Excerpt from the Book
Cold, and ice pick pain bored into Kit Garrido’s temples.
Eruption or nightmare? Her limbs were leaden, her body a dead weight in the driver’s seat of her big rig. Grit coated her tongue and teeth. She tasted blood. Try as she would, she couldn’t reach out to unbuckle her seatbelt. Panic bubbled up inside her.
She felt movement. Someone yanked hard on the passenger door, unleashing pulses of pain.
“Ma’am?” A low baritone, rough.
A big hand touched her shoulder, calloused fingers hard like talons. Through her slitted eyelids, a male torso materialized, a large man in a heavy jacket. Warm ash drifted from his baseball cap and settled on her cheek, feather light.
“What…happened?” Her voice was a croak.
“You crashed.” His voice held the trace of a southern accent. “Volcano’s unsettled everything. Not safe to stay here.”
Not safe? Crashed? Why wouldn’t her mouth work fast enough to spit out the questions? Fear lapped at her insides as he fumbled for her seatbelt.
“You’ve got to wake up. Now.”
She forced her eyes further open, grabbed the wheel. Cold wind raked her cheek. Wind? She lurched into full consciousness so fast her brain rocked in her skull. Green. Everywhere green mixed with brown, the trees of northern Washington all around, the rattling pine needles oddly muted by their coating of volcanic ash. A pine cone dropped on her lap through the gaping hole in the windshield. It left a sooty stain on her knee before it bounced off. She stared at it.
How…?
He was talking but she couldn’t follow.
She touched her brown ski cap, then the flannel of her favorite long haul driving jacket, the feel of the fabrics proving to herself she was alive. Somehow. A hiss of escaping steam commanded her to acknowledge what she desperately didn’t want to see.
Her beautiful Freightliner truck was wedged cab first, jammed in a crevice between two crooked trees. In the side view mirror she observed an enormous trench of gouged earth which marked her journey from the road above to the place of impact. The shiny yellow cab with its cozy sleeping unit, her home for three hundred plus days a year, was squashed like the face of a Pekinese. The pristine white trailer she’d washed that morning was no doubt damaged as well. She couldn’t even make out the logo on the side. Garrido Trucking. How absurdly proud she’d felt the day the lettering was applied. Her truck. Her business. Her life. Finally.
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Fire rains from above as they fight to discover the truth and stay alive.
In the shadow of a threatening volcano, long-haul trucker Kit Garrido wakes up in her crashed big rig, unable to recall what happened or why she’s suddenly in possession of someone’s baby. Fiercely independent, she has to admit that perhaps this time she could use a little help.
As the threat of eruption grows, former cop Cullen Landry refuses to leave his cabin in the evacuation area, which is why he’s the only one left who can help Kit escape the crumpled cab of her truck. He doesn’t want to get tangled up in the mystery of the beautiful woman with an abandoned infant, but when he sees the bullet hole in the windshield and the bloody handprint on the interior, he realizes that he’s in this thing, like it or not.
When two armed men with ill intent approach, the race is on to stay alive, discover the truth, and find the baby’s missing mother–all while a deadly mountain rains fire from above.
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About the Author
Dana Mentink is a New York Times bestselling author of more than fifty novels for Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense, Revell, Poisoned Pen Press, and other publishers. She lives in sunny California with Papa Bear and close to her two cubs, affectionately nicknamed Yogi and Boo Boo.
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