Release Day | Frostbite

It’s release day!!! Frostbite is out today 🥳 AND since it’s part of JMS Book’s Advent Calendar, it’s free TODAY. But only today, so don’t snooze! 😆  

It’s been a year since I had a release as Ofelia. I’ve had plenty as Holly, but she has been hogging all my time, so very little has been left. That being said, of all the stories I’ve written these last twelve months, this is one of my favorites 😊  

It’s short, it’s quite silly, and I love it.  

Noel has a cold case podcast together with his best friend, Thea. He goes to interview a woman about the disappearance of her friend, which happened thirty-seven years ago. When he gets there, the woman is shot right in front of his eyes.  

Noel comes from a long line of rugged men working law enforcement, and his initial reaction is to call his brother, but he’s away on an undercover job. So he calls Bo.  

Bo is Noel’s brother’s best friend and former work partner, and Noel has spent the last sixteen years hating him (and secretly fantasizing about him, but no one needs to know that!). Bo, being the ass he is, doesn’t believe Noel and takes his sweet time coming to the rescue.  

When he realizes Noel isn’t making things up, he jumps into action and takes Noel to his cabin where they’ll hide until the police can find the murderer. The cabin is tiny, and it only has one bed…  

So if you’re in the mood for some close proximity, brother’s best friend kind of story, grab it now! 

Frostbite

Murder isn’t as much fun as it’s made out to be, neither is being rescued by a grouchy cop.  

All Noel Chance wanted to do was ask a woman a few questions about a kidnapping that took place thirty-seven years ago for his cold case podcast. He didn’t think someone would shoot her right in front of him.  

While hiding from the murderer by the dill pickle in the food cellar, he calls Bo, his brother’s best friend, who is a cop. Bo takes his sweet time to come to the rescue, and once he does, he’s surprised Noel was telling the truth.  

Bo then kidnaps him and takes him to his cabin in the woods while the police investigate the murder. Okay, maybe it isn’t kidnapping, and more a case of keeping him safe, but still. What is he to do with a hot but grumpy man in a cabin with only one bed?   

Grab it here for FREE on December 2nd!

Excerpt:

Chapter 1 

 

Noel Chance curled up in the corner of the dank food cellar and clutched his phone to his chest. His heart beat a mile a minute and there were spiderwebs in his hair. There may or may not be blood and gray matter on his cheek, so actually spiderwebs were the least of his concerns. 

Unless something crawled. Then they’d have a problem. 

There was only one person he wanted to call in a situation like this, but he couldn’t. 

Noel came from a long line of police officers. Tough, hardy, unflinching, masculine men who stood tall and laughed in the face of danger. If they didn’t laugh, they at least grinned. 

Not Noel. He was all fine limbs and doe eyes. Okay, perhaps not doe eyes, and if they were doe eyes, people didn’t notice them behind his glasses. Which didn’t matter. 

What mattered was he was curled up in a basement with mushed brains on his face, and he couldn’t call his brother Matt. He was off doing undercover work, like the macho man he was. 

Noel’s fingers shook as he unlocked the phone and scrolled through his contacts. 

He’d made a promise. Several, if he was to be honest, but this one he’d made without planning on keeping it. Normally, Noel kept his promises, but this one he’d made because Matt had nagged and nagged and nagged, so he’d said he would without ever thinking he would. 

Call Bo Nicholas if he got in trouble. 

It was what he’d promised, but he didn’t want to. Bo was Matt’s former partner and best friend, and Noel wanted to kill him. Or perhaps not kill, since he’d now seen murder and it wasn’t what it was made out to be. 

He’d settle for shipping him off to a different planet. 

One planet away would have to be enough. Yeah, he’d settle for that. 

Once he found Bo’s number, he hit call and waited as one beep after the other sounded. Then there was a crackling. 

“Nicholas.” 

Damn, his voice was enough for Noel’s throat to grow parched. Infuriating. Annoying. Maddening. So fucking self-assured, Noel wanted to ruffle all his feathers and maybe hear his voice in the dark of his bedroom—not that he ever would. 

Nothing, nothing, broke through Bo Nicholas’ icy facade. 

“Hello?” 

Fuck. “Eh… Bo?” 

“Yes.” He dragged it out. 

“See, I’m in a bit of a pickle, right next to the pickles actually, and I promised Matt—” 

A groan cut him off, and Noel could picture him sitting by his desk and pinching the bridge of his nose with his big fingers. He hoped he poked himself in the eye by mistake. 

“Yeah, well, now I have, so when you’re called out for a double homicide and find me, tell him I love him, and I did as promised, okay?” 

“What?” Bo sounded a little more alert now. 

“Could you tell Thea too? She has my consent to turn my death into a podcast episode. I know it’s not our normal thing, to talk about active investigations, I mean. Not dying either. Until now, we’ve both managed to stay alive, but she can turn me into an episode or series of episodes if she wants to. Oh, and Dad too. Tell him I love him, I mean. I don’t think he’ll get into podcasting anytime soon. Though, should he want to—” Noel cut himself off as steps sounded on the stairs. He was unsure if they led into the basement or to the upper floor. The stairs were right atop each other and every creak sounded as if it was right there. 

“Shit, I have to go. Someone’s coming. They shot her right in the head. Whatever they say when you interrogate them, there was no struggle or anything. No self-defense. Murder. Executioner style.” 

“Noel?” 

For a moment, Noel stilled. He realized it was the first time Bo had said his name. Shit, hadn’t he understood who was calling until now? He must have, right? He’d said Matt and Thea. He had to know. 

“Yeah, sorry.” He hadn’t been speaking loudly before, but now he was whispering. “I should’ve introduced myself. I guess you get a lot of frantic calls from strange men.” 

“Not regularly, no.” 

“Okay, remember what I said. I love Matt, Dad, and Thea. They can do podcasts. And there was no struggle, they murdered Cynthia Harris point-blank.” 

The steps were coming closer, and now Noel was sure they were in the basement and not on the upper floor. 

“They’re outside the door now, I have to go. Bye, Bo.” 

“Noel, wait—” 

But Noel didn’t wait. He hung up and made sure the volume was off since he suspected Bo would call him back, then he put on the recording app he and Thea used for their cold case podcast episodes. It would save onto the cloud, so she’d be able to hear him, maybe she’d get his murder on tape too. A nice bonus. 

“Thea. I’m hiding in the food cellar on Pioneer Passing number four. I came here to interview Cynthia Harris about what she remembered from the night in 1987 when her best friend Pamela Hawk was abducted.” Thea knew already, but he added it in case she wanted to use the recording for the podcast. 

Bo’s name flashed on the screen, but Noel only checked that it didn’t stop the recording, then he continued. “I knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer despite having picked the time for me to come around herself, so I walked around the house. The patio door was open, which was strange since it’s fucking snowing outside, and I walked inside. I called out and said I was Noel Chance from Chance Leads there to see her. I heard some shuffling and muffled whimpers and thought maybe she’d fallen or was unwell and needed help. I rushed toward the sounds right into the living room. She was on a chair with her back toward me.” 

He took a moment to listen. He hoped she could hear his whispers and whoever walked around in the basement wouldn’t. Though, if he’d been a killer who wanted to get rid of an eyewitness, he would have checked every door, so it was only a matter of time. He lowered his voice more. 

“I rushed inside, and you know me. I’m not the most observant person in the world. I didn’t look around. I hurried forward. It was so weird, her sitting in the middle of the room on a kitchen chair with no other furniture nearby. I wanted to see her face, but when I was right by her side, there was a thud. Blood splattered. Not splatter-movie splattered, but I think I might have a few specks on me.” He pulled in a shuddering breath. “Anyway. I didn’t see the man’s face. He was wearing a ski mask, and when he trained the gun on me, I ran. I’d say he was a bit over six feet. Six-one, six-two tops. Nah, I’m leaning more toward six to six-one.” 

He paused and listened. The basement was silent, but he didn’t trust it. 

“I have spiderwebs in my hair, and I’m hiding right next to the dill pickle in the food cellar. I called Bo, erm… I mean Detective Nicholas, and warned him it was done execution style, no scuffling or accidentally pulling the trigger while wrestling on the floor or anything like that. We’ve all watched The Jinx, right?” He and Thea had at least, and he believed their small audience had too. 

“So, yeah… Why would anyone want to kill Cynthia Harris?” 

For all Noel knew, she was an ordinary sixty-three-year-old woman, divorced with two grown kids, who’d lost her best friend after a night out thirty-seven years ago. 

The police deemed it a freak abduction. A random man, maybe a hitchhiker, an in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kind of thing, which was why Thea had wanted to look into it for their cold case podcast. Kidnapped women were seldom an in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kind of thing, no matter what the white middle-aged men working the cases wanted to believe. 

Noel hadn’t had any arguments about looking into it. It was as good a case as any. It was local, which was their thing. Cold cases in Cokford and surroundings. 

They were amateurs, Thea and him. Doing the podcast for fun. Mostly. The money they got for it was more than welcome, and there was nothing more satisfying than setting up a murder board—or in this case, a kidnapping board. Though, it would turn into a murder board now, wouldn’t it? 

They called their podcast Chance Leads since his last name was Chance and Thea’s was Leads, and sometimes they stumbled upon a lead by chance. 

They’d done it for years and had a small but loyal following. It was growing, their following, and he’d wished their sponsor and Patreon income would skyrocket, since he hated his boring admin job. The office would benefit from a few murders. 

Thea and he might not solve any cases, but they allowed everyone who wanted to share their memories of the crime to do so. And they tried to give the audience a nuanced portrait of the person missing or murdered and show an accurate picture of what had happened, the investigation, the suspects, and so on. 

Never had he believed it would lead to him being the sole witness in an actual murder. Or the victim of a double murder.