Murphy's Call

She never would have believed that one phone call could be enough to undo years of cautious, disciplined living, but that is exactly what happens. One conversation with Murphy and Bronwen Campbell embarks on a spontaneous journey that will change her entire world.
Murphy isn’t one for asking for help, but his current mission has gone from bad to worse, and his son needs him, so he calls one of the few people in the world he can trust. He’s never met her…never even spoken to her, but her father had been someone he’d trusted with his life for years, and that was all he needed to know. So while he is fighting to get out of Belfast in one piece, he can at least feel relieved to know that his son will be in good hands. And maybe…just maybe…not having to worry about that will give him the extra edge he needs to outrun the hounds of hell. Although even he, a clever operative who has been in his fair share of tight spots, has to admit it could take a miracle to get him out when he has betrayed every faction fighting in Ireland’s troubles. But he has to hope that he hasn’t used up all of his luck and that maybe the faith of his young son and his bone-deep need to meet the amethyst-eyed woman who has stolen his heart while looking out at him from the well-worn photo her father had carried will be his salvation. And maybe the Fates…and a few well-aimed Hail Marys… will smile on him and finally allow him to find a sanctuary for his troubled soul.
She was only supposed to deliver the wee boy to his family, but Bronwen finds that she is unable to simply walk away. One look into that child’s eyes melted her heart, and she feels a kinship with him that few others could possibly understand. She knows what it is like to wait and to wonder when that phone will ring again; when your larger-than-life father will walk through the door. And she knows what it is to bury the fear that he isn’t real…that he won’t ever come, and to replace it with a belief whose strength is only found in the pure adoration of a child’s heart. The belief that mortality is only for others and that some superheroes don’t need masks and costumes…they just need the unfailing faith of a child to keep them safe.
Then there’s the bond that Bronwen feels with that child’s father, the man called Murphy, who is little more than a voice over the phone and a blur on the edge of her childhood memories. She finds herself once again waiting for the phone to ring…but this time there is no fairy tale clouding her mind or her heart. This time she is waiting to hear the voice of a man who quite possibly holds the key to her future, and she quickly discovers that she is no longer content to stay out of the dangerous, clandestine world her father had lived in. This time she will not be waiting blindly for the phone to ring. In caring for Murphy’s son and meeting the people who’d shared her father’s life, Bronwen finds her strength and her place in the world.
And when Murphy finally walks through the door of his house, it is with the knowledge that he is no longer alone. That his house is now a home and his family is waiting there for him. The woman who stole his heart, and that of his son, not only loves him…but she’s waited for him. Regardless that he’s been to hell and back, he must have done something right after all.