Accused
by Wendy Byrne
GENRE: Romantic Suspense
BLURB:
Spawned
from the depths of every parent’s worst nightmare, Jillian Beckett’s 16 year
old troubled son is charged with murder. He’s unable to remember what happened
and swears he’s off drugs, but should she believe him? Her ex-husband doesn’t.
The high-priced lawyer she hired doesn’t. Where does motherly instinct
intersect with reality?
Afraid and alone, she
reluctantly enlists the help of her son’s football coach to find the truth of
what happened. As they battle to uncover the guilty party, confidences are
shattered, lives are on the line, while her son is one step closer to spending
his life behind bars.
Excerpt:
Jillian tumbled into an open elevator and leaned against the
back wall. Tears rolled down her cheeks and sobs hiccupped through her chest.
Catching her breath seemed like a formidable task with depleting energy.
“Are you all right?” The voice sounded familiar, but she
couldn’t raise her eyes to see who it came from. “Let me give you a ride home.
We can come back later for your car when you’re feeling better.”
She raised her head. “You’re...hiccup...Coach....”
“Sam. I’d be happy to give you a ride. You’ve had a rough
morning.”
For some reason, she couldn’t get her head around why he’d
offer her a ride. Yes, she was a mess. Yes, she couldn’t string more than two
words together coherently. “I’m fine.”
“Forgive me for saying this, but you look like you might
pass out any second.”
She wanted to say something flippant like, ‘Having a son
accused of murder would do that to any gal’ but couldn’t manage to get out the
words. Instead, she repeated the one word she could. “Fine.”
“Do you remember where you parked your car? I’ll walk you
there.”
Her car. Where had she parked? For the life of her, she
couldn’t recall even pulling into the parking garage. Jillian wiped the tears
that continued to roll down her cheeks and struggled to extract keys from her
purse. “I’ll hit…,” she sucked in a breath and tried to compose herself, “the
panic button.”
“Before you do that, what level did you park on?”
Oh God. She couldn’t fall apart the way she had when her
parents died. Travis needed her. Finally, she remembered. “Three. Level three.” Maybe she hadn’t
slipped down the slippery slope to crazy after all.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Wendy lives in
the Chicago area. She has a Masters in Social Work and worked in the child
welfare field for twelve years before she decided to pursue her dream of
writing.
Between
teaching college classes, trying to get her morbidly obese cat to slim down and
tempering the will of her five-year-old granddaughter, who's determined to
become a witch when she turns six so she can fly on her broom to see the Eiffel
Tower and put hexes on people--not necessarily in that order--somehow Wendy
still manages to fit in writing. She spends the remainder of her days
inflicting mayhem on her hero and heroine until they beg for mercy.
She has written
three books in the Hard Targets trilogy, Hard to Kill, Hard to Trust and Hard
to Stop. In addition, she has a contemporary romance through Entangled
Publishing called The Millionaire’s Deception, a self-pubbed Christmas short
story called The Christmas Curse and two interracial romances, Fractured and
Mama Said.
No comments:
Post a Comment