Product Description

The sexy heroes of Black Ops, Inc., a covert private security team, sizzle in New York Times bestselling author Cindy Gerard's electrifying new romantic suspense series.

THE SULTRY HEAT...

Only two things can compel journalist Jenna McMillan back to Buenos Aires after terrorists held her captive there just months before: a rare interview with a shadowy billionaire and the memory of the dark and dangerous man who saved her....

HIDES THE DEADLIEST THREATS...

Bad guys, bombs, and bullets are Gabriel Jones's way of life. But he'll never forget the brash redhead he rescued not so long ago...or the passionate kiss they shared before he sent her packing....

AND EXPOSES THE DEEPEST DESIRES.

Now, forced together by a bombing at the National Congress, Jenna and Gabe confront the urgent longings that simmer between them. But this surprise meeting is no coincidence. A ruthless enemy stalks them with deadly precision. The question is...if they make it out alive, will Gabe turn his back on Jenna...again?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8586 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"Romantic suspense at its best." -- Kay Hooper, New York Times bestselling author

"Cindy Gerard's roller-coaster ride of action and passion grabs you from page one." -- Karen Rose, USA Today bestselling author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Landers, Wyoming
Nine years later

"Okay, problem child. Back you go," Jenna McMillan murmured when a white-faced calf made a break from the herd. Then she hung on and let the sturdy bay she was riding have his head.

A week ago, on the first day of the cattle drive when they'd started moving her dad's herd down the mountain, Jenna had learned that the gelding didn't need her help. The horse knew exactly what he was doing and like he always did, he cut that little doggie off at the pass.

Not so long ago, Jenna had known what she was doing, too. Now, not so much, she thought.

Dewey Gleason rode up beside her and flashed her one of his contagious grins.

"What are you smiling at you old trail dog?" She tried to sound put out with her dad's long time foreman, but she couldn't stall her own grin.

"You, baby girl. I'm just smiling at you."

Dewey was one of those born on a ranch, work-on-aranch, die-on-a-ranch cowboys. The genuine article. He'd been with her dad for close to thirty years now. Dewey sat a saddle like a train sat a rail. Jenna strongly suspected that her rusty horsemanship was the source of his amusement.

"So I make you laugh, do I?" she asked. "You and the boys weren't laughing last night when I cleaned you all out at the poker table." Cleaned out to the sum total of eleven dollars and twenty-three cents from the lot of them. Big spenders all, she thought, remembering Dewey counting his pocket change and deciding whether to call.

"I ain't laughin', Jenna Rose. Just thinkin'."

"Now there's a scary notion."

"I was thinking," he went on, "that before you went off to see the world and write your news stories you were a real cowgirl," he said, but not unkindly.

"Tell me about it," she agreed, shifting in the saddle to relieve the trail-weary ache in her butt.

Yeah, once she'd been a real cowgirl. Now she was just playing at it. Playing and passing time as she rode along with the real drovers. Still, her pride was wounded.

"Do I really look that green?"

Dewey shifted leather reins from one gnarled hand to the other. "You'll always look good to me, Jenna Rose," he said, then true to form when he realized he was waxing a little sentimental, Dewey blushed to his ear tips.

"You're still an old softy, Dewey Gleason."

Jenna would always have a soft spot for him. He'd taught her to ride. Taught her to rope. Taught her that the measure of a man wasn't determined by education or how much money he had.

Yup, Dewey was the real deal. She loved that about him.

Like the gentleman he was, when another stray tried to run, Dewey tipped his fingers to the brim of his old stained Stetson before kneeing his mount and giving chase.

Her gelding decided to follow. The bay lunged and did a little crow-hop, almost unseating her.

Almost.

See, Dewey, she thought, dredging up a small kernel of satisfaction,

"Don't be lookin' too smug there, Missy."

There was a hint of amusement in her dad's warning as his voice drifted through the fall chill and the dust two hundred odd head of Angus stirred as they ambled down the snaking trail from the high plains and summer grazing to the south pasture where they would spend the coming winter.

"That little bay's got spunk." He reined in his buckskin to keep pace beside her. "He'll dump you yet if you don't watch him."

Because he wanted her to smile, Jenna grinned at her dad and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Unlike Dewey, who looked like a piece of scarred, worn leather, her dad was still a handsome man despite the deep creases etched around his eyes from sun and time and smiles. But like Dewey, her dad had reason to be concerned about her riding. She was rusty, and they all knew that she'd been dumped from the back of a horse more than once. X-rays would show a hairline crack in her left forearm to commemorate one of those falls.

Long time ago, she reflected, buttoning the top button of her shearling jacket and turtling deeper into the wooly collar to ward off the cold.

Not so long ago, she'd been dumped again, she mused as she and her dad rode in companionable silence. Well, not so much dumped as dismissed. In her book, that amounted to pretty much the same thing.

Gabriel Jones had despised her at first sight, on general principle and because he was a narrow-minded, heartless alpha dog. She'd walked away from him and Argentina nine months ago. She hadn't been able to get him out of her stupid head since.

It royally ticked her off.

So did her reaction to the note Hank Emerson, her editor at Newsday, had sent by overnight mail two days ago. Guilt. Hank had managed to make her feel guilty. He wanted her back on the job.

I need you down there, Jenna. You're the only one who can do this story. Maxim asked for you. Said he wouldn't trust it to anyone but you. Besides, you know the territory.

Yeah. Jenna knew the territory, all right. That's why the thought of going back to Argentina scared her.

And yet, the story enticed her.

Hank was right, Emilio Maxim was big news. There was a story there. Maybe a big story. It was a story she could nail if she could just dredge up the guts to go back and face a contingent of demons.

"How long are you going to distance yourself from the hard news with those little fluff pieces you've been turning in, Jen?" Hank had asked yesterday when he'd followed up his note with a phone call. "I don't want the plight of the caribou in Alaska from you. I don't want to know what you know about the disappearing honey bees, for chrissake.

"I want a Jenna McMillan story. Something with teeth. Something with fire."

He'd softened his tone then and Jenna could almost see him raking his fingers through his gray hair. "Jenna. What the hell happened to you down there?"

What happened in Argentina was something Jenna had never shared with anyone. That wasn't going to change. Hank would never know. Neither would her parents.

How could she tell them that when she'd been in Buenos Aires searching for a man by the name of Edward Walker, she'd been abducted, blindfolded, and driven to a dust and adobe village in the middle of nowhere then locked in a six-by-six-foot, vermin-infested cell without food or water for days?

How could she confess that just when she'd thought she was going to rot there, she'd been hauled away again by rifle-toting thugs who had thrown her in the back of a battered pick-up and taken her to a camp full of their warthog kind?

She shivered. The bastards had had all kinds of vile acts in mind for her before she'd finally been rescued.

By Gabriel Jones.

Then the real nightmare had begun.

But don't cry for me, Argentina, she thought sourly.

She'd been doing enough crying on her own, thank you very much. All of that boo-hooing and poor-meing had turned her into a cowardly, spineless wimp.

That knowledge stuck in her craw like glue because the old Jenna McMillan didn't quit. Didn't cower. Didn't back down. Her mom was fond of saying that Jenna had been all of two years old when her dad had set her on the back of a horse and she'd been galloping full speed at life ever since.

If she fell off -- and she'd fallen off plenty in both her career and her personal life -- she always climbed back in the saddle.

Where was that woman? she thought grimly. And when is the old Jenna McMillan going to report for duty?

She forced a bright smile when she realized her dad was watching her with a puzzled frown. "So, how ya doing?" she asked before he could ask her.

She already knew the answer. He was getting older, that's how he was doing. So was her mom. Jenna worried about them. The difficult Wyoming winters and hard work had taken a toll. A lot of years had passed while she'd been off to college as a nursing major before switching gears. A stint as a volunteer for the campus newspaper had led her into journalism and an unending chase to capture stories around the world.

Haven't chased too many stories lately, though, have you, hotshot?

No, not so many, she thought with a defeated breath. Hank was right. She'd checked out. Bailed out. And now she was hiding out.

"I'm doing fine, Jenny. I was about to ask the same of you."

She shot him a wide grin. "Me? I'm great."

She breathed deep of the crisp mountain air, looked skyward, watch a jet trail heading south dissecting the pristine perfection of a vast blue sky. Once she'd have been itching to be on that plane -- on any plane -- following the next big story. Chasing the next big lead.

She wasn't chasing anything but dust now, much to Hank's dismay. She'd been his go-to guy for several years, covering assignments in every political and wartorn hotspot on the globe -- Mogadishu, Beirut, Gaza, Kabul, Baghdad, to name a few. Many of those stories had been for Hank. She'd thrived on the action and adventure. Even relished the very real threat of danger.

Until Argentina.

Argentina had gotten to her. Argentina had debunked the myth of "fearless Jenna McMillan."

The standard joke among her colleagues was a takeoff on an old breakfast cereal commercial: "Let's get Jenna to try it. She'll try anything once."

Well, she wasn't fearless now. She was gutless. After Argentina, she'd turned down stories baby reporters would wet their pants over.

What the hell happened to you down there? And when are you going to get over it?

Yeah, that was the question, all right. And that's why last week she'd thrown a few things in a bag, locked up her D.C. apartment, and come home. To get over it.

Only no Houdini type had shown up to make the boogie man magically disappear. Which meant that she was the only one who could make it happen.

"Jen?"

The brim of her dad's brown Resistol shadowed his face from the autumn sun but didn't hide the concern in his eyes. Even before he spoke again in that slow, thoughtful way he had, she knew he had her number.

"If you're so great, what are you doing here, sweetie?"

She'd never been able to lie to him. She felt weary s...

Customer Reviews

Great start to a new series
I loved Show No Mercy. Gerard just gets better with each book she writes. The characters in SNM had such great depth and Gerard really gave them excellent back stories to reveal their personalities and reasons for why they are who they are. Gabe was your great alpha, don't-want-to-love-again hero. But, he was so much more than just your typical alpha hero and wasn't just a cliche. Jenna was a tough, yet vulnerable, very likeable heroine and the two had great chemistry together.

What I especially liked was the balance of romance to suspense. It seems more and more romantic suspense books are leaning more to the suspense story and the romance is more of an afterthought or just a sub-plot. Some seem to think if there is the prerequisite sex scene or two that constitutes a romance. Not so, in my mind. Gerard knows how to write great romance and her suspense stories are taut and nail-biting. I can't wait to read the next in the series. The excerpt at the end of SNM was really a teaser - it didn't even reveal who the hero is in the story! But, it will surely be great whoever gets to be featured, as she laid out the groundwork for the next books well and she presented the characters well so that the reader will want to read more about them.

A Very Good Read!
This book features two characters dealing with various emotional scars, who are forced to team up to combat not only external forces, but also their own inner demons.

Jenna is a hotshot, globe-trotting reporter who is struggling to come to terms with an event that left her questioning, on very fundamental levels, who is she and if she'll ever be able to reclaim her sense of self.

Gabriel is a man scarred both physically and emotionally. A true alpha male in every sense of the term, he is take charge and intensely focused and skilled in matters of combat. He is also dealing with a profound loss, and extreme guilt and anger that have left him closed off emotionally.

While less capable authors would take the aforementioned factors and use them to create a novel that is little more than unrelieved melancholy and characters who are (voluntarily or otherwise) self-centered, Gerard allows her characters to be very real, in terms of being simultaneously flawed and honorable, grief-stricken and truly funny and snarky.

As Jenna and Gabe grow closer (whether they like it or not), their romance does not in any way take away from the action and danger, and the almost palpable suspense, and the reverse holds true, as well. What the reader is left with, then, is a novel that is equal parts action and romance, which is a rarity this day and age, as all too often authors allow one aspect or the other to languish undeveloped or virtually ignored while the other receives most of the attention.

Fortunately, Cindy Gerard has proven that she is adept at handling everything from explosions and gunfights, to passionate love scenes and intensely emotional conversations. This is a very well-written book that is a truly great kickoff to what promises to be a fantastic new series.

How did this book get 5 star reviews here?
I truly don't mean to be mean-spirited about this book, but I thought it was terrible. It took me a week to get through 40 pages because I had to keep putting it down from sheer boredom. It was full of cliches, such as the boss man saying "I want to have your baby" in response to the gal agreeing to take a job he wanted her for. Overall, it seemed like a poor rip-off of Suzanne Brockmann's Troubleshooter's series. Gerard's black ops group was founded by a former spec op, who got his old comrades to join his private black ops company, just like Brockmann's series. But, these characters do not compare to Brockmann's, and I'm not even that big of a fan of the Brockmann series.

There was a part of the story where the main guy, Gabe, gets hurt saving the main gal, Jennifer, and while they are speeding in a car with other ops guys, they are being pursued and shot at, and while all this life and death stuff is going on, Jennifer is wondering about Gabe and how she was so into him (they had known each other previously), and questioning the other ops about what they were doing in Argentina. Give me a break! I have never been shot at, thankfully, but I'm certain if anyone was in a situation like that, the last thing they'd be concerned about was a past love and interrogating the fellow passengers.

The whole book just seemed ridiculous, with the female character being the worst. I'm glad others enjoyed it, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. Very juvenile, and the writing just not up to par with other black ops type books.