ON THE EDGE
MIRA Books Re-issue
Mass Market Anthology
October 2011
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ON THE EDGE
Three chilling stories to keep you
on the edge of your seat.
SHELTER ISLAND by CARLA NEGGERS
What better place to hide from a deranged stalker than a ramshackle cottage on a desolate coastal island. But two men have followed Dr. Antonia Winters to her refuge. One simply wants her. The other wants her dead.
BOUGAINVILLEA by Heather Graham
After twenty years, artist Kit Delaney returns to the lush Florida estate that harbors a million childhood memories. . .and a deadly legacy. Has the man she's fallen for restored her to her birthright–or lured her to her doom?
CAPSIZED by Sharon Sala
Her cover blown, DEA agent Kelly Sloan miraculously escapes a Mexican drug kingpin's yacht and certain execution. After washing up on a Galveston beach, she awakens to a handsome rescuer and a two-million-dollar bounty on her head. Now Kelly and her Texas Ranger must race to bring down Dominic Ortega. . . or die trying.
Read Excerpt
Shelter
Island
by Carla Neggers
"Antonia . . ."
Antonia Winter stopped abruptly in the middle of the mostly empty hospital parking garage, certain she'd heard someone whisper her name. She glanced at the parked cars and the exits, but saw no one else. She took a cautious step forward, her dress shoes echoing on the concrete. She'd changed from the more casual clothes she wore in the E.R.—she had a dinner date in Back Bay.
It was tension, she decided. Simple tension had her turning ordinary garage sounds into someone whispering her name.
"Antonia Winter . . . Dr. Winter . . ."
She gasped and ran the last five steps to her car, clicking the button on her key that automatically unlocked the door. Her hands shaking, she ripped open the door and three herself in behind the wheel. She hit the button that locked all four doors.
This couldn't be happening to her. She had to be imagining it.
This wasn't the first incident.
Wasting no time, Antonia stuck the key into the ignition and started the engine. It was just after seven o'clock on Saturday evening. It was just after seven o'clock on Saturday evening. She'd been on duty a full twelve hours. She was a trauma physician in the busy emergency room of a downtown Boston hospital. None of her cases today had been easy ones. But that was her job, and she was good at it—she was accustomed to dealing with its demands. She wasn't one to go off the deep end and imagine things that hadn't happened, draw the most dramatic conclusion to innocent events.
At least she'd never been that sort. Maybe the demands of the rest of her life had finally gotten to her. Demands like Hank Callahan, she thought. He was her dinner date that night. She'd been half in love with him for months, but their relationship had complications. Her work, his work. Her family. His past. Her past.
Hank . . .
No. She couldn't blame him—she wouldn't.
She wasn't hearing things or making up things that hadn't happened. That was the problem. They were real.
Someone had just whispered her name in the parking garage.
She edged out of her space, glancing in the rearview mirror and side mirror every few yards as she made her way to the exit. She almost asked the parking attendant if he'd heard anything, but she knew he wouldn't have. Once out on the street, she forced herself to take several deep breaths.
Yesterday, it had been an anonymous instant message. The third in a row. Your patients trust you, Dr. Winter. What if you betrayed their trust?
All were on the same theme. A doctor's trust. A doctor's betrayal of that trust. Without going into detail, she'd asked a friend more familiar with computers than she was about instant messages, and he'd said that tracking down an instant messenger who wanted to remain anonymous was very difficult, if not impossible.
There was nothing overtly threatening in the messages. And certainly no mention of Hank Callahan, a candidate for an open U. S. Senate seat from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The election was the first Tuesday in November, less than two months away. If the messages had mentioned him, Antonia would have to report them, tell Hank? She didn't want to cause an unnecessary stir—she wanted a sensible explanation for what was going on. If something was going on. She still didn't want to believe someone was trying to get under her skin. Creep her out.
But who would want to?
Why?
Was someone stalking her?
No. It couldn't be. Tension, fatigue and her imagination must have turned the whir of a car engine or an exhaust fan into someone whispering her name. Maybe the instant messages were from someone whose screen name she just didn't remember. A friend or colleague working on a paper or struggling with an ethical question, idly instant messaging her. Maybe they weren't to be anonymous or creepy.
But when she reached the restaurant, Antonia paid extra to have her car valet parked and avoided another parking garage. She stood in the warm evening air and took several deep breaths to calm herself. There. It'll be all right. I can do this.
She had on a simple black dress, black stockings, black heels. Gold earrings. Her dark auburn hair, chin-length and straight, was tucked neatly behind her ears. No lipstick—she didn't have time for it now.
As promised, Hank was waiting for her at their table. He was, she thought as she smiled at him and waved, the most drop-dead handsome man she'd ever met. Forty-one and tall, with graying dark hair, a square jaw and eyes so blue they took her breath away. She'd met him last November in Cold Ridge, her small hometown in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His weekend in New Hampshire was to have been a break, Hiking with his air force pals, Tyler North and Manny Carrera. Instead they'd come upon Antonia's younger sister, Carine, a nature photographer, being shot at in the woods. Later that same weekend, Hank, Ty and Manny had rescued a wealthy Boston couple stranded on the ridge for which her hometown was named.
Complications, Antonia thought. So many complications.
Hank smiled, getting to his feet. Other diners watched. He was a man in the spotlight. There didn't seem to be any reporters around, but she couldn't know for certain, another reminder that it wasn't just her reputation as a respected physician that would suffer if she rushed to judgment or cried wolf about a possible stalker. His would, too, as a man who was asking Massachusetts voters to trust him. With just weeks left in the campaign, she had to be sure before she said anything, although she had to admit, her own nature made her reluctant to speak up. She was thirty-five and accustomed to handling her own problems.
But it wasn't just Hank's campaign or her own reserve that made her cautious—it was Hank himself. He was a Massachusetts Callahan, the current most visible member of a visible family of dedicated men and women who were expected to do their share in the military, in public service and in business. Hank had left the air force two years ago as a major, a helicopter pilot who'd flown countless search-and-rescue missions: on his last mission, he and a team of pararescuers had performed the dangerous high seas recovery of five fishermen whose boat had capsized. It had put his picture on the front pages of newspapers across the country. While emergency operations conducted in conjunction with civilian agencies sometimes hit the press, his many combat search-and-rescues hadn't received such coverage—Antonia had learned that the military didn't necessarily publicize when and how it went after aircrews downed behind enemy lines.
Hank would come to her rescue in a heartbeat.
And not just because he was trained to rescue people.
He lost his family ten years ago when his wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident while he was serving overseas. It still haunted him—everyone knew it, could see it. He wasn't even on the continent when the accident happened, a head-on collision with a car driving on the wrong side of the interstate. The other driver was a woman in her mid-fifties who'd had a stroke. Brittany Callahan, three, was killed instantly. Her mother, Lisa, thirty, never regained consciousness and died in the hospital three hours later. Hank wasn't with them—it wasn't possible for him to have been with them. But he didn't look at it that way, at least not emotionally, and probably never would, no matter how much he'd come to accept that his wife ad daughter were gone.
No, Antonia thought, making her way to their table. She couldn't just think she might have a stalker or some weirdo trying to get under her skin. She had to be certain before she breathed a word of her fears to anyone—even Hank. Maybe even especially Hank.
