When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster
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When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster
PDF Ebook When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster
The tougher they are, the harder they fall…
Professional mercenary Dare Macintosh lives by one hard-and-fast rule: business should never be personal. If a cause appeals to him and the price is right, he'll take the mission he's offered. But then the lovely Molly Alexander asks him to help her track down the men who'd had her kidnapped—and for the first time, Dare's tempted to combine work with pleasure.
Fiercely independent, Molly vows to trust no one until she's uncovered the truth. Could the enemy be her powerful estranged father? The ex-fiancé who still holds a grudge? Or the not-so-shy fan of her bestselling novels? As the danger heats up around them, the only anchor Molly has is Dare himself. But what she feels for him just might be the most frightening thing of all…
When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster - Amazon Sales Rank: #56780 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-01
- Released on: 2015-02-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster About the Author Lori Foster is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author with books from a variety of publishers, including Berkley/Jove, Kensington, St. Martin’s, Harlequin and Silhouette. Lori has been a recipient of the prestigious RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Series Romantic Fantasy, and for Contemporary Romance. She’s had top-selling books for Amazon, Waldenbooks and the BGI Group. For more about Lori, visit her Web site at www.lorifoster.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Midnight came and went with only the quiet buzz of meager traffic along the beach. An occasional horn blew or tires squealed. Two people exited a bar nearby, laughing too loud before piling into an SUV and steering drunkenly onto the road.
In the shadows of a weed-ridden parking lot at the back of the rundown motel, no one noticed them. Avoiding the glow of the full yellow moon, they stood behind the south wall beneath a broken security lamp.
A lamp Dare Macintosh had broken.
Ocean breezes stirred the air and heightened his senses. While scanning the area and repeatedly peering at the black van he'd rented when first arriving in San Diego, Dare waited. His friend, Trace Rivers, embraced his younger sister with choking emotion.
It had been a long two days filled with frantic preparation, little sleep, less food and loads of pumping adrenaline: the conditions in which Dare operated best.
With the job done, and then some, he desperately wanted something to eat and a place to sleep. Even more than that, he wanted to check on the skinny, abused woman still out cold in the backseat of the van.
"Tell me," Trace said, not to Alani, whom he kept crushed close, but to Dare.
After again glancing at the van, Dare nodded. He'd
found Alani and returned her to Trace as he'd sworn to, but neither man knew yet what she had suffered.
"She was in Tijuana, as you said. Locked in a trailer with some other women in an isolated area."
"Heavily guarded?"
"Yes."
Trace drew a strained breath, and uttered what they both had known: "Human traffickers."
Dare nodded. "Not much in the way of food or drinks. Dirty, airless with the windows screwed shut. They had the women…" He hesitated, knowing how Trace would take it, but he needed to know. "They were leashed, chained to grommets in the floor, with just enough chain to reach a toilet. No sink."
"Fuckers." Overcome with rage, Trace knotted his hand in his sister's hair and squeezed her tighter, protectively.
She didn't complain.
Trace never used coarse language in front of his sister, which meant he was on the ragged edge, barely aware of what he said or did. Dare looked away from them, understanding the lack of control.
He focused on the rented van. "I had to go through several lookouts and a few armed guards to get her out of there."
"Quietly." Trace made it a statement, not a question.
"There wasn't much fuss." Dare always worked in efficient silence; an alarm would have brought more armed guards, possibly too many for him to combat. As much as he wanted to kill them all, he hadn't.
Only those most responsible.
By the time the empty trailer was discovered, Dare was already heading over the border into San Diego—where Trace waited. Over the years he'd built up alliances
everywhere, and sometimes worked with the coyotes who made a living taking people back and forth over the border.
Thanks to those contacts, even with the extra cargo slumped in his backseat, no one had stopped him as he went through the border checkpoint. The van had been given only a cursory inspection, his weapons ignored, and the excuse of the women being tired—never mind that one was beaten and haggard, only half-dressed—had satisfied all questions.
Both men were damn good at what they did. But Trace couldn't go after his sister himself as he'd wanted, because the men holding her knew what he looked like. Before he'd have even gotten close to Tijuana, Trace would have been spotted by lookouts.
So Dare had gone—and come back with more than he'd bargained for.
Making a small sound, Alani tucked her face in closer to her brother's shoulder. The siblings shared blond hair and light brown eyes, but that's where the physical similarities ended. Trace was thirty, of an age with Dare, eight years older than his sister. He stood six foot three and weighed over two hundred pounds—all of it muscle.
Next to him, Alani looked tiny and fragile and, presently, wounded. Even since Dare had removed her from the trailer, fresh bruises continued to show on her arms and around her narrow wrists. Because the bastards had planned to sell her, they hadn't harmed her face.
Innocence was a huge commodity, and at twenty-two, having led a sheltered life, Alani gave off a definite vibe of innocence. Blond-haired, blue-eyed women brought the most profit, but he had a feeling that Alani's golden-brown eyes, in contrast to her very fair hair, would have fascinated the sick pricks.
Dare prayed they hadn't raped her, knowing a woman ill-used would bring less, but he left that uncomfortable discussion for Trace.
Hearing a noise like a soft moan, Dare zeroed in on the van with his senses on alert. He'd left the rear door open so he'd hear her if she moved, if she awoke…. But she did no more than readjust.
Three hours had passed since he'd carried her out of that trailer. Worry gnawed at him.
Why didn't she awaken?
"Dare?" His eyes filled with pain, rage and relief, Trace whispered, "Thank you."
Alani gave an audible swallow, and then she, too, said, "Yes, thank you. So much."
Putting a hand on her shoulder, Dare replied without words. He'd known Alani for years, watched her grow up, and felt like a pseudo big brother in many ways. He'd attended her graduation, both from high school and college. He'd been there with Alani and Trace when they buried their parents.
They had become part of his hodgepodge family.
Two days ago human traffickers had snatched Alani outside her hotel while she vacationed near the beach. Tomorrow she would have been sold, and finding her after that might have become impossible.
Right now, what the siblings needed was time alone, and Dare needed to sort things out with his remaining passenger. "I should get going."
Trace followed Dare's attention toward the van, saw the slim, dirty foot that appeared out of the open rear-passenger door, and lifted one eyebrow in an expression of disbelief. "You have a passenger?"
"A small complication, that's all."
"You're serious?"
Dare shrugged. "There were six women in that small trailer, Trace. Four of them were local and scattered as soon as I got them free." He nodded his head toward the van. "That one was drugged, near starved, grimy." And in many ways, even in the cramped confines of the rusty trailer, she'd been separated from the others, kept alone.
For certain, she wasn't the typical woman kidnapped for the growing sex trade.
Trace grew curious in that quiet way of his. "An American.complication?"
"I think so." From what he'd seen of her grubby face, she didn't look foreign. "She hasn't come to yet, so I haven't been able to talk to her."
Alani turned in her brother's arms, and she, too, looked toward the van. "She fought them whenever she came to. She called them names and almost…egged them on." Alani shivered in remembered fear. "It was so horrible. The men slapped her around for being mouthy, but she didn't stop. She just cursed them more."
Dare frowned. The little idiot might have been killed. "Foolhardy."
"I think she was really…angry." As if she couldn't fathom such boldness, Alani took a breath. "Even when they held her down to force more drugs on her, she didn't cry. She.raged."
"Did she speak English?"
Nodding, Alani said, "She sounded American to me. I mean, no accent or anything."
Considering all that, Dare said aloud, "She wasn't there for the same purpose as the rest of you."
"Probably not. Sometimes four or five of them would come in the trailer, but they'd stand around her and I couldn't see what they did. As far as I could tell, they
never really leered at her like…" She bit her lip, shivered again. "Like they did the rest of us. They never seemed to be sizing her up for anything. They just picked on her."
Trace hugged her again. "It's all right. You're safe now."
She nodded, shored up by the courage her brother had given her, and faced Dare. "She was there when we got there, already looking pretty bad. Once, before the men drugged her, she told me her name was Molly."
"Molly what?"
Alani shook her head. "We weren't supposed to talk, so I was afraid to ask her anything."
Trace tucked her back in close and asked over her head, "What are you going to do with her now?"
"No idea." Dare thought of her insubstantial weight when she'd been over his shoulder, of that tangled, light brown hair that had concealed much of her bruised face. "Hopefully someone will pay me for bringing her home."
Without releasing her brother, Alani reached out and punched Dare for the callous comment. He grinned, caught her wrist and kissed her knuckles.
She'd been given a terrible fright, and two days had probably felt like a month, but Alani had spirit. She'd get through this, thank God.
But the other one. How long had they had her? And why? Impatient with thoughts of her, Dare said, "I gotta run."
"Hold up a sec." Trace caught his arm, then dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out a fat envelope.
Pissed, Dare took a step back. "What the hell is that?"
"Expenses. And don't curse in front of Alani." Hell, just because he usually hired out didn't mean he'd
charge a friend—a brother. He'd have gone after Alani if he'd had to crawl the whole way. "I don't need it."
Solemn, Trace held the envelope out to him. "But I need you to take it."
It hit Dare anew how difficult this was for Trace, not just that his sister had been hurt, but that he hadn't been able to go after her himself.
Dare took the envelope. "Thanks." He leaned in close. "And for future reference, I resolved the issue of you being recognized." There was no one left who knew Trace.
Deep satisfaction glittered in Trace's eyes. He gave a sharp nod. "I should have doubled the amount."
"No."...
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Most helpful customer reviews
63 of 68 people found the following review helpful. Good beginning, then fell flat... great cover, though! :) By RatherBeTraveling Lori Foster is a hit or miss for me. I've found that she really shines when her books/stories have lower word counts - usually under 300 pages. Not many authors can pull off a great story, with characters that you truly care about, with a lower word-count. She can. She seems to be able to focus better on developing a believable relationship, tension, and steam between her characters, and the plot and pacing are usually much better when she doesn't have so many threads to keep track of. Some examples are her earlier Buckhorn Brothers series (shorter books published by Harlequin), and almost any of her stories written for an anthology (loved her story in the Star Quality anthology).I don't want to give away any spoilers for When You Dare, so I'll just summarize the basic story. Molly was abducted and taken to Tijuana by sex slave traders. The reason she was abducted remained a mystery for most of the book. She was older than the other girls, and not as attractive - not the typical kind of girl that the slavers usually went after. Dare rescues her from the slavers (he was originally sent to rescue someone else), and then acts as her bodyguard while they try to solve the mystery of who abducted her and why. Until they find out, she's in danger of being abducted again.It was an interesting premise and started with a bang - with interesting characters and fast-paced plot, but after about a quarter of the way through, it started to fall flat. The pace slowed down, the action and relationship development wasn't integrated as well, and the tension/steam between the hero and heroine didn't really take off.As is evident with some of her other books (Caught in the Act, for example - a similar book that is based on a writer who is being threatened), Foster tends to rush feelings, making her characters "know" things about each other that normally take time to discover. The deeper character traits such as courage, honesty, and integrity should be revealed slowly, developing as the relationship grows. Rushing this results in shallow characterization, and unbelievable relationships.In this book, everyone knew how uncomplaining, brave, honest, etc., Molly was within minutes of meeting her (not only the hero, but secondary characters, too). To compound the problem, Foster tends to tell us (repeatedly) about all these fine qualities instead of showing us through her characters' behavior and reactions to situations they are faced with. Foster obviously enjoys researching and plotting her books, but she ends up short-changing her characters by rushing their development, resulting in a lack of depth.Foster can also (usually) write great steam scenes and create tension between her characters. Again, she's better at this when she writes shorter books, and books where her characters already know each other. Unfortunately, she missed the mark in both respects with this book. The sex scenes weren't as well-written as she's capable of, and the love between Molly and Dare just wasn't believable to me. By the end of the book, I still didn't find a real "spark" between them. Even the friendship between Molly and Chris seemed rushed and forced. The secondary relationship between Dare and Chris, however, is well-developed and believable. I think it was because they already knew each other, so Foster revealed their relationship through action/reaction rather than by just telling us.As I said before, the story started out wonderfully. I just wish that Foster had maintained that tension and excitement throughout 448 pages. I believe she could have if it was a shorter work. Overall, I give this book a 3-star rating. The cover, however, gets 5 stars, and then some... ;)
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful. When You Dare By S. Davies When You Dare is the first book in Lori Foster's Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor series. How can a girl say no to a series title like that? I enjoy romantic suspense and if it features a hot sexy alpha male who's name is Dare and a smokin' hot cover even better!Molly has been kidnapped and taken across the Mexican border to Tijuana presumably by white slave traders. But she doesn't fit the typical profile for women who generally fall victim to this sort of crime. She is a successful romantic suspense author pretty much lives a low key life and stays to herself. Other than the odd over zealous fan here and there, she doesn't have any enemies and no reason to believe someone would want to hurt her.When Dare is on a mission to rescue his best friends sister from slave traders he also finds Molly, beaten, abused and being held separately from the other kidnapped girls. Something just doesn't add up and after the rescue mission is completed Dare is determined to find out who had Molly kidnapped and why. Dare's sense of honor and his attraction to Molly fuel his drive to see that the person or persons responsible for hurting Molly will pay.This book got off to a really good start with Dare on a covert mission to rescue the sister of a good friend. Dare is a good and honorable guy but he is also ruthless and when it comes to doing his job he doesn't hesitate to shoot to kill if necessary. He is all alpha male, in charge, and the kind of guy you definitely want on your side when things get ugly. Actually he's the kind of guy you want on your side no matter how things are, as long as he's on your side. Molly recognizes Dare as someone she can trust almost right away and their mutual attraction becomes apparent soon after Dare whisks Molly off to safety.You could call Molly a solid heroine in that she's not overly dramatic and hysterical or so determined to show her emotional strength that she fights her rescuer tooth and nail to show she can stand on her own two feet. She is quite independent and I can certainly appreciate a level headed heroine, however I found Molly's personality somewhat flat and a little too level for someone who had gone through such a traumatic experience. I wanted her to react at some point, be angry that someone tried to hurt her, or show how scared she actually was. Instead, she seemed more concerned about being a polite house guest and staying out of the way, and minding her manners. I just didn't connect with her and found her response to her situation somewhat unbelievable.Although this book was heavier on the romance, the mystery and suspense did keep me guessing for the better part of the book. I actually figured it out before the big reveal but then changed my mind because I thought my theory was too far fetched. Turns out my far fetched theory was right on, but I liked that I was kept guessing for the greater part of the story.When you Dare is the first book I've read by Lori Foster. I enjoyed the mystery and suspense and although I didn't really care for Molly I still enjoyed romance and found Dare to be a swoon worthy hero. I look forward to future books in the series.Rating 3.5
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful. Interesting Read By LAS Reviewer I love a book with alpha-heroes and plenty of action (in and out of the bedroom). This book satisfied all those needs.I have to admit, I've never read a book by Lori Foster but have always meant to, since her reputation is so huge. So, when this book came up for review I pounced on it like a cat on tuna fish, and I gobbled it up just as readily.The book has a great premise. Dare, our hero, is a mercenary of sorts who was hired to retrieve a woman kidnapped by white slavers and taken to Mexico. While there, he stumbles across another woman who's been kidnapped, but clearly doesn't fit the mold of the type of woman the bad guys would usually take. He does what anyone in his position would do - he rescues her, too.Molly is older (thirty) and not model thin or conventionally pretty. She's also been treated differently than the other women; beaten more, starved more, tortured more. I had a hard time identifying with Molly. She's a successful novelist who'd been taken from the doorstep of her apartment, drugged, imprisoned and tortured. And, despite it all, she never really loses it. She has a little trouble sleeping, but that's really about it. No tears. No panic attacks. No fear. She remains calm in every situation. She never even loses her temper ... not really.Interestingly, these are all the reasons why Dare is drawn to her, but I kept waiting for her to be human. She really had no significant flaws, and sometimes just didn't feel real. In fact, my first comment when finishing the book was that my biggest complaint was the heroine was too perfect.Regardless, the rest of the book makes up for that. I loved Dare, I loved Chris and I was fascinated by Trace (and glad he gets his story next!). The "who" and the "why" of Molly's kidnapping kept me turning pages. They're sure it was done by someone close to Molly ... but who? Dare uses every resource to find out the truth, even though he knows it's going to upset Molly. He'll do anything to keep her safe.Though this book was definitely more romance than suspense, I still enjoyed trying to figure out whodunit. I thought I'd gotten it figured, but kept changing my mind. I waffled, much like Dare did, when the facts started falling into place. I have to admit that I wasn't terribly surprised by the villain, but I struggled with the reasons for the kidnapping. They just didn't work for me. Really, though, it didn't matter -- because the writing was that good. There is no denying the skill Ms. Foster has in her fingers.Secondary characters were wonderful, too, and sometimes stole the show. Chris was especially great, and I hope he gets his own story someday ... I'd especially like to know the background between him and Dare. Even the dogs were unique and individual!As a virgin Lori Foster reader, I came away from "When You Dare" quite satisfied. It may not have been perfect, but it entertained me which is what I expect from a good book. I never had a moment when I even thought about taking a break from it. I needed to know what happened to Dare and Molly. I was invested in them and in the rest of the characters who populated the book. When I wasn't reading it, I wished I was.Simply put, "When You Dare" is a good start to what sounds like an intriguing series, and I can't wait to get started on the next book.Originally posted at The Long and Short of It Romance Reviews
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When You Dare: Hard Knocks: An Ultimate Novella (The Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor), by Lori Foster
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