RELEASE WEEK! A New Bachelor is Released: Jake

On Tuesday, we release Book 3 in the Band of Bachelors series (part of the overall SEAL Brotherhood series). I've had a great time writing this hero.

I have a printable book list on this website, if you go back to the Home page. That will give you the reading order, and the series, as well as other books, box sets, and novellas.

So here's how I got the Band of Bachelors. I was going to do a SEAL for Cat Johnson's Kindle World. Cat is a good friend of mine, and a great writer. I got Lucas' story done in novella format, and then had to change plans. So this book became a full length novel, Book 1 in the Band of Bachelors.

All my books are part of the overall SEAL Brotherhood series. My publicist at the time told me that I shouldn't have long series. So I decided to break up the titles to focus on the unique group of SEALs in each group. In real life, there are different types of SEALs. Ones that stay in for twenty years, married and divorced SEALs, SEALs who get out after six years, ones who are single, ones who are happily married, ones who have to roll out due to injuries, and everything in between.

So my Bachelor SEALs then are those who have been married before, and either get married multiple times with kids all over the place (like my Jake), or go through messy divorces. The one thing they have in common is that they rely too heavily on their own form of Bachelor advice. They live like a bunch of bachelors, and haven't yet figured out what all the fuss is about housekeeping and decorating a home. In fact, they are enjoying the fact that they don't have to do that anymore.

But one by one, they fall. I love the concept.

In contrast, my Bad Boys of SEAL Team 3 are men who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, from often foster care or tragic family lives. Men who found their true calling by becoming a SEAL. Of course, one by one, they each find their Happily Ever After, and rise to become the warrior they were destined to be.

True Blue SEALs is going to be a series of injured warriors, starting with Book 1, Zak. This story was based in part on the story of Adam Brown, who lost an eye and then have to re-qualify to go back on the SEAL Teams. Very inspiring true story. I used the idea of what impact a freak injury can have on the life of a warrior. Zak of course opens the door to the winery life in Sonoma County. I wanted to be able to include that in the future for some of the guys who get out and go on with their lives.

Nashville SEALs was inspired in great part by my narrator, J.D. Hart, sort of as a romanticized version (although J.D. needs no enhancement) of his early life as a country-western star in Nashville. In getting to know him over the twenty plus audio books we have done together, his story came out, and I asked for and received permission to tell an exaggerated tale of it, tailored to my SEALs. He could have been a bad boy, but I don't see J.D.'s young single life as being bad at all. But that's just me. My hero is the same. He gives more than he takes, but he decides there's more to life than backstage hookups and short term relationships, and rises to the call.

And now I have the Trident Legacy, my first paranormal SEAL. Tay Demmett makes your acquaintance on 3/28/17 when Kathryn LeVeque and I release the duet Trident Legacy. I hope you will go buy that book as soon as you finish Jake.

What's next? It will be another SEAL story, in one of these series. It might be Bad Boy #4, Bachelor #4, Tay's full length story, another SEAL Brotherhood story in the original series, a continuation of Lizzie and Jameson's story, or a continuation of Fredo's Dream with Fredo and Mia.

In any event, I hope you use this as a reference to what has come before, and where I'm going. After all, it's been a fun journey and I couldn't do it without you, the readers, and my wonderful sister authors, who have taught me so much.

Thank you for a great year so far. I've only just begun!!

RED Friday Reads

Got a sexy Red Friday Read for you today. This is from SEAL's Code, my third book in the Bad Boys of SEAL Team 3, the SEAL Brotherhood series. I love the chemistry between these two. It was hard to distance them, alienate them, but you know that has to be done in a good book, right? Interested to know what you think. This is not a PG excerpt, just warning you.

Excerpt SEAL's Code (not PG folks):

           “There’s no rush, little fox.” He watched her as he dipped his tongue down for another taste.

            Luci was wild with need and understood he was deliberately slowing things down.

            “You thrash like an injured deer,” he whispered to her sex. “She knows what’s coming next, yet is powerless to stop it,” he said as he scanned the juncture between her legs eagerly.

            Am I injured? It was a totally curious thing for him to say. He had become the hunter of her soul, but was it a death she sought, or freedom from her earthly body she craved? But yes, it was dangerous. Wreckless.

            And the only thing she wanted.

            The voices rose in a chant, a chorus of angst and pain, passion and desire so fierce it would scare off anyone but the most fervent. As those ancient voices began to screech and crescendo out of control, he climbed atop her, spreading her thighs wide open, positioning himself for unfettered entry. His left hand gripped her chin, forcing her lips to pucker as he covered them, his tongue plunged inside her mouth as his cock found it’s home.

            Silence followed, the chanting cut off mid-stanza, startling her. She heard the sound of a large bird of prey flying through the sky, as if marking his territory with his calling, his whistle just barely discernable above the rush of the branches in a deep forest underneath. Maybe it was the waves slapping themselves on the shore. Maybe it was the sound of a cloud of black starlings twirling like smoke up through the sky to the heavens. Whatever it was, the silent force of nature hit her in the middle of her chest as she watched him root deep, command her body to rise up out of the ashes of her cold past and come alive. Had she ever felt this way before?

            She gave herself to him with complete abandon, and it scared her. Whatever remained of her previous life was left torn apart and dead like an old skin, lying in a heap at the side of the bed. In her new persona, the uncontrolled intensity of something so fantastic flowed into every cell of her body, and she began to cry.

RED FRIDAY READ

Since it's Red Friday, I thought I'd take an excerpt from one of my SEAL Brotherhood Series books. This one is from the upcoming book SEAL My Home, which releases 3/31/15 but is on preorder now. Just like in SEAL'S Promise, a terrorist cell figures prominently in the story. Here's an excerpt that won't reveal a spoiler. 

Here's the blurb:

Bad boy Rory Kennedy was raised in foster care, bouncing in and out of trouble along the way. He finds his true family and real brothers as a Navy SEAL, one of the Navy’s elite warriors. When his BUD/S instructor barked the SEAL’s Motto: Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, he knew he had found home.

Megan Palmer works in a bookstore and finds her passion in life through reading steamy romance novels. Her brief affair with a man she later found out was married has left her damaged, until she meets the handsome SEAL, who stands ready to open her world and give her things she’s only dreamed.

On a skiing trip, Rory suffers a possible career-ending injury and also comes face to face with a past he never knew of, and a family who had abandoned him. His relationship with Megan is tested to the breaking point as Rory wades through the dark waters of recovery and whether or not he can live without the life he loves. A home-grown terrorist cell forces his hand and he discovers his true purpose.

EXCERPT:

“Detectives, I’ve spent less than ten minutes total talking to him. I barely know him. He told me he was a hedge fund trader. I got that he was successful, I mean, he arranged his private transportation to the hospital in Los Angeles from Big Bear. He had this guy Derek helping him, and he was on the phone and computer. That’s pretty much it. That’s all I know about him, other than the fact that he’d tried to find me when I was little, and failed.”

“And you’ve had no contact since L.A. No phone calls or internet with his office, with this Derek guy?”

“Absolutely no. I haven’t checked my emails in a few days, but last time I did, nothing.”

“Would you check it right now, please?” one of the detectives asked.

Rory got up slowly, positioning his cane for steadiness. Kyle stopped him.

“Let me. Where is it?”

“Next to the bed.”

           Rory walked slowly with his cane as a guide, leaned slighty into a stool, setting the computer on his eating bar, the two detectives looking over his shoulder. Scrolling through his gmail account inbox he did find something he’d never seen before.

            It was a single line item with a subject line: Raymond Corrigan, from Raymond Corrigan’s computer. Underneath there was a single picture which flashed slowly on the screen line by line. It was a picture of his father, bound and gagged, barefoot, sitting on a chair on a concrete floor of some dark warehouse. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit. On his lap was a copy of the New York Times dated today. His eyes were swollen shut with dark bruises. Underneath the picture were the chilling words:

            Proof of Life.

Do I have your attention? I hope so. Hope you join me in this journey for SEAL My Home next month, and then SEAL's Code in June.

 

 

Sharon Hamilton

Life is one fool thing after another.

Love is two fool things after each other.

Author Page ** Sharon's Blog ** Sharon's Website ** Facebook**Twitter

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SUNDAYS WITH SHARON: Christmas SEAL, A Gift for Christmas

SUNDAYS WITH SHARON: Christmas SEAL

I decided to give you a little short story to sketch out a new character I'm going to be writing for my next SEAL book in the Bad Boys of SEAL Team 3 of my SEAL Brotherhood series. His name is Rory Kennedy and I'm already in love with him, and he's only nine in this story, until the very end.

Enjoy! Merry Christmas to you all!

Rory Kennedy didn’t believe in Santa Claus when he was a child, because there were no pictures in the orphanage he spent five of his young years in. There was a Christmas Tree, but they removed it when Rory and a number of the boys took the glass ball ornaments outside and tossed them at each other like snowballs.

They’d missed their dinner that night too, but the giggles continued all through the evening. Instead of Christmas carols, they told ghost stories in the corner of the locked room they shared. The room was always locked at night from the outside because these were the incorrigible boys, and though the oldest was seven, they had earned a reputation they liked: impossible to live with. They figured if they’d continue screwing up, they could stay together until their teens, and then be a pack of friends “on the outside” as they referred to it. Though they’d been scolded and reminded of it many times, it still felt like a children’s prison.

Rory’s parents were said to be still alive, but he didn’t believe it. The nuns had two classifications of children: orphans and true orphans. This made a difference since the center was given an allotment of new clothes every year, along with hand-me-downs given by the community. The true orphans got the new clothes, and the orphans, like Rory, got the hand-me-downs.

Rory didn’t mind this arrangement, because he didn’t like the look and feel of stiff pants that made skinny underweight kids like himself look like cardboard stick figures as they walked around in their new finery. The fact that his clothes had smudges and tears made him more comfortable, and less guilty when he damaged them further.

His mother visited him one time. She brought a boyfriend with her, and afterwards he realized he’d not passed the test she was hoping he would and they never returned. No doubt, the man was looking to see if Rory could come home and live with them and evidently he decided he couldn’t. It hurt a little bit. Would have been better, he thought afterwards, if she’d never come. It was evidence that she’d abandoned him, and not the other way around. And that sucked big time.

But fate had a way of messing up his community, and one by one the boys were sent off to foster care as the aging nuns began to close down the orphanage. The Diocese was in need of money, and this enterprise was considered expendable, especially since there were other agencies who could handle children that needed homes.

The first foster care home only kept Rory for a week. The second was another zoo of unkempt children with snotty noses and Rory took ill and wound up in the hospital. They discovered he’d picked up a tapeworm and along with other things, removed him from the home.

He’d developed an allergy to strawberries, of all things. His new foster mother liked to put them in everything, and Rory was soon covered in spots. At first he was quarantined like he had chicken pox, but when the spots continued for a month, the allergy was discovered. Rory had liked his quarantine. He’d started reading Playboys he’d snuck from his foster older brother, who also was a good source for alcohol and cigarettes for the nine-year-old Rory, who acted as lookout for some of the teen’s more questionable activities. But all that dried up when young Frank was sent to Juvenile Hall for some infraction he swore he never did, involving a girl at his high school. Rory was, once again, left alone.

He knew he’d developed an addiction to cigarettes. He’d heard and seen things enough to know that’s what happened when you smoked several a day. Sometimes he’d steal a whole pack from his foster mother when he learned where she stashed them after Frank was carted off. But then she discovered his sinister deed and kept her smokes in a locked cabinet.

Frustrated and telling himself he needed some kind of distraction or he’d start thinking about running away, he began a love affair with fire. He liked to set small fires in the rear yard, raking up leaves and burning them, thinking he’d been helpful to The House as he called it. His foster mother seemed to be okay with it, for some reason, since Rory was the only one to rake the leaves or do any work around the house. He liked tinkering with things.

He started tinkering with bottle rockets when he was given some firecrackers by a Chinese kid at school. Then he began unpeeling the paper on the little explosive devices and filling plastic straws with a longer fuse, which really sent the projectiles into the air. Of course he could never tell where they’d land. Only one of them landed on a car and set off the alarm. It left a large crater in the roof, though.

He found some shotgun shells in the old garage that was more of a toolshed than garage and he knew he was in like Flynn. He accidentally set one off on the workbench. He was lucky to get away with only losing the fourth finger on his left hand, but the ensuing fire burned down the garage and once again, Rory was sent to his fourth foster home after his surgery and hospitalization.

Now, as a grown man, and a Navy SEAL, he sat in the coffee house/book store and watched the chubby and well-loved children huddle at a book reading with a woman dressed as Santa Claus, telling stories to her little horde of fans. He allowed himself to drop the window on his calluses, and enjoy the scene, even though he felt a pang of hurt. It was like the caramel salted latte he sipped: some salt and some sweet. It was the story of his life.

 

Hope you enjoy your Holidays with friends and family. Let's remember those who are no longer with us this Holiday season as well. And the men and women who stand for us in harm's way. God Bless.

Sharon Hamilton

Life is one fool thing after another.

Love is two fool things after each other.

Author Page ** Sharon's Blog ** Sharon's Website ** Facebook**Twitter

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