charming, with vivid blue eyes and a smile that drove like an arrow directly into my heart.

Best of all, he made me laugh, when I hadn’t laughed in a very long time.

There were other things I also hadn’t done in a very long time. Following the guiding principle that what happens on the Princess line stays on the Princess line, I threw myself wholeheartedly into a shallow, scorching, unabashedly shameless shipboard romance. Ten days, I reasoned, and I’d be back in L.A., selling rhinestone bracelets to anorexic young blondes who played tennis and spent half their lives at the beach. In the interim, a little sun, sand and sex were just what the doctor ordered.

Except that, somewhere along the way, what was supposed to be no more than a shipboard fling turned into something else. And on the morning when Tom, his hair as rumpled as my bed sheets, pulled out a blue velvet box that held a single diamond solitaire, I realized he was offering me more than just marriage. He was offering me a second chance. A fresh start. And the opportunity to leave L.A., and all its sorrows, behind.

There was nothing left for me in L.A. Dad was gone. Jeffrey had moved on to bigger and better things. And Angel, the baby I’d lost, was nothing more than a sweet, painful memory. For a while, I’d been thinking about quitting my job, climbing into my beloved yellow Miata, and driving off alone into the sunset.

But Tom offered me so much more than that.

Anybody who knows me will tell you that I’m a born cynic. After all, I’m Dave Hanrahan’s daughter.

He taught me pretty much everything I know, and if there was one thing Dad didn’t believe in, it was romance. Right now, he was probably spinning in his grave over the knowledge that his only daughter, high on moonlight and hormones and God only knew what else, had stood on a white-sand Bahamian beach at midnight, a month after her thirtieth birthday, and married a man she’d known for five days.

I was still having trouble believing it myself.

Beside me, Tom turned a page. “How can you do that?” I said.

Without looking up, he said, “Easy. I just lift the corner with my finger, and—”

“Ha, ha. Very funny. Aren’t you nervous?”

“Why should I be?” He flipped another page.

“Seems as though you’re nervous enough for both of us.”

“With good reason. I’m serious, Tom. It’s not every day your firstborn son comes home from a Caribbean cruise with a brand-new wife in tow. What if your mother hates me?”

He closed the magazine and looked at me. He smiled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled, and my heart did this funny little thing it’d been doing since the first time he smiled at me. “She’s not going to hate you,” he said. “Even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. I’m thirty-eight years old. A little too old for my mother to be running my life. Besides, she’ll love you.”

“Why should she love me?”

He leaned and placed a kiss on the tip of my nose.

“Because I love you. Stop worrying.” Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one who was uprooting his entire life, leaving behind friends, coworkers, career and home, to move to some tiny town in Maine, all in the name of love.

He must have seen the expression on my face.

“Having second thoughts?” he asked.

God knows, I should have been. What I’d done was so out of character, I still couldn’t believe I’d really done it. In spite of being Dave’s daughter—

or maybe because of it—I’d never done anything this crazy. This was risk-taking behavior, something I’d spent the last decade avoiding. This was stepping off the edge of a cliff into free fall, without a parachute or a safety net to slow my plunge. This was insanity at its terrifying, spine-tingling, exhilarating best.

The days we’d spent aboard ship had been heaven, days of sparkling turquoise water and ice-cold margaritas, days we’d spent lying on matching chaises, fingers loosely clasped in the space between his chair and mine as we soaked up the sun’s rays, nearly purring with mindless contentment.

And then, there were the nights.

In light of my legendary cynicism, it seemed far-fetched that the word
besotted
kept coming to mind.

It sounds so undignified. So junior high school. And I’m a woman who has walked a hard road to maturity. But none of that seemed to matter, because at that particular moment, as we touched down smoothly on the runway at Logan International Airport on an early September afternoon, it was the only word that came close to describing how I felt about my new husband.

Tom was still looking at me, still waiting for an answer, his blue eyes pensive, as though he wasn’t quite certain what my response might be. Was I having second thoughts?

Was he out of his mind?

I grinned and said, “In your dreams.” Nobody was at the airport to meet us.

“I don’t get it,” Tom said. We stood with our bag-gage, lone islands in a sea of arriving passengers who flowed around us like salmon swimming upstream.

“I told Mom what time we’d be landing. Which gate we’d be coming through. Where to meet us.” He flipped his cell phone closed. “There’s no answer at the house.”

“Maybe she’s running late because of the weather. She could’ve hit traffic. Does she have a cell phone?”

A vertical wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. “In spite of my constant nagging, she’s too stubborn to buy one.”

Until now, I’d never seen him frown. I hoped it wasn’t an omen. I couldn’t help wondering if his mother’s failure to arrive on time was a deliberate snub aimed at me, her new daughter-in-law. Tom had described his mother as formidable. Intimidating.

Difficult. All of which went a long way toward explaining the unease I’d been feeling ever since we took off from Los Angeles. I’d already built up a picture of her in my mind, one that involved horns, a tail, and sharp teeth.

But I was determined to win her over. After all, Jeannette Larkin was the woman whose DNA would be passed on to my children. “I’m sure she’ll be along shortly,” I said.

“Maybe.” But he didn’t look convinced, which did absolutely nothing to alleviate my apprehension.

“You have to understand my mother,” he said. “She’s a bit set in her ways. This wouldn’t be the first time she’s done something off-the-wall just to prove a point.”

In other words, maybe my theory was right.

Great. “Okay,” I said, trying to focus on the primary problem at hand. “If she doesn’t show up, how do we get home?” We still had at least a hundred miles to go.

Scanning the crowd, he said, “We’ll have to rent a car. Damn it, I knew I should’ve driven down by myself and left my car in long-term parking. But you can’t imagine how much I hate to do that. You never know what you’ll find when you get back. Scratches, dents, slashed tires, graffiti—”