Blurb
Captured along with members of her team after a targeted explosion in Iraq during transport, Airman Sarah Benton is tortured and assaulted as well as severely injured before she’s finally rescued by Captain Brand Reardon and his men, avoiding certain death.
Two years later, honorably discharged from the Air Force as a wounded warrior, Sarah accepts a position as administrator of a new program intent on retraining wounded military men and women planning on remaining in active service.
Now an AFOSI agent, Brand has been sent to Crystal Rock to watch over Sarah for another reason besides as a program liaison: Sarah’s life could be in danger. Similar incidents of sabotage had been occurring before and after the assassination of Sarah’s team in Iraq. Although Sarah has little memory of her time in captivity, they’re almost certain she saw something she wasn’t supposed to.
When Brand discovers her cowardly fiancé broke up with her because he couldn’t deal with her injuries, Brand decides to do what he’s wanted to do from the moment they met, and make Sarah his.
But his assignment is only temporary, and he’ll be moving on if Sarah doesn’t seem to be in danger. Can Brand break through Sarah’s wounded heart before he’s reassigned?
Review
After recovering from trauma in Iraq, former soldier Sarah Benton joins a wounded‑warrior program, only to cross paths with her former captain and longtime secret crush, Brand Reardon. Brand is undercover, tasked with finding out whether someone is targeting Sarah, one of only two survivors of a deadly mission she barely remembers.
Sarah and Brand are strong characters who are dealing with trauma and grief the best they can. I liked them both.
This plot kept my attention at the beginning, even though it took a while for Sarah and Brand to show up on page together, but the pacing slowed by the midway point. Scenes jumped around without a transition and left me confused as to where the characters were. There are unanswered questions and a surprising number of typos like misspellings, missing words, punctuation errors, and the wrong name was used for the hero in a couple of pages. I read this book when it was part of the A Valentine She’ll Remember box set, so hopefully these issues have been addressed in the single-release edition.
Overall, I enjoyed the story, and I appreciated how Ms. Ferguson drew attention to how the government sometimes mistreats its veterans.
3 Stars
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