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    A Moment Of Madness
    A Moment Of Madness
    A Moment Of Madness
    Ebook68 pages1 hour

    A Moment Of Madness

    By Christiane France

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    About this ebook

    Jenny Romano thinks her boyfriend, Steve, has found someone new. Rather than sit around agonizing, she goes to his lakeside cottage, determined to find out for sure. And finds Steve’s dead body in the bedroom, and the body of a woman on the patio. Before she can recover from the shock, she’s attacked from behind by a man who has arms of steel, a body that’s rock hard, and there’s a gun sticking in her ribs.

    Convincing the attacker she’s not the killer is easy, once the man realizes she’s holding a flashlight and not a weapon. But then the real killers come back, and Jenny and her newfound friend, Andy Mulligan, ex-British Special Forces turned retrieval expert, are outnumbered and on the run.

    According to Andy, Steve was trying to sell a valuable piece of stolen property that Andy has been trying to locate for months. It’s the statue of a golden horse encrusted with diamonds and emeralds that’s believed to be of Inca origin and reputedly worth millions. If the killers don’t find the statue at the lakeside cottage, Jenny’s afraid they’ll be coming after her.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristiane France
    Release dateFeb 10, 2017
    ISBN9781386196426
    A Moment Of Madness

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      Book preview

      A Moment Of Madness - Christiane France

      A Moment Of Madness

      With a little practice, Jenny Romano was usually able do most things reasonably well. But even with all the practice in the world, she knew she’d never succeed in taking a short cut through the woods in the dark without making a sound. And she was proving herself right. Instead of gliding noiselessly through the trees without attracting attention in the way she’d hoped, she sounded more like an invading army. The rustle of dead leaves and the annoying snap of dry twigs marked each and every step she took, and the quieter she tried to be, the more noise she made.

      And with nothing more than the inadequate beam of a penlight to show the way, she couldn’t even be sure she was going in the right direction.

      As she paused to check her bearings, several loud, cracking noises ripped through the night, and she froze. A moment later, the same noise erupted again. For a minute or two, all was quiet. But then, somewhere not too far away, a car engine coughed a couple of times before the cough became a full-throated roar, and she saw the flash of headlights through the trees as a car zoomed along the access road, closely followed by a second vehicle.

      She expelled her breath in a soft whoosh and told herself to relax. What she’d heard was the sound of a car backfiring. If she’d been back home in the city, she might have thought it was gunshots. But not out here in the country. In fact, she could almost guarantee it was those kids who lived on the other side of the lake—a pair of male teenage hell-raisers whose idea of a fun time was to spend their nights racing through the woods in souped-up wrecks, scaring the daylights out of the weekend cottagers.

      Jenny’s boyfriend, Steve, and some of the other property owners had talked about speaking to the boys’ parents on the subject of unacceptable noise levels and also the very real danger of speeding cars on narrow back roads at any time of day. But then someone had mentioned the boys’ father was a biker and the mother had a mouth that was better left closed, and the complaints had disappeared as fast as a cold beer on a hot summer night.

      When she finally reached the bushes at the rear of Steve’s lakeside cottage, Jenny paused again and wondered, for the tenth time in as many minutes, what in hell she thought she was doing. Coming up here to spy on Steve in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere had to qualify as the most ridiculous thing she’d ever done in her whole life. She wasn’t the jealous, suspicious type, and she didn’t have one single piece of evidence Steve was playing away from home, or doing anything underhand, or, heaven forbid, something downright illegal. But, from the way he’d been acting lately, she knew he was up to something. He’d become furtive, evasive, looking everywhere but at her when she asked him a question. He’d even taken to disappearing for hours on end without any explanation other than a mumbled excuse about having forgotten the time.

      A couple of months ago, he’d said he was worried about his business taxes. But she knew, thanks to the efforts of a clever tax accountant, the problem had long since been done and dusted. Steve hadn’t owed anywhere near as much as he’d thought, and Jenny had personally mailed the tax return, along with a certified check, at least a week before the deadline.

      If it were something to do with his antique business, she knew Steve would have told her because she was working for him temporarily. Instead, he kept saying everything was fine and that she needed to put a lid on her imagination if she thought otherwise. But Jenny knew it wasn’t imagination. For several weeks now, she’d had a nagging feeling things were far from fine and that whatever it was she and Steve once had, had pretty much run its course. It wasn’t one particular thing. It was a lot of little things. Steve was a very sexual person, and the two of them hadn’t had sex in over a month, and it was more than a week since he’d even kissed her properly. Then there were all the vague reasons why he had to leave her at home instead of taking her with him. Either he had an important business meeting, or he had an appointment with a customer, or his lawyer or accountant, or some deal he needed to firm up.

      But it was the way he’d kept nagging at her to move in with him and then, at the last minute, doing a complete about-face that had really set her alarm bells ringing. If Steve had lost interest in her—and it was beginning to look like that—then there was a good chance he already had her replacement all lined up and ready to go.

      In the six months Jenny had known Steve Garway, the handsome, party-loving owner of Corktown Antiques and Collectibles, she’d discovered he had the same trouble resisting a pretty face or the sexy twitch of a shapely female butt as he did making a quick

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