He felt a driving need to protect her.
He tried not to speed on his way back to the cabin, but he didn’t like leaving McKenna alone so long. She was making a good show of being stronger, but he’d seen the circles of fatigue under her eyes, the pale tone of her skin. She was still weak, still vulnerable.
About three miles from the turnoff, a glance in the rearview mirror made him sit up straighter. That black SUV about three cars back had been with him since he’d left The Gates, hadn’t it?
He took the next turnoff and drove at a steady pace down one of the small feeder roads that led toward Warrior Creek Falls. Only one vehicle behind him followed, keeping a steady distance back. The black SUV.
He was being tailed.
Killshadow Road
Paula Graves
PAULA GRAVES, an Alabama native, wrote her first book at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.
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For Jenn,
who shares my love for all things Darcy.
Contents
Tablis, Kaziristan, baked beneath the August sunshine, and no amount of joking about it being a dry heat could make the place feel any cooler to the soldiers and diplomats assigned to protect the US Embassy against the rising unrest in the no-man’s-land beyond the city walls.
For Nick Darcy, who’d spent most of his childhood in the cool, mild south of England, the brutal summer heat in the Central Asian republic was a shock to the system. The dress code for his job with the Diplomatic Security Service—suit, tie, holstered weapon—didn’t help.
But the escalating tensions in the Kaziristan countryside had driven considerations such as climate and comfort from the minds of everyone tasked with the embassy’s protection.
Something was building. Something bad. Darcy could feel it as if it were a living creature writhing beneath the dusty earth, making the very ground beneath his feet feel unsteady.
Trouble was coming. Fast and hard.
A harsh squawk of static from his handheld radio jangled his nerves. “BOGART on the move.”
Darcy acknowledged the signal and watched from his post for the ambassador’s car to emerge through the slowly opening gates. The dusty black sedan moved safely through the opening and onto the four-lane boulevard in front of the embassy. The sedan made it down the road about thirty yards before all hell broke loose.
A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the ambassador’s car and sent pieces flying through the air. One slab of metal debris slammed into the stone column next to Darcy, fragmenting the stone and sending a large chunk slamming into his forehead.