He made it home from a war zone. But danger remains in the mountains of Montana… Navy SEAL Brett Morgan has come home to recover after a disastrous deployment, desperate to remember what happened. As he struggles to find his feet as a civilian, he intervenes in an armed robbery, saving the life of waitress Anna Larkin. But there’s more to Anna’s past than meets the eye and as that past … as that past circles dangerously closer, Brett will have to draw on all of his combat experience to keep them both alive.
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Navy SEAL’s Deadly Secret begins The Runaway Ranch series with an intense story of recovery and finding love along the way. While there were some technical issues I had with parts of this story, overall I was easily drawn into Brett’s and Anna’s world with all of its intricacies, fears, and underlying danger. Those few issues, for me, took nothing away from the emotional reactions I had as this couple fights themselves as well as others to find their happiness together… eventually.
Brett returned home after his most recent deployment, wounded in mind, body, and spirit. He’s lost in the past with a memory that is only bits and pieces of his last assignment, the last mission that went so horribly wrong. Until or unless he recovers those lost moments of time Brett isn’t going back to the military or anywhere but his lonely existence at the family cabin avoiding everyone possible while continuing his obligatory once-a-month trip to town for supplies and human contact.
It’s while at the local diner, making that necessary trip to town that Brett encounters Anna for the first time since her return home. He will step into a dangerous situation to save a woman from a drugged robber without thinking simply reacting. The woman’s absolute surrender to the idea of that knife at her throat taking her life spurred Brett on to take down the deranged man… no one should welcome death as she seemed to, forgetting that he himself wasn’t exactly the life of the party right now.
Anna returned home after the death of her husband – at her own hands. Oh, it clearly was an accident when during a drunken rage he lunged for her as she turned from the cutting board with a knife still in her hands which he impaled himself on. Everyone, including the police, say it was only an accident that Anna did nothing wrong at that moment… but she doesn’t believe that for one second and wishes for death to take her away from the memories of the past. She’s dealt with her husband’s drinking, his verbal abuse which soon turned into physical beatings for all of her marriage. But she cannot deal with the fact that she was holding the knife that ultimately set her free.
Her husband’s family can’t believe that either. Soon the threats toward Anna are more than vicious rumors and she’ll turn to the one man she trusts for help.
Anna and Brett are both dealing with PTSD, for different reasons, and in different ways but at the core, each is wounded and searching for an escape. Neither holds out hope for closure for Anna cannot bring back the dead and Brett cannot recall why so many of his men died on that last mission. I felt that their mental injuries were presented in a way that made sense for them, and also from the outside looking in for the reader. Watching them begin to heal, slowly but with each other’s help was an emotional journey for me. The danger that they both were placed in only added to the intensity of their story.
I enjoyed Navy SEAL’s Deadly Secret and will definitely be following the series.
I own a Kindle edition of this title.
The Navy SEALs Deadly Secret is the first novel in Cindy Dees’ new Runaway Ranch series, and while it was a quick, well-written, emotional and engaging read, and while I’ll read anything with Navy SEALs in the title, I had more than a few issues with both the title and this novel, which is why I’m giving it only 3 stars.
Let’s start with the title–first, there is no deadly secret, certainly not relating to the hero, Brett Morgan, who isn’t a Navy SEAL, he was in Special Forces, a U.S. Army Ranger, who, after 4 tours of duty in Afghanistan, can’t remember what happened on his last mission, one which left him alive and his comrades dead, leaving him with PTSD, flashbacks, nightmares, and what is clearly survivor’s guilt, blaming himself for the deaths of his men, although his inability to recall the details is quite literally driving him to drink. He’s holed up in a remote mountain cabin on his family’s large ranch with the injured service dog he adopted, where he’s been drinking himself into oblivion, but must fulfill his father’s demand that in order to stay at the cabin, he must get out, go into town, and see people a minimum of once a month. As the novel opens, he’s at Pittypat’s Diner, nursing his one cup of coffee and fulfilling that obligation, but it isn’t something he’s happy about and he can’t wait to get out there and back to his cabin.
His waitress, Anna Larkin, has more than a few issues in her past as well. She’s a local gal who ran away from the small town of Sunny Creek with her high school boyfriend, Eddie, right after graduation. Eddie was a wannabe actor, and Anna married him and followed him out to Hollywood. What she didn’t know was that Eddie was a control freak and a drinker, and when he drank, he was both emotionally and physically abusive to her. Ten years into their marriage, when Eddie still was unable to land a film role and while Anna was working to pay all their bills, Anna accidentally killed him as he was about to attack her in a drunken rage, and although she was cleared of any wrongdoing, she holds herself responsible for his death, as does his family, who would love to see her dead or behind bars, preferably the former.
On that particular day, when a scruffy, scary, hopped up on drugs customer walks in, puts a knife to Anna’s throat and demands the contents of the cash register, Anna assumes that he will kill her and that she’ll finally get what’s coming to her, payment in full for killing Eddie, but Brett, seeing that lost and submissive look in her eyes, comes to her rescue, beating and subduing the felon, and saving Anna’s life. After the police arrive and Brett follows them to the station to file a report, Anna is cleaning up the bloody floor and discovers a gold medallion under the counter. She soon learns that it belongs to Brett, and when her shift is over, drives up the mountain to return it to him and to thank him for saving her, although it’s clear she would have preferred her life to end at the diner, and so begins their on again, off again, relationship.
As any romance reader can anticipate, these two broken people are going to be attracted to another, feel unworthy, and eventually help heal one another, which is why this novel was a little too predictable, and would have greatly benefited from a more complex plot than Anna’s nearly deadly car accident, her abduction, and Brett coming to her rescue yet again. My issues with this novel stem from my knowledge of PTSD, and my knowledge that there is no quick fix for it, certainly not as quick a fix as the hero experiences. While I enjoyed the heat between these two likable characters, it seemed unlikely to me that any woman who’d been as abused as Anna would be so willing and eager to jump into bed with a virtual stranger–let alone one who drinks. Once Eddie showed Anna his dark, abusive side, since she was the breadwinner, I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth she stayed with him for a decade.
This is not a bad read, it moves along quickly and the characters are, as stated previously, likable, but it was far too predictable, the healing process which both main characters faced was given short shrift, and since you know beforehand that there will be an HEA ending, this novel would certainly have benefited from a more complex plot, and from an epilogue, rather than the abrupt HEA ending the author chose to write.
I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.