Unshakeable Pursuit (Christian Romantic Suspense)

Chapter 1a

“Are you Doctor Geoffrey Whelan?”

Geoffrey looked up from the chart of the ten-year-old boy he was perusing. The woman approaching him wore nurses’ scrubs, but they weren’t the colorful, cartoon-speckled ones of the other nurses at the Sonoma Free Children’s Clinic. Instead, they were a solid washed-out gray color that matched the pale color of the young woman’s face, with the letters KSN embroidered in red on the pocket. He didn’t remember seeing her here at the clinic before. 

There was an expensive Rolex watch on her wrist. A graduation present? She was very young, barely out of nursing school. But then again, lately most of the nurses seemed extremely young to him. The events of the past few years had made him feel old. 

“Can I help you?” he asked.

The young woman edged closer down the clinic hallway toward him, and he realized that her eyes were wide with … fear.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I have an urgent message for you and Nurse Kinley,” she whispered. She glanced behind her, then around him toward the other end of the hallway.

Geoffrey turned, but saw no one. He looked back at the young woman. “You mean Maylin Kinley?”

She nodded.

Geoffrey knew who Maylin was—in fact, he’d first met her years ago when he was doing his residency at the Merlyn Memorial Hospital down in Los Angeles. 

He’d been a different man back then.

But Maylin was the same as he remembered her, still beautiful, still wary of him. She had good reason to be.

“What kind of message? Are you in trouble? I can help.”

The young woman shook her head with a kind of despair in her tightly closed eyes. “It’s you and Nurse Kinley. You have to disappear.”

“What?”

The girl gripped his arm with slender fingers, strong and faintly trembling. Her brown eyes pierced him. “You’re both in danger. You have to run away. It’s the only way you’ll escape from them.”