Excerpt from THE
BURIED by Shelley Coriell (On sale October 28, 2014)
As the bay of hounds tapered off, the huddle of men and
women in the parking lot broke, moving swiftly. Hatch, on the other hand,
moseyed to her side, his gait slow and easy, but there was nothing conciliatory
in his eyes. “You should have told me.” His mouth and jaw barely moved as he
spoke.
She tried to ease away, but he moved with her. “Told you
what?”
“Hmmmmm, where should I start?” With his free hand, he
jammed a finger in the air. “One, you received threats from a convicted felon.
Two, you received nine phone calls from a girl presumably buried alive. And
three, as we speak, a forensic team is sifting through dirt in your backyard
looking for human bones.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Oh, Princess. Dear, dear Princess.” He moved closer, a big,
graceful, golden cat. He stopped a hairsbreadth from touching her, but the heat
of his skin warmed her, nipping at the chill that had set in yesterday with
Lia’s phone calls. When he spoke, his breath fanned her face in a low, rumbling
half-purr, half-growl. “You have been and always will be my business.”
The words, the closeness, so Hatch. For a moment, she considered
sinking into his strength and warmth, which proved how deeply rattled she was
by the past twenty-four hours.
Hatch didn’t seem to notice the crazy thoughts flitting
around her brain. He grabbed her elbow and led her toward a sheriff’s
department SUV.
“I’m not going home.” Her boots dug into the damp earth.
Hatch opened the SUV’s passenger door. “I wouldn’t dare
suggest it.”
“I’m involved in this.”
“That’s obvious.” He pointed to the seat.
“Where are we going?”
“Into the swamp to search for Lia Grant. Together.”
The humid air had left her hair a riot of waves, and she
jammed a wayward curl behind her right ear. Together wasn’t hard for her. She
was a team player when she had to be, and Lia Grant needed the biggest team
they could muster, and frankly, Hatch was on a winning team. She’d be an idiot
not to ally herself with him. She hopped in the SUV. “Where to?”
He reached into his pocket and took out a coin. “Call it in
the air?”
“Wait! You’re going to let a coin toss determine our course
of direction, which could very well determine if a girl lives or dies?”
Hatch fingered the coin. “Do you have a better plan?”
“Surely there’s a more systematic way to handle this. What
does Agent MacGregor recommend?”
An enigmatic smile tugged at Hatch’s mouth. “Like all of us
on Parker’s team, Jonny Mac understands the value of a good coin toss.” Hatch
tossed the coin in the air, adding. “Heads we go right, tails, left.”
She snatched the coin in mid-air. Decades of tennis had done
wonders for her hand/eye coordination. “I don’t think so.”
Hatch swept his hands at the dense forest stretching out
behind the bait shop. “Fine, Princess. Lead and I shall follow.”
Grace cradled the coin in her palm. She’d already played the
phone messages from Lia, listening for ambient sounds, ideally something like a
jet plane, which could be tracked. But in all of the voicemails, she’d heard
nothing but Lia’s increasingly desperate words.
I’m in a bad place, a
really bad place.
A hand settled on her knee. Golden and steady. This was not
Hatch her ex-husband but Hatch the Apostle. Hatch who was a master in a crisis
situation. She ran her thumb over the face of the coin, and with quirked lips
tossed it in the air. The coin spun and fell on the ground between them.
“Left.” Hatch pocketed the coin and with a seriousness she’d
never seen from him, climbed into the SUV and drove into the swamp to find a
girl who’d been buried alive.
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