A woman in need of hiding.
I thought my kids and I would be safe once we escaped the cult’s compound in the desert and started a new life in Las Vegas, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Four years later, the stakes are even higher, and I need another escape plan. Knowing I might not see the light of another day if I’m discovered, I risk everything to call an ex-coworker who had already left Nevada for a better life: “Did you mean it? Can you get us out?”
When she promises to send her friend, a long-haul truck driver on route nearby, to safely smuggle us out of state, all I have to do is pack and wait, hoping I’ll find the freedom I’ve been searching for since I was ten years old. In twelve hours, my kids and I will be safe and hidden away. My hand drifts to my lower stomach. And so will this one.
A trucker sent to help her.
I’m on my last long-haul job before my worsening eyesight takes me off the road for good when I get a call, asking for a favor: smuggle a woman and her kids out of Nevada. It’s supposed to be a two-day trip, and at the end, I’m to drop them off at a mutual friend’s house. Except when a massive storm system sweeps the lower half of the country, the trip takes twice as long. It’s both a blessing and a curse that when we eventually make it to Texas, the freak-freeze causes the state’s power grid to fail, and I have to take them home to my cabin.
The more time I spend with them, playing house as we wait for the power to be restored, the clearer it becomes that our small town’s infamous whirlwind has sunk its talons into me. How am I supposed to let her and the kids go when the storm passes? When we already feel like a family? When the dangers she left behind in Las Vegas follow her all the way to her new home?
Put simply, I can’t.
Because the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
And I’m the biggest, most dangerous of them all.
Hideaway Whirlwind is the 4th book in the Big Boys of Berenson Trucking series but can be read as a standalone. Hideaway Whirlwind is a full-length, spicy, age-gap romance. Please read the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book before proceeding. Happily ever after guaranteed.
Author’s Note
Hideaway Whirlwind is my darkest and perhaps most triggering of the Big Boys of Berenson Trucking books in that it deals with on-page, physical DV and other major traumatic themes, but with a hard-fought, sweet HEA at the end.
This book was heavily inspired by the freeze of 2021 that left the state of Texas without power, my Granny’s house flooded from multiple burst pipes, the visibility of our breaths when the temps dropped to 45 degrees inside the house, having to fill four pots of water to boil on the gas stove so we’d have some heat, and me mentally kicking my own ass six ways to Sunday for never having bought a generator.
I hope no one takes offense at how I represent a certain dog breed within these pages. I’ve had two of these mixes, raised since puppies until they passed away. They were the goodest of good girls, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge they have a bad rap, and seriously, please, not just anyone should have one. While they were so incredibly sweet and gentle…they also stopped an intruder who tried to break into my house at 1 a.m., with my babies asleep upstairs, and the would-be burglar (or worse) took off as soon as my dogs jumped at the door. I love this breed type, and I also know how powerful and scary / what a deterrent they can be, so I wrote what I know.
As for Elliott, not to be cryptic, but there is this *thing* he does that I also wrote from experience. Please do not think I’m implying that everyone who does this *thing* is doing it for *the reason he does it*. (ok, I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this while trying not to spoil anything, but I just needed to put it out there. A little disclaimer, if you will.)
Onto the lighter stuff. I’m going to say what I do in all the Whirlwind books: UTIs don’t exist in this fictionalized version of Texas, m’kay? I know it’s not realistic (not much is), including some of the more imaginative elements of this story, and that’s intentional. Also intentional: the spelling of certain curse words. They’re slang I use and hear often, so please don’t report them as errors. Thank you.
My very last disclaimer: I have not used generative A.I. to write any part of this story (nor any of my other books), and I never will.
Now, I’ll stop yapping and leave you with my hope that you’ll love Teagan & Elliott’s story as much as I loved daydreaming and writing it! Thank you x infinity,
May Alder
This book contains sensitive content and is intended for an 18+ audience.
