When he came up for air, he placed a finger on her trembling bottom lip. “Can we stop talking? I’ve been waiting a long time to make hot, sweet love to Jane Doe.”
“Jane Doe?” She broke away from his embrace and tugged at the hem of his T-shirt, yanking it halfway up his body to reveal a washboard belly that looked as if it had been kissed by the sun. She ran her hands across his mocha skin. “Should I be jealous of this Jane Doe?”
“Maybe you should be.” He yanked his T-shirt over his head and threw it over his shoulder. “When I laid eyes on her, I lost all reason, even though she pulled a knife on me.”
“Jane Doe doesn’t sound very good for you.” Libby placed a finger on her chin and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “I think you’d be much better off with Libby James.”
“What does Libby have that Jane doesn’t?” Rob hooked his fingers in the waistband of her skirt and pulled her toward him.
She cupped his face in her hands and kissed his mouth. “Libby’s already half in love with you.”
“Only half?” He swept her up in his arms and carried her off to his bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he cradled her in his lap. “I guess I have some work to do. I plan to give you a night you’ll never forget.”
She sighed against his lips. “As if I ever would.”
Look for the next book in Carol Ericson’s
Holding the Line miniseries when Buried Secrets
goes on sale in September 2020.
And don’t miss the previous titles in the miniseries:
Evasive Action
Chain of Custody
Available now wherever
Harlequin Intrigue books are sold!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Someone Is Watching by Amanda Stevens.
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Someone Is Watching
by Amanda Stevens
Chapter One
For the past three nights, Ellie Brannon had been receiving staticky messages from an unknown caller on the open-line portion of her radio program. The reception was so poor she could barely make out the anonymous caller’s voice, let alone the broken message. But there was something disturbing about the timing of the calls. Something unsettling about the frenetic undertone that sputtered through the white noise.
Cocooned as she was in her soundproof studio, Ellie could normally lose herself to the weird and unusual stories brought to her via her most avid listeners.
The subject matter she covered ran the gamut from paranormal activity to political conspiracies to unsolved mysteries. Unlike most talk radio hosts, Ellie refused to use a screener despite the fact that Midnight on Echo Lake was now broadcast on sixty stations around the country, as well as live-streamed on the popular internet radio network where she’d gotten her first big break.
Adjusting the microphone arm, she glanced at the clock on the wall, noting the time as she pushed the blinking button and greeted the caller.
Static once again crackled in her headphones.
“Go ahead, Caller. You’re on the air with Ellie Brannon.”
The reception cleared for a moment, allowing the woman’s urgent whisper to come through loud and clear. “He’s coming...”
Ellie ignored the shivers down her back as she kept her tone even. “I’m getting a lot of noise in my ear, Caller. Can you move the phone away from the radio?”
The voice faded as the interference rose to a deafening crescendo. Ellie fiddled with the slider on the audio console as she tried to filter out the annoying clatter. “Caller, are you still there?”
Nothing now but chilling silence.
Ellie’s hands trembled as she adjusted the controls. She didn’t know why. Strange calls were her raison d’être, but something about the persistence of this particular caller unnerved her.
Probably a prankster.
Ellie was accustomed to a fair amount of prank calls, though not as many as one might expect given the premise of her show. Most people who took the time to call in just wanted a chance to tell their story in a forum that didn’t openly ridicule or pass judgment. But from time to time, some of the local teenagers dared each other to call in with outlandish stories about alien abductions just as they’d once goaded their classmates to spend the night in the Ruins, an abandoned psychiatric hospital not far from Ellie’s studio. On a clear night, she could see the smokestack rising up through the pine trees as she trekked the short distance from her studio to her back deck. Sometimes, if she was feeling brave, she would walk down to the dock and sit with her feet dangling in the water as she traced the crumbling roofline and remembered.
On most nights, though, she hurried inside her house and locked the doors. Still. After all these years.
He’s coming...
With a start, she realized she’d broken the golden rule of radio—no dead air. Shrugging off the final caller, she queued up the closing music. “You’ve been listening to open-line Wednesday on the After Dark Network. I’m your host, Ellie Brannon, signing off from the banks of eerie Echo Lake...”
Wrapping up her callout, she turned off the mic and removed her headphones as the on-air lights winked off on her console and over the studio door.
What now?
She tried reversing the call using star-sixty-nine but nothing went through. Should she contact her brother? Tom was the Nance County sheriff. If someone was in trouble, he needed to know. But the call could have come from any part of the country. Or even out of the country. It was probably nothing more than a prank call, anyway. If someone were really in trouble, why not notify the authorities instead of calling in every night to a syndicated radio show?
Go home. Have a glass
