Though her confidence is badly shaken by a training accident, A. J. Cooper vows to become an excellent T-FLAC operative. She is everything the antiterrorist agency looks for—she’s smart, resourceful, and a crack shot. Eager to prove herself to her instructor, the highly regarded Kane Wright, A. J. takes on a difficult and potentially deadly assignment. A success in the field could be just the thing she needs to make her career with the agency—and working so closely with the extraordinary and irresistibly sexy Kane is a fantasy come to life.

Kane Wright is a master of disguise, hiding his powerful attraction for A. J. in the name of professionalism. But when she doesn’t bounce back quickly after her accident, Kane’s desire becomes concern. In the field, even a moment’s hesitation can turn a routine operation into a deadly one. With A. J. taking a lead position in this mission, Kane knows he won’t be able to take his eyes off his gorgeous tomboy trainee. Under the hot desert sun, even as they struggle to unravel a madman’s devious plot, their long denied passion will finally boil over. . . .

Jonah Cutter is just getting to know his half-brothers and feels he has to prove himself. When he is scouting for a lost ship, he’s positive he’s found the ultimate treasure: Atlantis. He’s even secured the ultimate non-believer, Dr. Calista West, to verify it. He just didn’t expect everything that makes up Callie.

I’m not too much into contemporaries and I’ve only ever read a novella by this author before, so I really didn’t have much expectations on this book. However, I very much enjoyed it. Callie is independent, a loner and very much driven in her task.I loved watching her character change around as the story progressed. There really wasn’t anything not to love about Jonah. He was smart, sexy, and determined to come out on top. As for the plot, I really wasn’t sure what twists the author would stick in there, but I really loved how she ended it. After reading this book, I so want to go treasure-hunting!! I look forward to reading about the other Cutters and more from this author!.

**I voluntarily read and reviewed this book

GR Cleanup Originally Read in 2010

I'm quitting this one for several reasons:

1. It's boring. I was cleaning up the doggie droppings in the yard and found my mind drifting. If a book can't hold my attention when I'm doing that chore something is seriously wrong.

2. The heroine is a rookie who "forgets" to wear her safety gear on her 1st mission out. Seriously? I'm supposed to believe this? And, yep, you guessed it she gets shot. Not to worry though she's ok (figures).

3. It's #15 in a series and what I've read so far does not make me want to torment myself by reading 14 of these things to play catch up. Good lord people, 14 of them!

4. Hero and heroine have names that are so similar I don't know who the hell is who in this audio. And their last names are the same. And no, this isn't some backwoods horror/love story where they create two headed babies either. They're not even related. What are the odds?

5. I have no patience and this books requires lots.

DNF

12/11 - Nenia Campbell was right, this is preposterous. This is her review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., which most likely is better able to explain the ridiculousness of this book than I ever could.

I've already got a number of pages marked as worth discussing in this review, and that's not counting the ones from the first 40 pages that I didn't bother to mark because they were just small things and didn't seem worth the effort.

On page 51

'An easel held a blank canvas, and beside it all a tall table covered with a dish towel and a pretty blue glass vase held an assortment of high-pigment Lukas paint tubes and dozens of Kolinsky sable brushes in various sizes. None of them used. All of them, as he well knew, top-of-the-line.'

Umm, how does he 'well know'? Was there an explanation about his painting prowess that I missed? Or does he simply 'know' they're 'top-of-the-line' because she's rich and would, of course, buy the best?

On page 53

'She should be 'barricade' in a safe room, not attempting to fix him the most important meal of the day, 'dressed', with deceptive innocence.'

A couple of queries regarding that sentence. First, 'barricaded' instead of 'barricade'. Second, I'm confused by the word 'dressed' in this context. Is Adair saying Mia's dressed in a 'deceptively innocent' way? Or would Cruz rather she wasn't dressed at all? I have no idea.

On page 65

'Mia put her hands behind her, then realised it was the gesture of a three-year-old...'

Why is putting your hands behind your back the gesture of a three-year-old? I think it's a perfect way of making sure you don't get in the way of someone else's cooking (I sure it also works when you need to keep your hands off the hot guy doing the cooking). To be continued...

Later - This is so not the book to use words like 'verisimilitude' and 'propinquity'. I even had to look 'propinquity' up. I guess that's a plus because I learnt a new word, but using such extraordinarily complex (and hard to pronounce) words when it would have been far easier to simply write 'truth' and 'proximity', smacks of an author forcing a reader to admit to their large vocabulary and high intelligence. I'm not impressed by Adair's vocabulary, I'm just irritated by what I see as her shoving it down my throat. To be continued...

Later - So much bad! I think this might actually be getting worse.

On page 97

'Her choppy hair tumbled around her head, parting erotically on her neck.'

What the hell does an erotic hair parting look like?! What a stupid description!

On page 98

'He smelled of fresh air, virile male, and soap.'

God! How does a virile male's smell differ from a non-virile male? Now I can't decide which description is more ridiculous.

On page 101

'The negligee she'd bought from a racy online catalogue was an absolutely plain tube. No ruffles, no embellishments. Just a simple, stretchy, sheer black sleeveless column clinging to every curve and valley, from throat to ankle.'

I don't get the logistics of this negligee. A page and a half after this description Cruz 'moves between her legs', if the negligee is a tube that clings to every curve and valley from throat to ankle I can't see how he can do that while she's still wearing it. It would be too tight (it would probably also be too tight for walking, but she's not actually described as attempting to do that so I won't mention that impossibility) for her to successfully separate her legs without the negligee having been raised above her waist, which clearly hadn't happened as Cruz is described as kissing her through the material. It actually sounds like good exercise for your thighs, like a reverse Thighmaster - wrap your legs in a giant elastic band and then try to open them against the resistance of the material.

On page 106

'Fully clothed, he knelt in the V of her legs.'

That's funny since on page 101 we've already read

'Smile wicked, he straightened and pulled his T-shirt over his head.'

It's the amazing reappearing t-shirt!

On page 109 I decided it was time to start skimming after I read that he'd choked her out while they were having sex, but it was okay because

...he'd known exactly how much pressure to exert on her carotid. More would've killed her. He'd pressed...less. Last-moment decision. She hadn't been hurt.'

Really? It's well documented that a lack of oxygen to the brain is likely to cause, at the very least, a severe headache when she wakes up. That's if she wakes up, because only be a few extra seconds could make the difference between knocking her out and causing permanent damage.

Amazingly I might be finding Cruz's internal monologue more annoying than Ana's. All he seems to say/think is "Can't have more sex with the mark. Have to kill her, in a few days if not sooner. Ooh, I could have killed her just then, but I didn't because I'm so attracted to her, but I can't have sex with her again because I have to kill her. Oopsy daisy, had sex with her again. No more sex frommm......now!", and repeat that over and OVER again. Sooo irritating. The only reason I'm even bothering to keep skimming is that I want to know how he got her profile so wrong and who hired him. To be continued...

15/11 - I've just realised how much I've written on this book, it's not worth a review this long, so this final update will be as short as I can make it while still making my opinion clear. I'm giving this 1.5 stars, rounded down for GR. This wasn't as bad as some of the rubbish Kindle freebies I've gotten from Amazon, that's why it gets an extra half star. There are so many problems with this book, compounded by the fact that it was written by what I consider a pretty popular and well-known romance author who has been writing for many years now. These mistakes were newbie mistakes, but Adair is not a newbie. The plot was not believable, the editing was half a step above 'woeful', both characters were annoying in their own way, and the end was very rushed and tied up way too easily. I can't believe this has such a high rating on GR. Is it just because of all the sex? Yes, it was frequent and creative, but that's not enough to keep a story going. Romance as a genre could be considered a type of fantasy, but there has to be some realism, some believability that these two people would behave the way they do. This book could have an associated drinking game that involves drinking every time she should be dead, the winner would be the one who makes it to the end of the book without losing consciousness.