Into the Fire (58 page)
Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
Hannah sat there, just looking at Murphy.
“He stopped in while you were sleeping,” Murphy said, and at first she didn’t understand. But then she did.
Decker
had stopped in. Which meant that Murphy knew about Nash.
“Deck told me Ebersole’s still in intensive care,” Murphy continued, spelling out ICU. “He’s expected to survive. Reed was hogtied and delivered to the FBI by his own people for shooting Ebersole. The entire compound surrendered and Reed, Ebersole, and a bunch of other Freedom Network leaders are gonna go to jail for a long, long time. The FBI’s still trying to ID the body that was supposed to be Ebersole’s. It’s all good.”
Not all. “I’m so sorry about Jim Nash,” Hannah said, and Murph held out his hand to her.
“Come here.”
“Hannah of the wolves,” she reminded him.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Maybe we should write that into our wedding vows. Through richer and poorer, through three days without a shower…”
Hannah just sat there, her heart in her throat.
“That was my kind of lame way of asking you to marry me,” Murphy said.
She nodded. “I was thinking we could go to Juneau,” she told him. “Maybe talk to Pat about getting the boat up and running. There’s still plenty of summer left.”
Now Murph had tears in his eyes. “Was that your kind of lame way of saying yes?” he asked her.
She nodded again. “Pat’s looking to sell it,” she said. “The
California Dreamin’.
I could probably swing it with the money from the insurance settlement, but I want to make sure I have enough for these cochlear hearing implants I was checking out, before you came back. They’re expensive and there’s no guarantee that they’ll work, but, I want to give ’em a try.”
“Definitely,” Murphy said. “Besides, you know, I have…that insurance money from, you know…”
Angelina.
“She would love it if we used it to buy the boat,” Murphy said quietly. “We could run the business, Han. You and me.”
“Tourist season’s only five months,” she pointed out. “We couldn’t earn the kind of money we’d make working someplace like Troubleshooters.”
But Murphy was already shaking his head. “I’m not going back to that. I left it a long time ago.” He held out his hand to her again. “Come. Here.”
Hannah pushed herself out of her chair, and it was then, as she sat beside him on the bed that he used his hands to spell out three words.
Nash is alive.
His message was even better than the three words she was expecting, and she gazed at him in stunned surprise. He nodded, his smile wide.
“What—”
“Don’t ask,” he said. “And don’t tell anyone. Just…kiss me, Hannah.”
Despite the almost unbearable lightness and joy that had flooded her at Murphy’s incredible news, she was still reluctant to get too close. “Let me go shower.”
He shook his head as he smiled, and pulled her toward him. “Mmmm,” he said after kissing her. “Good thing I’m a nature lover.”
Hannah laughed her dismay. “I don’t really smell
that
bad, do I?”
“You kind of do.” But Murphy caught her by the belt and pulled her in to kiss him again. “But you know the way clean’s on your wishlist?” he told her, contentment in his dark brown eyes. “I’ve got just one thing on mine.
You.
”
No doubt about it, life was good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since her explosion onto the publishing scene more than ten years ago, S
UZANNE
B
ROCKMANN
has written more than forty books, and is now widely recognized as one of the leading voices in romantic suspense. Her work has earned her repeated appearances on the
USA Today
and
New York Times
bestseller lists, as well as numerous awards, including Romance Writers of America’s #1 Favorite Book of the Year (three years running), two RITA Awards, and many
Romantic Times
Reviewer’s Choice Awards. Suzanne Brockmann lives west of Boston with her husband, author Ed Gaffney.
ALSO BY SUZANNE BROCKMANN
All Through the Night
Force of Nature
Into the Storm
Breaking Point
Hot Target
Flashpoint
Gone Too Far
Into the Night
Out of Control
Over the Edge
The Defiant Hero
The Unsung Hero
Bodyguard
Heartthrob
Into the Fire
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Suzanne Brockmann
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brockmann, Suzanne.
Into the fire: a novel / Suzanne Brockmann.
p. cm.
1. United States. Navy. SEALs—Fiction. 2. Neo-Nazism—Fiction. 3. Murder—Fiction. I. Title
PS3552.R61455156 2008
813'.54—dc22 2008015817
eISBN: 978-0-345-50774-7
v3.0