Instead he’s dodging
bullets and wondering how the hell he ended up back in the Black Ops lifestyle
he left behind him. After rescuing former child star Trey Bishop from a pair of
thugs in the middle of the night, he knows it’s time to pick up his gun again.
But it seems trouble isn’t done with Trey, and Kuro can’t quite let go… of either
the gun or Trey Bishop.
Trey Bishop never denied
his life’s downward spiral was his own fault. After a few stints in rehab, he’s
finally shaken off his Hollywood bad-boy lifestyle but not his reputation. The
destruction of his acting career and his relationships goes deep, and no one
trusts anything he says, including the LAPD. When two men dragging a dead body
spot him on a late-night run and try to murder him, Trey is grateful for the
tall, dark, and deadly ramen shop owner he lusts over—not just for rescuing
him, but also for believing him.
Now caught in a web of
murders and lies, Trey knows someone wants him dead, and the only one on his
side is a man with deep, dark secrets. Trey hopes Kuro Jenkins will stick
around to see what the future holds for them once the dust settles, but from
the looks of things, neither of them may survive to find out.
Buy links: Dreamspinner Amazon
Cat gives this one 5 Meows...
I love all of Rhys Ford's books,
but the mystery suspense/romance are my favorites. I also like unique characters so I jump at assassins.
( I mean bad boys...oh yeah!) The prologue in this book is so intriguing and
like sticky paper... once you start reading you are stuck on the story!!
Kuro is not really a hired
assassin but more black ops kinda guy (I don't know exactly what he was, but he
keeps saying not an assassin). His covers were blown in a big (kinda funny way)
and he was very injured to boot so now he is a ramen shop owner.
Trey is a washed-up child
actor that is from a very wealthy, mixed up family and after his last drug
escapades, his family has practically disowned him. He is on last legs with his
dad and living in a bungalow on a mansion his dad still owns and one of his
ex-mistresses and Trey's best friend runs and lives in. Trey witnesses
something horrific gets seen and tries to run, Kuro hears the shooting and
steps in to protect the man and sees its one of his customers. This sets two
things in motion. A slow burn romance between Trey and Kuro and a price on both
men's heads.
I absolutely loved both
Trey and Kuro. They are perfect for each other. Trey though has his issues is
no pushover. Kuro the hot, dark avenger. There are lots of other good
characters as well. The plot was good, hard to figure out, twisty, and
intriguing. If you like a good romantic suspense I highly recomend this one. I
can't wait to see more of these guys!
Excerpt…
One
KURO KNEW they
weren’t going to make it.
He just couldn’t tell that
to the kids he’d pulled out of a squalid shack not more than an hour before.
In his line of business,
an hour was a lifetime. Stuck in a bullet-ridden van with eight screaming kids,
an hour became being stuck on the edge of a black hole waiting an eternity to
be sucked into nothingness.
Dawn was a ghost on the
horizon when he’d started the van up. Now it was slipping over the edge, swirls
of pink and gold light chasing away the night sky. Only a few hours ago he’d
crawled on his belly under what felt like a mile of barbed wire, intent on
reaching the ramshackle shed his handler was certain held the ambassador’s
young daughter. Holly was wrong. It was a rare moment in life when Holly was
wrong, but when she was, it was usually bad news for Kuro.
He’d been expecting to
find a frightened ten-year-old girl and her kidnapper. Instead he’d punched
through the front door to discover eight children shackled to cots and iron
rings set into the floor, their dirty young faces streaked with tears and worn out
from dehydration. It was clear they were all well-off. Their clothes were
filthy but finely made, designer labels paired with expensive shoes. Or at
least those who still had shoes. Some of the kids sported welts and dark
mottles from being hit. The youngest of them was three or four—having little
experience with kids, Kuro had to guess—but his round, pink-cheeked face was
bruised, and one dark brown eye was nearly swollen shut.
It’d taken him nearly
fifteen minutes to calm them down and another half an hour to free them all.
Weak with hunger and frightened half to death, they followed him in a shambling
mass of filthy flesh and mewling, unable to keep silent through their mad dash
to the nearby barn where he’d stashed the van he’d stolen from a bakery down
the road. A delivery transport wouldn’t have been out of place in either the
bucolic countryside where the children had been stashed or the bustling streets
of London where Kuro needed to drop off his original target. A bakery would
have very early-morning deliveries, rambling through the motorways toward the
shops it serviced. The van would have been the perfect cover
if only one of the children hadn’t started screaming.
But then, Kuro supposed he
would have started screaming his head off when he was six if he’d spotted the
man who thrashed him within an inch of his life scrambling across the dew-wet
fields and spraying the ground with machine-gun fire in an attempt to stop
their escape.
That was over an hour ago,
and since then, they’d rammed a jeep, had their windows shot out, nearly rolled
over, and dislodged a man who’d jumped from a Rover to cling to the van’s
driver-side door and put several bullets into Kuro’s right side.
He hit the city streets
with a vengeance, hoping he could lose the remaining Rover, but his gamble on
the early hour traffic being thickened by people commuting in hit a serious
snag once Kuro found the roads mostly empty. It was too close to dawn, and
London hadn’t quite shaken off its weekend.
A heavy lorry turned out
to be his undoing. Well, that and the little boy screaming in his ear. The kid
spoke Farsi, one of the languages Kuro was spotty in at best, and nothing he
said or did seemed to calm the boy down. The other kids alternated, some
yelling, then babbling for their parents or crying while the eldest girl sat
stiffly behind him, holding the barely-not-toddler in her lap, her arms
clenched tight enough around his tiny body to cause more bruises. The screaming
boy didn’t seem to even take a breath, his wailing reverberating in the small,
confined space of the van’s front compartment.
Either way, the kid
couldn’t or wouldn’t listen to Kuro telling him to sit down, and the lorry
punching out of a back alley nearly killed them all.
They were so close. Only a
half a mile away from the embassy and the van went up on two wheels, its tires
smoking when they hit the curb. They hit something sharp, maybe even bending
the rim, because a tire blew, rocking the van askew and then drawing up sparks
when it landed back onto the street. The jolt rattled Kuro’s teeth, and for one
blessed instant, all the children were silent, either from shock or fear, but
whatever the reason, Kuro relished the quiet. Spotting the truck in the van’s
remaining side view mirror, he braced himself for a long, drawn-out fight where
he’d not only fail to deliver the young girl back to her parents but also get
seven other children killed in the process.
And probably himself too.
Rhys Ford is an
award-winning author with several long-running LGBT+ mystery, thriller,
paranormal, and urban fantasy series and is a two-time LAMBDA finalist with her
Murder and Mayhem novels. She is also a 2017 Gold and Silver Medal winner in
the Florida Authors and Publishers President’s Book Awards for her novels Ink
and Shadows and Hanging the Stars. She is published by Dreamspinner Press and
DSP Publications.
She’s also quite skeptical
about bios without a dash of something personal and really, who doesn’t mention
their cats, dog and cars in a bio? She shares the house with Harley, an insane
grey tuxedo as well as a ginger cairn terrorist named Gus. Rhys is also
enslaved to the upkeep a 1979 Pontiac Firebird and enjoys murdering
make-believe people.
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enjoyed the blurb and excerpt
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