Guarding Hearts

Can the heart’s orders overrule the chain of command? 

September 1944. Private Helen Tucker has two goals—to drive for the Women’s Army Corps motor pool and to convince Tee Owens to be more than best friends. Helen has always done whatever it takes to survive, and she’s not good at waiting for what she wants. But Private Teresa Owens is a good Baptist girl who’s struggling with how her feelings for Helen can be wrong when she can’t bear to be without her.

Sergeant Gale Rains has learned to make her way in both the Sioux and White worlds, but will her love for Bett Smythe put her career in the WAC at risk? Private Elizabeth Smythe hopes Rain will be her future, but is she truly free from her past, including her class-conscious family?

Socialite Elizabeth Carlton impulsively joins the Women’s Army Corps to escape love’s disappointments and her father’s attempts to control her life. Still, she has never been one to accept discipline imposed by others—not even someone as intriguing as her new sergeant. 

Sergeant Gale Rains is accustomed to challenges, but she’s never had a recruit quite like this one. Rains surrendered much of her Sioux heritage to the Army to escape the hardships and pain of her youth. Now a drill instructor, her calm, steady manner and firm hand have molded women from all walks of life into WACs. But not one of them has ever touched her. Why should this spoiled party girl be any different?

With the whole world at war, victory is never certain as two women wage their own battles of will and desire.

Suri Daniels, a beautiful and troubled woman, is the descendant of a family of supernaturally gifted women, known as the Blessed, and literally holds keys to gateways between the earthly plane and seven powerful gods. A series of tragic losses and a stipulation in her grandmother’s will has her returning to the family’s home in New Orleans, unaware that she will need to step into the role of Orisha priestess and escape the attention of a powerful demon. To top it all off, she must accept the help of a Cambion—Lyla Jefferies, a dark supernatural being she has spent her life avoiding. What’s worse? She can’t help being drawn to Layla in ways she doesn’t understand.

Being the child of a top-tier demon and a human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the past two hundred years, Layla Jefferies has lived a life of quietude. When an unknown force draws her out of seclusion, the pull is too strong to ignore. Layla is tasked to assist with protecting the gateways and saving Suri from becoming a vengeful demon’s avatar. Falling in love with her is definitely not part of the plan.

Layla and Suri are brought together by fate to defeat the darkness threatening to tear their world apart. What they don’t expect to discover is a love that might set them free.

Content advisory: Opening chapter includes a depiction of sexual violence and rape.

Dear Reader,

I wrote The Blessed to honor the resilience, strength, and faith of my community’s ancestors. To tell a story, in my own way, of their survival in a world that treated them as less than the lowest of creatures. A world that continues to methodically strip away our sense of selves as humans and our culture as a people. Layla is the embodiment of all People of Color, particularly Women of Color, in this country and the suffering they have endured, which was violent, painful, and has lasted for generations. I choose to honor all those women like Layla, her mother, and grandmother who survived and rather than turn to violence themselves, chose to stand tall and lift their community up.

The Blessed begins with an act of physical violence to represent how some People of Color were brought into the world. Just as we survived our violent past, so does Layla. Just as we did not allow what was wrought upon us to break us, to take away our capacity to love and cherish others the way we were not, Layla also does not let her circumstances break her. She turns that violence into the resolve to help her community. In the process, she finds a love that strengthens her even more.

You may feel discomfort when reading Layla’s beginnings as it mirrors the pain of the past. Atrocity and its generational impacts should not feel comfortable or easy. But her story is ultimately an uplifting one of family, faith, culture, and love that I believe you will enjoy. I hope you see The Blessed as honoring the struggles of my ancestors and accepting the blessing of life, faith, and love that they have bestowed upon me as a result of their survival.

Forever thankful, always grateful, abundantly blessed,

Anne Shade

Alessia Cavalii is a rising star in the competitive international wine scene, and one of only twenty-six female master sommeliers in the world. Her home is a gorgeous, renovated winery on the sun-soaked southern coast of Italy, she has a career she adores, and she has finally managed to end a long-term toxic relationship. But Alessia is hiding a dangerous secret—and she’s edging dangerously closer to losing the beautiful life she’s worked so hard to create.

Parker Haven is a captain in the US Army and stationed at the NATO military camp in Italy. A detective with the military police, she’s recruited to help solve a string of murders in the city and becomes inexplicably drawn into Alessia’s world. As the intrigue surrounding the case—and Alessia—spins dangerously out of control, Parker must choose between her military career and the woman she’s falling in love with.

How can we be sure we truly know the people we love?

Reprint. Previously published as The Last First Kiss.

A brief detour to a ranch in the middle of nowhere doesn’t lead to forever, does it?

Olivia Martinez, forced to leave her high-power Manhattan job with no prospects, is at a crossroad. Not only is she a city girl down to the tips of her Jimmy Choos, she wants to stay close to her parents, who depend on her more than they’d like to. Generally not a risk taker, Olivia steps out of her comfort zone when her best friend, Elizabeth Sutton, asks her to temporarily lend a hand at the Red Sky Ranch. After all, what can a few months change, and New York City is just a plane ride—or three—away, right?

Haunted by an hour that changed her life, Riley Mitchell escapes the memories and the guilt by riding motorcycles way too fast, skydiving, and running into burning buildings. She is good-looking, charming, and never wants for female company, as long as no commitment is expected. When Olivia returns to the Red Sky Ranch, Riley’s carefully crafted safe world goes up in flames.

Can they take a risk and cross the fire line to find love?

When the opportunity of a lifetime comes knocking, Claire Brennan is ready for a break from responsibility and the stuck feeling that won’t go away. Move across the world to Vancouver for six months? Absolutely.

Stacie Farran is a career-obsessed eternal optimist, so when the opportunity to trade jobs with a colleague in Belfast comes up, she jumps at the chance. That it gives her a bit of space from her girlfriend doesn’t hurt either.

Living in each other’s shoes, Claire and Stacie discover so much about each other and get a fresh perspective on their own lives as well. When a family emergency has Claire returning home early and they finally meet, the attraction they felt from afar is real.

But Stacie’s stay is temporary. Are they on a collision course to a long-distance dating disaster or will love find a way?