Celebrated Seattle restaurateur Callie James is more than a little thrown when her ex-husband, French investigative reporter Daniel Odile-Grand, shows up after fourteen years asking for her help. Even more disturbing: as she throws him out, Daniel is deliberately hit by a car, hurled through the front window of her restaurant—broken, bloody and unconscious. He flees from the hospital and breaks into Callie’s apartment, where he passes out. Reluctantly, Callie hides him.
When she gets back to her restaurant, two assassins walk in, insisting that she find Daniel for them by tonight or pay the consequences. Overwhelmed and hopelessly out of her depth, Callie hires the only man she knows who can help her: Cash Logan, her former bartender, a man she had arrested for smuggling ivory through her restaurant two years earlier, and who still hasn’t forgiven her. The assassins blow up her restaurant. It’s Callie’s nightmare. And the worst is yet to come as she and her unlikely, incompatible ally discover that the most perilous dangers are far closer to home than they’d imagined.
This wasn’t my usual type of book but I liked the premise and took a chance. That was a great decision. The story reads like an action movie from the first chapter. Callie needs a plan when her ex brings trouble to her doorstep she only knows one person with the skills to save her family. Sure, her ex is a cheating jerk but he’s still her son’s father so she doesn’t want to see him get taken out. But Daniel Odile-Grand has made a lot of enemies in his career so it’s going to be tough just figuring out where the threat is coming from, let alone what to do about it.
Enter Cash and his band of misfit mercenaries to the rescue. Except when things don’t go as planned, Callie ends up saving his hide just as much as he saved hers. There’s some intrigue, lots of suspense and near-constant action with a romance in the middle of it all. From terrorists to smugglers, this story has a little bit of everything, and I really enjoyed it. The fast pace kept me turning pages because I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I received an ARC from Get Red PR in exchange for an honest review.
