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Military Romantic Suspense
Major Grace Samuels, a trauma surgeon deployed to Afghanistan, spends her life helping her fellow soldiers overcome disease and combat injuries. But her own wounds are harder to heal. Wracked with guilt over the death of a fellow soldier, she finds comfort in her only friend and appointed bodyguard, weapons sergeant Jacob “Sharp” Foster.
Sharp feels more for Grace than a soldier should, more than he wants to admit. When the team discovers a new, quick-to-kill strain of anthrax, he tries to focus on the mission to find its source. He knows he can help Grace defeat her demons, but first they must defeat the deadly outbreak.
Sharp is Grace’s most loyal ally, but in close quarters, he starts to feel like more. She can’t watch someone else she cares about die—but she might not have a choice. The closer they get to finding the source of the strain, the closer it gets to finding them.
The battle line between good and evil
runs through the heart of every man. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chapter One
“I’m so dead.” Dr. Grace Samuels
stared at the chessboard. There was no hope. None. Not a single move
left open to her.
Except for one.
She sighed, shook
her head at the patience on her opponent’s face. “I concede.”
“Want to know
where you went wrong?” he asked as he cleared the board. He set the
pieces up again. Those big hands of his could bandage a wounded
soldier, field strip a 9 mm and box her into checkmate with equal
skill.
“I sat down in
this chair,” she answered with a straight face. The mess hall was
busy with soldiers, American and Afghan alike, either beginning their
day or ending their night.
“No,” he said.
“You played the board.”
Grace thought about
it for a second, but it still didn’t make any sense. Then again, it
was 0600 and she’d only been up for twenty minutes. “Huh?”
Special Forces
Weapons Sergeant Jacob “Sharp” Foster looked at her earnestly.
“You played the board,” he repeated. “You should have been
playing the man.”
He winked and she
had to fight not to roll her eyes. When she first met him she’d
thought his flirting was for real, and had been worried she’d have
to shut him down. She didn’t want to, because he was hilarious, but
the impropriety couldn’t be ignored. Then, she discovered when he
wasn’t on the job, he had a wicked sense of humor, and everyone was
a target.
“Then I suppose
I’ll have to study you.” She leaned forward and made a show of
giving him a thorough once-over.
He grinned and
spread his hands wide. “By all means, study me.”
Sharp was a big
man, about six-two, and she’d guess he weighed about two hundred
pounds. He flexed his biceps and waggled his eyebrows in response to
her joke. Though he had brown hair, with a mustache and beard to
match, he had the lightest blue eyes she’d ever seen—like looking
into glacial ice.
Right now, those
eyes were challenging her. She just wasn’t sure if it was regarding
the game or something she didn’t want to talk about. At all.
Unfortunately,
Sharp wasn’t going to leave it alone. The chess game should have
warned her. They usually played poker.
She watched him
reset the chessboard while, for the first time in a week, letting her
mind go back to the moment she realized she was in trouble. On her
way to her quarters late at night. They’d arrived at Forward
Operating Base Bostick the week before, and she’d been introduced
to the base commander, Colonel Marshall. He’d barely spoken to her.
So why was he waiting for her outside her quarters with clenched
fists and a face so blank she knew he was in the grip of a powerful
emotion?
The colonel wasn’t
known for any kind of emotion.
She stopped several
feet away. “What are you doing here at this hour, sir?”
One corner of his
upper lip lifted in a sneer and he snarled, “I wanted a private
conversation.”
His words triggered
every internal red flag she had. “I don’t understand.”
Marshall’s
response was two words. One name. “Joseph Cranston.”
A name she wished
she could forget. “You…knew him?”
Scorn turned his
words into weapons. “He was my son.”
Oh God.
Author
Biography
Julie Rowe’s first career as a
medical lab technologist in Canada took her to the North West
Territories and northern Alberta, where she still resides. She loves
to include medical details in her romance novels, but admits she’ll
never be able to write about all her medical experiences because,
“Fiction has to be believable”. Julie writes contemporary and
historical medical romance, fun romantic suspense and military
romance. Her most recent titles are the MEN OF ACTION boxed set and
VIRAL JUSTICE book #3 of the Biological Response Team series.
You can
find her at www.julieroweauthor.com
, on Twitter @julieroweauthor or at her Facebook page:
www.facebook.com/JulieRoweAuthor
Social
Media Links
Website: www.julieroweauthor.com
Twitter: @julieroweauthor
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/JulieRoweAuthor
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