A young couple fleeing a criminal family confronts a reluctant assassin in this heart-pounding thriller from E.A. Aymar.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from E.A. Aymar’s When She Left, which is available from February 6th 2024.
When Melissa Cruz falls hard for a dreamy-eyed photographer named Jake, she can’t resist the urge to run away with him. The problem is that she already has a boyfriend, a rising star in his family’s crime organization. Betrayed and humiliated, Chris isn’t going to just let her go.
To find Melissa, Chris turns to Lucky Wilson, one of his family’s professional assassins. But Lucky has his own problems. After years of lying about his day job, his marriage is in shambles and he suffers from relentless panic attacks. He’ll do this job if Chris will let him out of the killing life.
Lucky knows this is his best chance at salvaging the home life he always craved. But Melissa and Jake aren’t going to abandon their chance at something real—something they’ve both been lacking in their lives. But they aren’t the only ones desperate to survive, and a powerful criminal family isn’t the only danger.
And soon, it’s clear that an unlikely partnership might be the only way for any of them to make it out alive…
Melissa Cruz realized she was trapped the moment those two men sauntered into the twenty-four-hour diner.
“They found us,” she whispered to Jake Smith. Hope had finally begun to seem like a possibility, and now it was over, the abrupt ending of an interrupted prayer.
Her fists tightened helplessly in her lap. Breath was hard to come by.
Jake sat across from her, his back to the door, oblivious. He didn’t look up from his camera as he spoke.
“Who what?”
Melissa brought her hand to her forehead to hide her face, hoped the movement wasn’t obvious. “The people hunting us,” she said, low and intense. It was difficult for her to say the whole sentence, fear nearly turning it into a question. Hunting us?
Jake swung around.
“Jake!” Melissa whispered desperately.
He ignored her, kept looking at the two men who had entered the diner. Stared as they sat at a booth near the door.
“Turn around!”
Melissa’s high hiss broke through, and Jake turned. The bruises coloring the left side of his face, a faded map, were already less apparent than they had been yesterday. But Melissa still noticed them.
And, despite her fear, they still caused her heart to ache—love and guilt wrestling inside her like a pair of angels tumbling to earth.
“That’s not them,” Jake announced.
Melissa wanted to believe him, wanted to let that wave of relief wash over her. “How do you know?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “They don’t seem the type. Polos, slacks. One of them has a lanyard. Probably here for some kind of convention. Came to get food after a party.”
Men always had this sense of certainty, of working in absolutes, the world defined by their perspective. Nothing’s wrong. We’re fine. I thought so. Sometimes Melissa found this confidence comforting, even if she knew it was misplaced.
She peered again at the two men. “Or they’re trying not to look suspicious.”
Jake grinned, that easy smile that always softened everything inside her. “Honestly, if the Winterses made custom polos to find us at mid-night in some random diner, then they deserve to catch us.”
He lifted his camera and snapped a pair of pictures of the half-eaten food on their table, the soft apple pie and finished dinner and empty coffee cup in front of him, the cooling bowl of tomato soup and nibbled grilled cheese sandwich in front of her.
He reached across the table with his free hand.
“No one’s after us,” Jake insisted.
Her hand was cold in his. Melissa had accidentally left her jacket in the car, and the diner wasn’t warm. She could feel the chill coming in from outside, from the thin glass window alongside their booth. “No one just leaves them. Especially the way we did.”
Melissa had heard stories about men and women who’d tried to leave the Winters crime family, how they’d been caught.
The parts of them that had been found.
