Excerpt:
Chapter 1
It
took forever to get anywhere, Stanton Rourke fumed. He was sitting at the
airport on a parked plane while officials decided if it was safe to let the
passengers disembark. Of course, he reasoned, Africa was a place of tensions.
That never changed. And he was landing in Ngawa, a small war-torn nation named
in Swahili for a species of civet cat found there. He was in the same spot
where a small commercial plane had been brought down with a rocket launcher
only the week before.
He
wasn’t afraid of war. Over the years, he’d become far too accustomed to it. He
was usually called in when a counterespionage expert was wanted, but he had
other skills, as well. Right now he wished he had more skill in diplomacy. He
was going into Ngawa to get Tat out, and she wasn’t going to want to let him
persuade her.
Tat. He almost groaned as he
pictured her the last time he’d seen her in Barrera, Amazonas, just after
General Emilio Machado had retaken his country from a powerful tyrant, with a
little help from Rourke and a company of American mercs. Clarisse Carrington was
her legal name. But to Rourke, who’d known her since she was a child, she’d always
been just Tat.
A
minion of the country’s usurper, Arturo Sapara, had tortured her with a knife.
He could still see her, her blouse covered with blood, suffering from the
effects of a bullet wound and knife cuts on her breast from one of Sapara’s
apes, who was trying to force her to tell what she knew about a threatening
invasion of his stolen country.
She
was fragile in appearance, blonde and blue-eyed with a delicately perfect face
and a body that drew men’s eyes. But the fragility had been eclipsed when she
was threatened. She’d been angry, uncooperative, strong. She hadn’t given up
one bit of information. With grit that had amazed Rourke, who still remembered
her as the Washington socialite she’d been, she’d not only charmed a jailer
into releasing her and two captured college professors, she’d managed to get
them to safety, as well. Then she’d given Machado valuable intel that had
helped him and his ragtag army overthrow Sapara and regain his country.
She
did have credentials as a photojournalist, but Rourke had always considered
that she was just playing at the job. To be fair, she had covered the invasion
in Iraq, but in human-interest pieces, not what he thought of as true
reporting. After Barrera, that had changed.
She’d
signed on with one of the wire services as a foreign correspondent and gone
into the combat zones. Her latest foray was this gig in Ngawa, where she’d
stationed herself in a refugee camp which had just been overrun.
Rourke had come racing, after an
agonizing few weeks in Wyoming and Texas helping close down a corrupt
politician and expose a drug network. He hadn’t wanted to take the time. He was
terrified that Tat was really going to get her self killed. He was almost
sweating with worry, because he knew something that Tat didn’t; something
potentially fatal to her and any foreigners in the region.
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About the Author:
Diana Palmer, AKA Susan Spaeth Kyle,
was born in 1946 in Cuthbert, Georgia, the eldest daughter of William and
Eloise Spaeth. She and her younger sister, Dannis, were raised in Chamblee,
where Susan graduated from Chamblee High School in 1964. The family moved to
Cornelia, Georgia, in 1965. Susan married James Kyle in 1972. They have a son,
Blayne, who is married to the former Christina Clayton. They are both graduates
of Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. They live in Tennessee and have a
daughter, Selena Marie Kyle, born in February, 2009.
In 1991, Susan returned to college
and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, in
1995. She continues to work on her master’s degree in history as time permits.
Her first novel as Diana Palmer was published in 1979. She has over 115 novels
in print. She has written historical novels as well as contemporary romance,
and has produced science fiction, with her novel THE MORCAI BATTALION appearing
in hardcover in 2007. Two sequels to this book have been released as eBooks. THE
MORCAI BATTALION: The Recruit and THE MORCAI BATTALION: Invictus are
both available from all eBook retailers now. Her latest hardcover novel is INVINCIBLE by
HQN, released in August 2014 and mass market paperback novel is WYOMING
STRONGby HQN, released November 2014.
Susan’s hobbies are gardening,
knitting, crocheting, astronomy, archaeology, and animals. She has dogs, cats,
birds and lizards. She enjoys getting mail from her readers, but is slow to
answer it.
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