Saving Grace (Serve and Protect Series) (31 page)

Read on for an excerpt from
Protecting Paige
, the next book in my Serve and Protect Series.

Sensual Romantic Suspense

GUARDING SUZANNAH
, Book 1 in the Serve and Protect Series

PROTECTING PAIGE
, Book 3 in the Serve and Protect Series

NEEDING NITA
, a novella in the Serve and Protect Series

Sensual Romantic Suspense w/Paranormal Element

EVERY BREATH SHE TAKES
(coming soon from Montlake Romance)

Sensual Paranormal Romance

THE MERZETTI EFFECT:
A Vampire Romance

NIGHTFALL:
A Vampire Romance

As N.L. Wilson

(writing partnership of Norah Wilson and Heather Doherty)

Dix Dodd Mysteries (humorous)

THE CASE OF THE FLASHING FASHION QUEEN

FAMILY JEWELS

DEATH BY CUDDLE CLUB
(coming soon)

As Wilson Doherty

(writing partnership of Norah Wilson and Heather Doherty)

YA Paranormal

THE SUMMONING:
Book 1 in the Gatekeepers Series

ASHLYN’S RADIO

Norah Wilson lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick with her husband, two adult children, her beloved Rotti-Lab mix Chloe, and numerous rats (the pet kind). Norah has had three of her romantic suspense stories final in the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart® contest until she sold her first story in 2004. She was also the winner of Dorchester Publishing’s New Voice in Romance contest in 2003.

Norah loves to hear from readers!

Connect with Her Online:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/norah_wilson


Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/norah.wilson1


Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1361508.Norah_Wilson


Norah’s Website:
http://www.norahwilsonwrites.com


Wilson Doherty’s Website:
http://www.writersgrimoire.com


Single parent Paige Harmer is at her wits end about her son. Dillon’s a good kid, but he’s fallen in with a bad crowd. She’s determined to enlist the help of her next door neighbor, the extremely handsome and much younger Tommy Godsoe. Tommy is a local cop, and up until he got shot recently in a police raid, was a dog handler. His injury is such that he can never go back to field work, and he refuses to be a desk jockey. All he wants is to nurse his wounds in solitude, and he’s done a great job driving his friends and colleagues away. But Paige is an unstoppable force. Before he knows it, he’s drawn into their lives. As it turns out, Paige and Dillon are going to need a cop in their corner. And Tommy needs Paige to drag him out of his self-pity and back to life.

C
ONSTABLE
T
OMMY
G
ODSOE
’
S BLOOD
sang.

His breath rasped harshly in his ears as he pelted along the concrete sidewalk, but he wasn’t winded. Not yet. Not even close. Max, the four-year-old Belgian Malinois straining at the business end of the thirty-foot lead, lent Tommy extra speed. Even now, backup was falling further and further behind, but Tommy couldn’t check Max’s momentum or the dog would think he was being corrected.

Suddenly, at the mouth of an alleyway, Max slowed. Without conscious thought, Tommy took up the slack in the lead even as he studied the dog nosing the asphalt. The dog wheeled in a tight semi-circle, then turned away from the alley and shot off again down the sidewalk. Tommy fixed the location in his mind. Max had eliminated the alleyway as a direction of travel. Always had to remember the last negative sign. If they lost the trail further on up ahead, they could come back to this spot, so Max could pick up the scent again.

At the next alleyway, Max did the same check, but this time he bounded off down the narrow passageway. Tommy raced after him, his heart rate kicking up another notch.

Fence!

Max cleared it in one leap, and Tommy vaulted over it right behind him. Over the sound of his own breathing, he heard backup in the mouth of the alley now. Good. No need to radio his location. He could save his breath for‌—‌

Ding-
dong
.

What the hell?

Tommy jerked awake, struggling up into a sitting position. The sheets, cool with sweat, pooled in his lap, and his heart pounded against his ribs as though he’d run a marathon.

Ah, Jesus wept.
A dream. It was just a dream. He wasn’t a cop anymore. He wasn’t a dog handler. Bitterness, familiar as the pain in his hip, curdled his stomach.

A light tapping at his door.

“All right, all right, keep your shirt on.”

Throwing off the sheet, he swung his legs gingerly over the edge of the bed. He thought about scooping up the blue sweat pants from the floor and hauling them on over his boxers, but another peel of the doorbell dissuaded him. Grabbing his cane, he lurched to his feet and hobbled toward the living room, grimacing with every step.

Ding-
dong
.

Cripes, that’s what his doorbell sounded like? Something from a ’50s Avon commercial? He’d lived here four years and couldn’t remember ever hearing his own doorbell. No doubt the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign had something to do with that. He and Max never stayed indoors when they could be outside, and they sure as hell never waited around for life to come to them.

Until now.

The doorbell sounded again, and he wished he still had his service weapon. He’d happily put a round into that little speaker by the front door.

Reaching the door at last, he tore it open.
“What?”

Paige Harmer took an instinctive step backward.

When she’d moved into this duplex last month, the other side had been vacant. The landlady’d said its occupant was in hospital recovering from surgery. But even after her neighbor had come home nearly two weeks ago, the unit next door had been unnaturally quiet. No visitors came or went, and no music thrummed through those walls. If it weren’t for the small bag of garbage that materialized at the curb beside hers every Tuesday morning, and the occasional muted sound of a television deep in the night, she’d have sworn the other apartment was deserted. Now, her neighbor stood framed in the doorway, wearing a pair of white boxers and a thunderous expression.

And oh, Christmas, he was most gorgeous thing she’d clapped eyes on in years, outside of a Calvin Klein ad.

Despite their current storminess, his eyes were as blue as the July sky. Black hair, a startling contrast to his pale complexion, stood up in all directions, all the sexier for its dishevelment. Thick, black eyebrows slanted over those killer eyes. More dark hair crowned his chest in a liberal thatch, tapering to a thin line that arrowed out of sight beneath his boxers.

Runner
, she thought.
Endurance athlete.
Just a hair over average height, with a leanness that shaded toward too thin. Yet the conformation of arms and chest disclosed enough wiry muscle to give the impression of power.

“Can I help you?”

Mister, if you can’t, there’s no help for me.

The thought barely had a chance to form before her internal censor roared to life. He was way too young for her to be ogling, for goodness sake.
Hardly much older than Dillon, by the look of him.

There, that did it. Though he was clearly nowhere near as young as her son, the mental association was enough to clamp a firm leash on her imagination.

Unfortunately, the extra seconds it took to channel her thoughts in more pure directions didn’t go unnoticed. One thick eyebrow arched inquiringly, reminding her she hadn’t yet stated her purpose.

She felt a flush begin to climb her neck. No chance he’d miss that, either. Her skin was almost translucent, at least the stuff between the freckles. She lifted the foil-wrapped plate she held. “I thought you might like some dinner.”

He looked at the plate. “Thanks, but I’m not a big eater.”

“I can see that,” she said, injecting her tone with the same censorious note she might use with her son when he ignored his body’s nutritional needs. He shifted, and she finally noticed the cane, which he appeared to be leaning on pretty heavily. “Don’t worry. It’ll freeze nicely if you can’t handle it all right now.”

“Look, lady, that’s real nice of you, but‌—”

“I’ll just put it in the refrigerator for you, shall I?”

She angled sideways and slipped right past him before he could finish brushing her off. No way was she going back to her lonely unit to worry about Dillon. Not tonight.

“That way, I presume?” She indicated the direction the kitchen must be, if the place were laid out in the mirror image of hers.

“Uh ... yeah.”

Seconds later, Paige stood in front of a white dinosaur of a refrigerator, a twin to the one that rattled and hummed in her own kitchen, right beside the commercial refrigeration unit she’d installed for her business. That’s where the similarity ended, she discovered, as she opened the refrigerator’s door.

Five bottles of beer, domestic. Some Chinese takeout cartons that bulged ominously as though approaching an explosive state. A drying chunk of cheddar cheese, circa 2008. A few bottles of condiments. No eggs, no dairy, no vegetables, no fruit.

Hearing him arrive at the kitchen door‌—‌the thumping of the cane on the linoleum-covered floor announced his progress‌—‌she glanced over at him.

“Is this the part where you tell me you’re really one of the undead and have no need of sustenance beyond human blood?”

He didn’t smile. If anything, he scowled more fiercely. “I’ve been meaning to get to the grocery store.”

“It must be hard.”

He followed the drift of her gaze. She could tell by the way his hand tightened on the cane’s handle.

His jaw hardened even further, if possible. “I manage.”

“Are you hungry? The food’s still hot.” She waggled the foil-wrapped plate temptingly. “Stuffed pork chops with mashed potatoes, glazed carrots and gingered parsnips.”

“It’s okay,” he said, after a split-second hesitation. “You can just put it in the fridge.”

Fat chance. She’d caught the fleeting look of indecision in his eye as she’d described what was under the foil. He was hungry, all right. “Aw, come on, sit down and eat. I need the distraction.”

Those cigar-thick eyebrows soared. “You want to stay and watch me
eat
?”

“Relax, fella. Nothing kinky. I just don’t want to go back over there yet. I’ve done two loads of laundry, vacuumed the carpet within an inch of its life, baked three cheesecakes and seven pies. I have nowhere to put any more baking and nothing left to clean. So if I go home now, I’ve got nothing left to do but worry about Dillon.”

“Who’s Dillon?”

Ah! A question. And she hadn’t even dragged it out of him. That was an improvement. “My son.”

“Where is he?”

She blew out her breath, lifting a strand of auburn hair off her face. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be worried, would I? Or maybe I would, at that,” she amended, thinking about the hard-looking young man Dillon had been hanging with lately.

“He’s missing?”

The sharpness of his tone drew her glance to his face. His eyebrows were drawn together again in a frown.

She shrugged. “He’s seventeen, almost eighteen. I can hardly describe him as missing every time he slams out of the house in a foul mood.”

That surprised him. She could see him doing the mental arithmetic, calculating her minimum age.
That’s right, son. Old enough to be your mother, even if I don’t look it.

Okay, that was an exaggeration. A huge exaggeration. But older than him by quite a few years, she’d wager.