April 2014 eBook Releases
The following books will be released on April 15, 2014.
Purchase My Only One at the following locations:
When Abby Fielding is knocked into the frigid Bering Sea,she has only one thought:to save the planet’s gentlest creatures from whaler’s harpoon. When Aleksandr Rostov dives from his helicopter into those arctic waters, it is to rescue the woman he spotted through his field glasses. Little does the Soviet naval officer know she’s the woman of his dreams.
For Aleksandr, dreams are of Mother Russia. But as he and Abby bring their dramatic tale of courage to an eager world, she shows him the wonders of her homeland. And all the time, another, more personal story is unfolding before them.
To the world, they are heroic, but all they long for is to be together. For Abby and Alec, glasnost is more than a policy–it’s a prayer.
AUTHOR COMMENT: This book was written to be part of the A Century of American Romance from the 1890’s to the 1990’s. My book was the 1980’s book. It was created by the editor of Harlequin American Romance series. It was fun taking part in this decade because the 1980’s were a time of massive change. Glasnost was the biggest change as Gorbachev took Russia out of the ice age of distrust with the world and in particular the USA, and gave his people democracy of a sort and in a way, they’d never had before.
I loved Alec, the Russian naval officer and pairing him with Abby, the nature woman who fought to keep whales safe from being killed by the Japanese harpooners. They were both people you liked and wanted to cheer for–continents apart and yet, their hearts didn’t see the distance or that one was Russian and one was American. All they saw was love.
Purchase Point of Departure at the following locations:
It takes a very special man to win that very special woman… A woman in uniform had to be tough. But to face down a Naval commander intent on harassing her out of the ranks, Lt. Callie Donovan needed more than moxie. She needed a miracle.
Top Gun Ty Ballard, assigned to represent Callie in a military Board of Inquiry, was no miracle worker. But having seen the stark vulnerability shadowing Callie’s azure eyes–and knowing it had been put there by predatory jet jocks just like him–he prayed he’d prove man enough to stand by this brave, beautiful woman in blue.
AUTHOR COMMENT: I wrote this book out of frustration of what goes on in the military toward women. Lieutenant Callie Donovan, US Navy, works in the Intelligence section of USNAS Miramar Naval Air Station, home of the Top Gun pilots who are in training. Only her boss, a Lieutenant-Commander, is constantly sexually harassing her. She lives in dread of going to work and being followed and pawed. She’s afraid if she takes her complaint to the captain, he will believe her boss and not her. Callie has seen it happen too often: a male military man gets away with harassing a woman. If she complains, the CO either blames her or she’s jettison out of the military with psychological issues. That is how military men cover their tracks. But Callie isn’t going to take this laying down. And she fights back. And she enlists the aid of one of the Top gun jet jockeys who will defend her in a Board of Inquiry. Lieutenant-Commander Ty Ballard gets to see first hand Callie being assaulted by a group of Navy pilots out in the parking lot near the Officer’s Club. And he wades into the fray to save her. His fury over what has happened to her is funneled into him coming to her defense, to protect her from the military machine who wants to destroy her because she has the courage to fight for her honor.
Purchase Texas Wildcat at the following locations:
Too hot to handle…A blowout in the oil fields was bad news for everyone–a loss of time and money for the owners, day and night danger for the men who fought valiantly to cap the raging flames.
Sam tyler was one of those men, cool-headed in the midst of bedlam, unafraid even when he risked everything to the fight against the towering column of smoke and fire. But when an accident in the oil fields sent him storming into Kelly Blanchard’s office, he learned there was one kind of fire even he wasn’t equipped to handle.
AUTHOR COMMENT: My husband and I spent days down in Texas interviewing one of the premier blow out teams, Boots and Coots. They were friends with Red Adair, who was well known for putting out these nasty oil fires. Everything you read in here comes from the research we did for this book. Plus, I had been a firefighter for three years and knew plenty about it in general, but it was educational to learn how blow out specialists handle these big rig fires.
Purchase Too Near the Fire at the following locations:
Leah Stevenson was a trained fire fighter, and all she knew when she battled her way through the smoke and flames was that there were lives to be saved. Now two innocent children were trapped inside a burning house, and Gil had trusted her to rescue them. Gil, the one man who believed in her, the man who had broken through her defenses and touched the woman inside. No matter what it cost her, she couldn’t let him down. She had to get through the choking, terrifying darkness; somehow Gil’s love would bring her out again.
AUTHOR COMMENT: Keeping in mind this was a 1984 book, there were very very few women fire fighters. Male firefighters fought the idea of women in their ranks. I know because I was one of about fifteen women in the state of Ohio in 1980, that broke down the male barriers of volunteer firefighting . I joined West Point Fire Department, West Point, Ohio. My husband David was already there, but I joined because I was home writing books during the day and could answer day fire calls. I took my training, worked out almost daily to keep my upper body strength to work with the men at my side and not be a weak link. I never was. I was as good as any other male. I took extra training in Hazardous Material down at the Reynoldsburg Fire Academy, Columbus, Ohio. Everything you read in this book, just about, comes from personal experience when it involves firefighting, the sensations, the heat, the flames.
Purchase Touch the Heavens at the following locations:
Flying was her first passion… Then Chris Mallory met Major Dan McCord, her instructor in test pilot school. The attraction –compelling, magical, overwhelming–was definitely mutual. The first woman in the male-dominated field. Chris had enough to handle without beginning a love affair. But the powerful feelings between them were irresistible and with Dan she could soar to such ecstatic heights.
AUTHOR COMMENT: With the Pentagon and Air Force’s approval, I was able to go out to Edwards AFB in Lancaster, California for seven days. An Air Force colonel from public relations/Pentagon, accompanied me. I was able to interview students at the prestigious Air Force Test Pilot School that was on base. I even got to fly in a T-38 Talon jet with a pissed off colonel who thought flying a romance writer around was a pain in the ass to his day and pressures. But fly me he did. I was in a chase plane with him, in a G-suit, helmet and oxygen mask going from 40,000 feet and spiraling around in a one mile circle around at Dragonfly test plane to 20,000 feet—and back up again to 40,000 feet. My thighs and abdomen felt bruised by the G-suit inflating, deflating as we plummeted toward earth and then zoomed upward again to the dark blue of the sky. It was an incredible roller coaster ride. This book is a compilation of the interviews, the experiences I had flying and more thanks to Chief Test Pilot, Doug Benefield, who was testing the B-1 bombe at that time.
I could write a book about Doug Benefield. As he put it, during the Vietnam war he had an “F4 phantom strapped to my ass” and he was an aggressive Air Force pilot raining lead and bombs down on the NVA and VC. Later, he was the chief test pilot on the French Concorde. And after that, on the B-1 bomber. I fell in love with him and his wife who invited me to dinner one night at their Lancaster home. They were good, practical, common sensed people with no sense of their own greatness. Down-to-earth, kind, caring and patriotic. Just as I was getting the author copies to send to Doug and his wife, because I had dedicated the book to Doug in honor of the man and his incredible life, he died during a B-1 test at Edwards AFB. The B-1 had a pod that was to jettison from the plane if it was going down. There was inflatables beneath each side of the cockpit. When the pod left the B-1, which crashed, Doug died instantly because that side of the cockpit did not inflate. The copilot, thankfully, bruised and strained, lived. The colonel who had escorted me out to Edwards before this, called me from the Pentagon to tell me that Doug had died, and how he had died. I sat there bawling my eyes out. I couldn’t stop crying. I must have cried until I hung up the phone for hours. Doug was a man among men. Truly. Kind, caring, protective of women, of me, loving his wife, so proud of his two young sons…family meant everything to him. I’ll never forget that I had an autographing over at the base Exchange at Edwards AFB. Doug came over, dressed in his best civilian suit, looking so handsome, confident and huge (he was six feet tall with shoulders that were incredibly broad) and he came and sat down with me and kept me company for that two hours I was there. That was the kind of man he was. I hope some day, someone writes his biography. The world lost someone special. The other book that I wrote based upon all my research and flights was Love Me Before Dawn.
Purchase Wilderness Passion at the following locations:
Love’s natural law… Biologist Libby Stapleton was ready for anything when she met her unwilling partner on an government environmental study–anything, that is, except forest manager Dan Wagner, whose animal grace and disturbing honesty, filled her with swift, passionate longing.
Suddenly the dreaded three-week trek into wild mountainous terrain became a dangerous adventure into an uncharted world of desire. But Dan was a man who played the game of life by his own rugged rules. If Libby wanted to win his heart she had to live by the laws of nature–and survive.
AUTHOR COMMENT: This takes place in Idaho forests, some of the most beautiful in the West. I had been a firefighter from 1980-1983, and wanted to use some of this knowledge in the book. Plus, my love of Nature, and especially the Rocky Mountains of the West where I grew up.