Breaking Boundaries (Book 5 of the SEAL Team heartbreakers) Prerelease and an Excerpt
As an author you never get over that big rush you get over finishing another book.
Then comes the hard part. Editing it.
But I don't think I'll ever get tired of what I do for a living now. I LOVE my job and I thank God every day I get to do it.
Breaking Boundaries, the 5th book in my SEAL Team Heartbreakers Series, is available for preorder. I never intended Breaking Boundaries to be a full length book, but the characters had a different idea. And their story line was such that there was no way I could tell their story in 35,000 words. So my readers get a 79,500 word full length book. I hope you'll like it. And it has Doc in it. I'm using this book as a kind of prequel to Doc's story so you, the reader, will get used to having his love interest call him Zach instead of Doc. And so you'll get a little more of his backstory.
Without further adu... Breaking Boundaries.
The Blurb:
The dusty road stretched ahead as they worked their way toward the northern mountains.
Jasper continued his grumbling, “Why couldn’t he fix our damn air conditioning before this patrol?
He had twelve fucking hours.”
Though he had similar feelings for the mechanic, he needed to pull rank and head off the bitchfest.
“Griping about it doesn’t change anything, Jazz. I’ll deal with it as soon as we return to base.”
“After eight hours in this fucking kiln we’ll be so dehydrated none of us will feel like taking on that shit brick,” Private Mitchell Ellison said in a deadpan, bitter voice.
Cal tracked movement as they passed a cart being pulled by a young boy heading in the opposite direction. His jaw tightened. Sweat rolled down his sides beneath his shirt, but it did nothing to cool the sensation of being baked inside his body armor. The window next to him beckoned with the promise of some small relief. With the possibility of having a grenade tossed into the vehicle or a lucky shot being placed by a sniper, they didn’t dare take the risk. “I’ll deal with Ollie.”
In the rear view mirror, Cal caught Ellison’s quick movement as he tossed a look behind them to the small convoy of vehicles following theirs. “I bet if we were SEALs Gunter would have fixed our vehicle,” Ellison murmured. “Those guys can get things done when they need it.”
The Special Ops eight man team, riding four to a vehicle in the convoy behind them had looked well armed and focused. Flash Carney, the sniper of the team and Greenback Shaker, had accompanied their Marine squad on more than one patrol when they sought to clear buildings suspected of harboring insurgents. They were the only two he knew.
Those guys probably fixed their own damn vehicle issues when they had to. Maybe if they were able to do the same, they wouldn’t be steaming inside the armored Humvee with the dismal breeze from above. The situation fed his anger and his voice took on an edge. “I put in the order. Gunter didn’t do the work and I had no control over that. I’ll have control over what happens when we get back, though. Now stow this shit and keep your eyes o—.”
A shallow depression, suspicious and threatening, lead up to the next pothole. Cal stomped on the breaks and swung the wheel sharply to the left in an attempt to miss it.
Sound roared through the vehicle pounding his eardrums, his brain. The front of the Humvee heaved upward. The steering wheel clipped his chin and snapped his head back. His vision went white, then gray, faded to black.
He woke to a harsh ringing in his ears and the smell of smoke. He threw out a searching hand. Who was beside him? Jazz? He gripped the mesh on the man’s body armor.
Smoke billowed from the front of the vehicle. They’d been hit. They had to get out of the Humvee.
He forced his eyes to stay open. Blood gushed from Jazz’s mouth to run down his chin onto his BDUs. The car’s engine sat in his lap pinning him to the seat.
God. “Ja—.” Cal’s jaw hung numb and useless. His mouth was full of marbles. He used his tongue to work them out. Bits of his own teeth hung off his chin.
The door beside him was jerked open. The rattle of machine gun fire sounded muffled as it burst from a few yards to the right. He reached for his sidearm and drew it. He had to protect himself, his men.
He focused in relief on the camouflage uniform within his vision. Thick red hair stuck out from under a Boonie hat. Dark green eyes, stony with purpose, scanned his face. A rust-colored beard covered the lower half of his face. The guy reached in and dragged him free.
Cal’s head pounded like his skull was being beaten to dust by a jackhammer. The world tilted and the sky, burning bright blue, blistered his eyes and he closed them as pain knifed through his brain.
“My men,” he tried to say and it ended up sounding like “M-mn.”
“Where’s that chopper?”
The words were still muffled, but he could hear them.”
“Fifteen minutes out.”
Bullets rattled and pinged off the smoldering remains of the Humvee’s chasse. Red threw himself over Cal to cover him, his body curved to hold his weight off of him as much as possible. An explosion sounded from close by and the shots ceased. Red pried the side arm Cal gripped away from him. “You won’t need this. You’re covered.”
“Bowie.” He flipped a length of stretchy rubber and a tongue depressor at the soldier beside him.
“Get a tourniquet on that leg.”
Cal barely felt the needle Red jabbed into the bend of his arm. He hooked it up to an IV.
Whose leg? Was it one of the guys’? When Bowie knelt at his side, Cal realized it was his leg they were talking about. Where were his men? Jazz? Neil? Ellison?
Cal tried to turn his head in the direction of the vehicle, but the red headed guy gripped his face. He nearly screamed as the pain shot to the top of his head.
“Don’t turn your head. You have a broken jaw and maybe a broken neck.”
His body felt numb, but he could still move his arms and legs. “Mn.”
Red stopped what he was doing to lean over him. “Focus on getting through the next minute
Corporal, then the next five. Keep breathing. You’re going to make it.”
By not saying anything about the others, he was saying they were dead. Ellison with his dry wit. Jazz with his soft Tennessee twang who tried his patience. Neil, the quiet boy from Oklahoma. They were gone.
The pain of it crushed his lungs and brought every injury he had roared to life. He couldn’t grit his teeth around it because his jaw wouldn’t work. Both his legs burned with agony. He choked out a groan as Red cut away his pants and applied pressure dressings around different parts of his legs.
When they lifted him onto a stretcher, he yelped in pain every muscle in his body clenching against it. His vision went white, then gray again. “Stay with me Corporal.” The SEAL medic wrapped an ace bandage around the stretcher and his forehead, ensuring his head remained stationary. “I can’t give you any morphine. You have a head injury. They’ll assess you at the hospital and give you something for the pain. You just have to hold on a little while longer.”
When the numbness began to recede and his injuries began to scream, five minutes seemed like an hour. His whole face ached and his eyes watered. His legs were on fire. Red crunched a chemical ice pack and put it to his face. The coolness eased the pain a tiny bit. He gripped the man’s wrist in gratitude.
A black hawk chopper came in low, spun around and landed in the desert a hundred feet from their location. The SEALs lifted the stretcher and carried him to it.
The rotor blades turned above, pounding him with air and jerking at his clothing. Three black body bags next to him rustled. He was flying back with the men he’d started the patrol with. Their faces, the sound of their voices rushed back to him in a kaleidoscope of pain. He’d turned the wheel to avoid the IED too late. The world had gone to hell. Tears streamed down his temples.
The medic on board the chopper reached across him and grabbed the IV bag from Red.
Flash, the SEAL sniper he’d worked with, leaned over him and gave his arm a squeeze. “You’re going to make it, Cal. Believe it.”
With the dead bodies of his men lying beside him, it was hard to believe in anything.
The book is available for preorder thus far at:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013QDDESC
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/1MmEKNe
Apple: http://apple.co/1MmOx7H
Don't forget any of the other SEAL Team Heartbreakers books available.
Read on,
Teresa Reasor
Then comes the hard part. Editing it.
But I don't think I'll ever get tired of what I do for a living now. I LOVE my job and I thank God every day I get to do it.
Breaking Boundaries, the 5th book in my SEAL Team Heartbreakers Series, is available for preorder. I never intended Breaking Boundaries to be a full length book, but the characters had a different idea. And their story line was such that there was no way I could tell their story in 35,000 words. So my readers get a 79,500 word full length book. I hope you'll like it. And it has Doc in it. I'm using this book as a kind of prequel to Doc's story so you, the reader, will get used to having his love interest call him Zach instead of Doc. And so you'll get a little more of his backstory.
Without further adu... Breaking Boundaries.
The Blurb:
Corporal Callahan Crowes returns home from Afghanistan missing part of a leg and haunted by guilt over the loss of his men. He pledges to live every moment of his life to the fullest and works to build a career in the only field he knows besides being a soldier: construction.
Reeling from her fiancé’s infidelity and their broken engagement, Kathleen O’Connor accepts a job far away from Boston and the suffocating pity of friends and family. She puts romance firmly behind her, and, armed with her shiny new architectural degree, launches her career with a commercial construction and design firm.
Her first day on the job, she sees Cal risk his life to rescue a fellow worker, and is shocked when his act of heroism triggers an unwarranted attack on him from her supervisor. When she learns Cal may lose his job because of his leg, Kathleen urges him to use social media to fight the decision, putting her own job at risk.
The public firestorm pushes Cal into the limelight in ways he least expects, but shows him a missing limb’s not the barrier to love he's believed it is. But there’s something besides business politics brewing at work, and when Kathleen’s life is threatened, she discovers there’s more to a man than two good legs—it’s the size of his heart that counts.
And an unedited excerpt:
AFGHANISTAN
PROLOGUE
The squeak and rattle of the vehicle’s chassis as they hit another pothole in the dirt clotted road acted as a minor irritant compared to the hundred and twenty-degree heat inside. Corporal Cal Crowes, the driver, twisted the wheel to the right in an attempt to miss a hole big enough to bury a wheel and grunted in satisfaction when he straddled the pit.
“Fuck me!” Private Jasper Holland exclaimed. “Ollie Gunter deserves a fast trip to hell with a short poker.”
Cal started to laugh at the comment and decided he didn’t have the extra energy. The rolling oven they were currently traveling in, better known as a Humvee, slowly sapped the moisture from his body like a sauna. The two privates encased inside with him weren’t fairing any better. The only one in their foursome getting any relief was Private first class Neil Carter currently riding in the gun shield on the roof.
The dusty road stretched ahead as they worked their way toward the northern mountains.
Jasper continued his grumbling, “Why couldn’t he fix our damn air conditioning before this patrol?
He had twelve fucking hours.”
Though he had similar feelings for the mechanic, he needed to pull rank and head off the bitchfest.
“Griping about it doesn’t change anything, Jazz. I’ll deal with it as soon as we return to base.”
“After eight hours in this fucking kiln we’ll be so dehydrated none of us will feel like taking on that shit brick,” Private Mitchell Ellison said in a deadpan, bitter voice.
Cal tracked movement as they passed a cart being pulled by a young boy heading in the opposite direction. His jaw tightened. Sweat rolled down his sides beneath his shirt, but it did nothing to cool the sensation of being baked inside his body armor. The window next to him beckoned with the promise of some small relief. With the possibility of having a grenade tossed into the vehicle or a lucky shot being placed by a sniper, they didn’t dare take the risk. “I’ll deal with Ollie.”
In the rear view mirror, Cal caught Ellison’s quick movement as he tossed a look behind them to the small convoy of vehicles following theirs. “I bet if we were SEALs Gunter would have fixed our vehicle,” Ellison murmured. “Those guys can get things done when they need it.”
The Special Ops eight man team, riding four to a vehicle in the convoy behind them had looked well armed and focused. Flash Carney, the sniper of the team and Greenback Shaker, had accompanied their Marine squad on more than one patrol when they sought to clear buildings suspected of harboring insurgents. They were the only two he knew.
Those guys probably fixed their own damn vehicle issues when they had to. Maybe if they were able to do the same, they wouldn’t be steaming inside the armored Humvee with the dismal breeze from above. The situation fed his anger and his voice took on an edge. “I put in the order. Gunter didn’t do the work and I had no control over that. I’ll have control over what happens when we get back, though. Now stow this shit and keep your eyes o—.”
A shallow depression, suspicious and threatening, lead up to the next pothole. Cal stomped on the breaks and swung the wheel sharply to the left in an attempt to miss it.
Sound roared through the vehicle pounding his eardrums, his brain. The front of the Humvee heaved upward. The steering wheel clipped his chin and snapped his head back. His vision went white, then gray, faded to black.
He woke to a harsh ringing in his ears and the smell of smoke. He threw out a searching hand. Who was beside him? Jazz? He gripped the mesh on the man’s body armor.
Smoke billowed from the front of the vehicle. They’d been hit. They had to get out of the Humvee.
He forced his eyes to stay open. Blood gushed from Jazz’s mouth to run down his chin onto his BDUs. The car’s engine sat in his lap pinning him to the seat.
God. “Ja—.” Cal’s jaw hung numb and useless. His mouth was full of marbles. He used his tongue to work them out. Bits of his own teeth hung off his chin.
The door beside him was jerked open. The rattle of machine gun fire sounded muffled as it burst from a few yards to the right. He reached for his sidearm and drew it. He had to protect himself, his men.
He focused in relief on the camouflage uniform within his vision. Thick red hair stuck out from under a Boonie hat. Dark green eyes, stony with purpose, scanned his face. A rust-colored beard covered the lower half of his face. The guy reached in and dragged him free.
Cal’s head pounded like his skull was being beaten to dust by a jackhammer. The world tilted and the sky, burning bright blue, blistered his eyes and he closed them as pain knifed through his brain.
“My men,” he tried to say and it ended up sounding like “M-mn.”
“Where’s that chopper?”
The words were still muffled, but he could hear them.”
“Fifteen minutes out.”
Bullets rattled and pinged off the smoldering remains of the Humvee’s chasse. Red threw himself over Cal to cover him, his body curved to hold his weight off of him as much as possible. An explosion sounded from close by and the shots ceased. Red pried the side arm Cal gripped away from him. “You won’t need this. You’re covered.”
“Bowie.” He flipped a length of stretchy rubber and a tongue depressor at the soldier beside him.
“Get a tourniquet on that leg.”
Cal barely felt the needle Red jabbed into the bend of his arm. He hooked it up to an IV.
Whose leg? Was it one of the guys’? When Bowie knelt at his side, Cal realized it was his leg they were talking about. Where were his men? Jazz? Neil? Ellison?
Cal tried to turn his head in the direction of the vehicle, but the red headed guy gripped his face. He nearly screamed as the pain shot to the top of his head.
“Don’t turn your head. You have a broken jaw and maybe a broken neck.”
His body felt numb, but he could still move his arms and legs. “Mn.”
Red stopped what he was doing to lean over him. “Focus on getting through the next minute
Corporal, then the next five. Keep breathing. You’re going to make it.”
By not saying anything about the others, he was saying they were dead. Ellison with his dry wit. Jazz with his soft Tennessee twang who tried his patience. Neil, the quiet boy from Oklahoma. They were gone.
The pain of it crushed his lungs and brought every injury he had roared to life. He couldn’t grit his teeth around it because his jaw wouldn’t work. Both his legs burned with agony. He choked out a groan as Red cut away his pants and applied pressure dressings around different parts of his legs.
When they lifted him onto a stretcher, he yelped in pain every muscle in his body clenching against it. His vision went white, then gray again. “Stay with me Corporal.” The SEAL medic wrapped an ace bandage around the stretcher and his forehead, ensuring his head remained stationary. “I can’t give you any morphine. You have a head injury. They’ll assess you at the hospital and give you something for the pain. You just have to hold on a little while longer.”
When the numbness began to recede and his injuries began to scream, five minutes seemed like an hour. His whole face ached and his eyes watered. His legs were on fire. Red crunched a chemical ice pack and put it to his face. The coolness eased the pain a tiny bit. He gripped the man’s wrist in gratitude.
A black hawk chopper came in low, spun around and landed in the desert a hundred feet from their location. The SEALs lifted the stretcher and carried him to it.
The rotor blades turned above, pounding him with air and jerking at his clothing. Three black body bags next to him rustled. He was flying back with the men he’d started the patrol with. Their faces, the sound of their voices rushed back to him in a kaleidoscope of pain. He’d turned the wheel to avoid the IED too late. The world had gone to hell. Tears streamed down his temples.
The medic on board the chopper reached across him and grabbed the IV bag from Red.
Flash, the SEAL sniper he’d worked with, leaned over him and gave his arm a squeeze. “You’re going to make it, Cal. Believe it.”
With the dead bodies of his men lying beside him, it was hard to believe in anything.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013QDDESC
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/1MmEKNe
Apple: http://apple.co/1MmOx7H
Don't forget any of the other SEAL Team Heartbreakers books available.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1ezAg50
B&N http://bit.ly/QrnCxu
Smashwords http://bit.ly/1EjzSWw
Apple: http://bit.ly/OfgIJH
B&N http://bit.ly/QrnCxu
Smashwords http://bit.ly/1EjzSWw
Apple: http://bit.ly/OfgIJH
Google play: http://bit.ly/196eoj1
BREAKING FREE Can a love-shy physical therapist with a fragile self-esteem and a commitment wary Navy SEAL plagued by guilt, discover the man responsible for her brother's injuries? Or will loyalties forged on the battlefield prove more binding than the truth? Or their love?
BREAKING THROUGH Ensign Brett Weaver wakes from a month-long coma to discover he is being investigated for murder.
When Brett offers Reporter Tess Kelly information about SEAL training in exchange for an introduction to her father, she jumps at the chance. But the secret she discovers about Brett is just as newsworthy. Will her feelings for him prevent her from releasing a story that could destroy his SEAL career?
BREAKING AWAY Navy SEAL Harold “Flash” Carney is neck deep in a double cross, cut off from his team, and on the run with only his training to keep him alive.
Samantha Cross is desperate to leave her past as a battered wife behind, but her ex husband has turned stalker and threatening to take her daughter.
Samantha and Flash can’t fight their attraction. Will trouble pasts destroy their love?
BREAKING THROUGH Ensign Brett Weaver wakes from a month-long coma to discover he is being investigated for murder.
When Brett offers Reporter Tess Kelly information about SEAL training in exchange for an introduction to her father, she jumps at the chance. But the secret she discovers about Brett is just as newsworthy. Will her feelings for him prevent her from releasing a story that could destroy his SEAL career?
BREAKING AWAY Navy SEAL Harold “Flash” Carney is neck deep in a double cross, cut off from his team, and on the run with only his training to keep him alive.
Samantha Cross is desperate to leave her past as a battered wife behind, but her ex husband has turned stalker and threatening to take her daughter.
Samantha and Flash can’t fight their attraction. Will trouble pasts destroy their love?
BREAKING TIES (a SEAL Team Heartbreakers novella) Navy SEAL Oliver Shaker is blindsided when he learns that not only does his wife, Selena, have a life-threatening illness, but she’s also pregnant. Can the SEAL code he follows see them through?
BUILDING TIES
Navy SEAL Brett 'Cutter' Weaver is on a mission to Nicaragua when he learns his bride-to-be, Tess Kelly, has been injured in a car bombing. He rushes home to find Tess embroiled in three controversial stories, and one interview at a time, they set out to catch a murderer.
Comments
I can't wait for it to be out either.
I can't wait for it to be out either.