Book Watch & Excerpt: The Missing by Shiloh Walker

I’m a Shiloh Walker fan. Whether it’s erotica or paranormal or erotic paranormal, I’ve always enjoyed her books. When I read the first excerpt of The Missing, I was immediately drawn in. I’ve since read the book and loved it (look for my review next week).

Here’s a second excerpt of The Missing:

Too bad he couldn’t deal with the lingering echoes of the dream just as easy.

The haunted look in Taige’s eyes bothered him. A lot. She wouldn’t tell him what was going on and Cullen knew from experience that if she wasn’t going to share what had caused those shadows, he may never know.

Thinking of her, the weird, too-real dreams, Cullen found himself walking out of his bathroom and into the office that was on the other side of his bedroom. He opened the connecting door and went to the bookshelf that spanned the entire northern wall. On the top shelf, out of Jillian’s reach, was a fat leather album. Inside it were pictures, newspaper articles, some clipped from the paper and some printed off the web, all of Taige Branch.

He’d seen the first one nine years ago. The day after Jilly was born. He’d been looking through the fat Sunday paper. The nurse came in, bringing Jilly with her and Cullen had tossed the paper onto the narrow, uncomfortable couch. A section slid to the floor and when he picked it up a few minutes later, time froze.

Down in the bottom right corner on the last page of the section was Taige. It wasn’t a great picture. She had sunglasses on and was looking away from the camera. The bold caption above the picture read Local Psychic Saves Kidnapped Child.

It had happened in Mobile. Some thug pulled a woman out of her car at a stoplight and either didn’t see the baby sleeping in the back, or didn’t care. Two days of non-stop searching had turned up nothing. Then a college sophomore showed up at the police department. She’d said she could find the baby. Cullen knew that must of been hard for her, going there and knowing she’d be ridiculed–and after she helped, she’d become the focus of rampant speculation.

As promised, and without any help from the police, she’d found the baby. All it had taken was getting to the mom’s side. The paper didn’t detail what all had happened beyond her finding the child, but Cullen had done some digging. After the police found the baby exactly where Taige had told them to find her, they had arrested her on suspicion of kidnapping.

The charges were dropped only after they failed to find any evidence at all linking her to the carjacker turned kidnapper, but not until she’d spent a week in jail. Nobody had come to post bond and by the time Cullen knew a damn thing, she’d been released.

There were other stories, some of them no more than a paragraph or two and others that were nearly full page stories featuring color pictures and interviews with people who claimed to know her. Dante and Rose had been mentioned in a few, always with something along the lines of No comment when asked about Taige Branch. A couple of enterprising reporters had even unearthed some of the kids she had helped when she was younger.

The most recent article was nearly two years old. She’d either gotten better at keeping her name out of things or she had people helping her on that end. He had a feeling it was a combination of both. Over the past few years it was getting harder to find any information about her, but he had a friend that worked for the FBI. A paper pusher more than anything, but Grant Wilson had confirmed that the FBI did have special task forces and Taige Branch was often called in to work on kidnappings or other crimes related to children.

He touched his fingers to the grainy image of her face. It didn’t seem as if she had aged a day physically, but there was a hardness to her that made him hurt inside. He didn’t imagine she’d had much choice but to develop some armor, given the life she lived.

She’d helped so many kids. Cullen knew there were probably far more than those found between these album pages. Ones that she helped and then disappeared before anybody even had a chance to thank her, much less ask her name. She’d done that sort of thing a lot when they’d been together and he knew how uncomfortable the attention made her.

Taige would avoid it as often as possible and when it wasn’t, she’d tolerate with clenched teeth and a grim look, as though she couldn’t understand why people were so amazed by what she did. As though she couldn’t comprehend how amazing she was.

Cullen turned to the last page in the album and stared at the picture of her there. It was the best image by far, taken by a reporter for The Birmingham News, but it wasn’t one he’d cut out of the newspaper. No, this one was an 8×10 glossy that he had paid for. “You’ve got it bad,” he murmured. If anybody saw the album, they’d probably peg him for some crazy stalker and chances are, they wouldn’t be far off.

Don’t both these excerpts made you want to read this book?

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