PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO RATE AND REVIEW Warrior Knight Knight ON GOODREADS. I’d love to know what you think of it. Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8138219.Aarti_V_Raman
Loved Warrior Knight? Hop on to a heart-racing royal adventure with plenty of thrills with GUARDIAN KNIGHT, the first book in the Knights of Justice series. And then race on ahead for a glimpse of IN LOVE WITH HER MILLIONAIRE FOE, the first in a trilogy of racy, heartbreaking romances from Aarti V Raman aka Writer Gal.
~~~~~
Guardian Knight
Knights of Justice Book 1
Buy on Amazon
Brand put in an hour of weights training. He usually ran the length of the yacht about ten times to finish off his daily workout routine but he didn’t want to round the ship today. Not now.
Because she was sleeping somewhere on this ship.
When he was done, he went back to the nav cabin. Lucas and Murad were manning the controls. The radar sweep looked relatively clean. And the monitors were emitting regular noises.
“Nothing untoward, boss.” Murad grabbed one of the coffee mugs Brand had brought back with him. His men worked hard and without complaint. Because he worked shoulder-to-shoulder with them, they worked better.
The way he figured it, a little courtesy and heft bonuses went a long way in keeping someone alive and on your side.
“Good. And the guards? The perimeter has been swept, I hope.”
“Yup.” Lucas nodded. Worked a few buttons on a console and instantly three TV screens on one side of the huge navigational console filled with images from fly-on-the-wall CCTV cameras.
Brand pivoted his head, worked a few buttons on another part of the console and three more screens came to life.
He looked at the huge map which represented the whole of the Strait of Magellan and the land that surrounded it: Chile, Argentina. And there, wedged in between the rock and the hard place, was San Magellan. A harsh, tiny country that had been on nobody’s radar until six months ago.
Today, its ruler was going to announce if it would join the UN.
He looked at the spot marked X on the map, where they were moored. In the middle of bloody nowhere.
He could kill Delgado for putting him in this position. Instead, he jammed hands in the pockets of his sweatpants and said, “The plan for tonight. Run it by me again.”
“Sweep checks every fifteen minutes,” Murad began, “with the launch manned either by me or Markham. We stand guard when we bring in the guests. Lucas does his tech and bug sweep remotely so that the eminent guests don't feel too violated. All firearms, of course, will be confiscated,” he ended, with sharp clarity.
“Good. Guards every ten feet on the fore, aft, and port-side. And patrols by you guys every thirty minutes on the clock from five pm. I don't want anything getting past us that we are not aware of. That we don't know,” Brand stated.
‘“Course, sir.” Lucas grinned and snapped off a salute.
Brand would have come back with a retort but the screen on his side showed a picture of Akira Naik sleeping deeply in her comfy bed. Hair spread all over the pillow and the robe bundling her.
Lucas whistled. “What I would give to be left alone with her.”
Murad, always on the lookout for single available female, asked, “Why?”
“Underwear, man. Things I haven’t seen. I got a hard-on just seeing her...”
“Why are we disrespecting Ms. Naik?” Brand asked mildly. “Have you two been around dudes so long you think its okay to talk shit about women?”
Murad and Lucas colored and muttered apologies.
Brand continued coolly, “If you two have things under control here, I am going to take a shower now. Work off this sweat. I’ll be back and we can go over the logistics again. Get the rest of the team here for the next debrief, will you, mate?”
The backtalk stopped as both men focused on work. They started using the miniature, palm-length com-talkies to call the rest of his crew to the nav cabin for a debriefing session.
Slipping his own comms in his pocket, Brand walked away, just as the radar screen started to blip.
Lucas and Murad frowned when they saw it.
The navigation cabin was aft of the prow, the cabins were situated about halfway away from the room, down one short flight of stairs. The gym, sauna, spacious galley and more cabins were all situated on this level. And there were three bathrooms, apart from those with en-suites, on this level.
The next level held all the lounges and Premier Delgado’s quarters.
None of the lounges were in use till tonight. The documentary would debut in the media room adjacent to Delgado’s stateroom. The rooms didn’t allow much in the way of access, but then again, this limited Brand’s own exit strategy.
It helped his conscience that there were three lifeboats and two more inflatables on board. All the ninety guests could be taken out in a matter of minutes if something were to happen. His crew was trained to handle any contingency.
His primary responsibility was to keep Santiago Sebastian Delgado alive past this night.
At least it had been. And dammit, he scowled as he opened the heavy oak door of his cabin opposite Akira’s, it still was.
His talkie squeaked static. He picked it up on reflex. “Go for Rice.”
Brand was inside his room, walking towards the closet that held his workout clothes, his daily outfit of cargo pants and black tee shirts, and one hideously expensive tuxedo that he’d had to bring to the event. He absently pulled a towel from an overhead rack and depressed the talk button.
“Brand, there’s an unidentified approaching us, port-side. Submerged. So we couldn't spot it till it came near range. We’ve asked for identification. Waiting for confirmation.” Lucas’s hard tones crackled over the talkie.
“Keep asking for identification. Don't make any moves. I’m moving out.”
Brand moved out of his cabin at a rapid run, holding his talkie and checking the Walther PPK he carried in his other pocket. It’s not like he was going to shoot at some submarine but it helped to carry it. To have that assurance.
“Brand, it’s a sub.” Short for submersible. “One of the new ones from the South East. And it has a Bazooka mounted on the mouth. Pointed at the first deck. Should we engage?” Lucas sounded worried now.
“Shit. Wait. Have they identified themselves? Dammit.” Brand ran back, opened Rumi’s door and breathed a sigh of relief because he found it empty. He’d seen her entering the gym when they’d been checking security in the nav cabin.
But that meant...
“They are refusing to identify themselves. Total comm silence. Should we engage?” Lucas asked with less worry and more surety now.
Brand’s answer was instantaneous. “Yes.”
The reason Brand had been hired was because he could make warships out of pleasure yachts. The Princess had been stripped and fortified with a special kind of Kevlar material that should withstand heavy fire, should the need arise. Unfortunately, a Bazooka was more than heavy fire. It was a contained bomb.
There were sten-guns and machs hidden on various levels of the boat. Not to mention the six torpedoes he had had fitted on the undersides of the vessel. And the men manning each of these firearms knew what they were doing.
In fact, there was even a rocket launcher on the port-side deck, in the storage area. Markham was manning it.
“They’re still refusing to back off. The Bazooka’s engaged. What do we do?”
“Dammit. Dammit. Secure Sebastian now.”
Brand didn’t think anymore, he kicked the door opposite his own cabin in. The wood splintered and gave way.
The woman on the bed came awake instantly with a small cry. But she didn’t scream. He gave her points for that.
“What the hell?” Akira looked at him wildly.
“No time to explain. Get your stuff. Now.” He strode in looked out of the huge porthole that was directly behind her huge four-poster.
There was another porthole on the west wall, but that one showed only shiny blue water. This one, on the other hand, showed a long black barrel poking out of the water. This was not good news.
“What?” Akira asked again, getting out of bed. She grabbed her laptop and stood on the side of the bed.
Brand knew they had seconds, if that, to get out. In these closed confines, the blast impact would be enormous. He was certain Sebastian was in the fortified nav cabin by now. Protected.
And he deduced this attack was not on the premier. No, it was on the woman who was going to make the little country and its ruler famous. It was for Rumi Bali.
Without another thought, he scooped Akira, the bag and laptop in his arms and sprinted out. He caught Rumi coming out of the sauna on the east end, near the stairs and yelled, “Take the stairs. Now.”
In Love With Her Millionaire Foe
Millionaire Foe Quartet – A Millionaire Enemy Romance
Releasing September 2020 – Pre-order link coming soon!
In the dream, she was eighteen years old. Filled with all the promise and recklessness that only true youth could offer. Now, of course, she was older, she knew better. She knew what loneliness was and what heartbreak was. But in the dream she was eighteen years old and beautiful and had everything she could ever want.
Still, she wanted more.
She wanted more than everything.
It was her party, her eighteenth birthday party, and she was sipping champagne like a real adult and looking at all the young, sophisticated stockbroker-investment banker preppy boys turned men who had turned up. They had all dutifully wished her, given her sweet kisses on the cheeks and lovely little gifts that would lie forgotten, gathering dust in some corner of her closet. Unopened, if she had anything to say about it.
They were boring with a capital B. These friends of her brothers, who were all here to impress her father.
Her brother, so tall and solemn, the weight of the empire, her father’s legacy, already sitting so well on his shoulders. At a time when other boys were chasing girls or hoping to get drunk all weekend, her brother was clerking at a law firm and interning at their father’s company. All because he was the scion, he was the heir. He was the son and that duty had been drummed into him in-utero.
He clinked his champagne glass with her and said, “So you look like you’re having fun, babe.”
She grimaced, and swung her legs, perched as she was, on the railing of the balcony on the thirty-first floor of one of the swankiest hotels in London.
“Yup. Time of my life.”
He nudged her with his shoulder and looked below, to the sounds of the city humming with life, with promise, with the future. “You should be, sis. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
She drank from the champagne flute, drained it. “I know. Dad’s never going to pay as much attention to me after today as he is today. Happy birthday to me.”
She had grown up with so much, with everything, and still…she looked at the flute critically. The lights of the ballroom where her coming out party was being celebrated glittered inside the rim.
It was a beautiful sight.
She wished she could enjoy it more.
“Come on, honey. Don’t be so morbid. Let’s go inside. Dance. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see.” He tugged at her arm and she jumped down lithely from the balcony railing.
He was always able to cheer her up. Her brother, the one person who understood her like nobody else. Ok, that was a stretch. Her brother loved her like nobody else, and he accepted her for who she was. Flaws and all, and she had many, many flaws.
They entered the ballroom, and he swung her into his arms, theatrically and she laughed and swayed with him. The song was a corny number, one her father had thought she would enjoy. She was more inclined to the passionate tragedy of Tchaikovsky, the moody brilliance of Puccinni, but her father didn’t know that. He thought eighteen year old teenaged girls liked listening to cute pop stars who couldn’t hold a tune to save their life.
Her father rarely bothered with her. That’s just the way he was.
She hugged him close, barely reaching his chin, because she’d left her shoes on the balcony. But underneath the taffeta skirts of her ball gown, no one knew that. These were the things that always got her in trouble. Things like forgetting to wear her pointy heeled shoes. Impulsive, reckless things.
“I love you, big brother,” she whispered.
He hugged her back, kissed the top of her forehead. “Me too, little sister. Always.”
They resumed dancing and her quiet grey eyes roved idly over the crowd gathered to celebrate her birthday. There must have been two hundred people present, all wishing her well. She knew less than a dozen people here. Cared about like, maybe three of them. And loved only her brother with the single minded devotion of a feral mama bear.
Her future, the one she had chosen and the one she had yet to tell her father of, lay before her in all its glory. Freedom. The freedom to know and understand and be was there, hers for the taking. Oceans away from everything she had known so far. Away from her father and his overpowering presence.
She could hardly wait for it to begin.
She smiled, meaninglessly, at all the people’s eyes she caught. Because she was still here, and good manners were drummed into her like duty and responsibility had been drummed into the brother. In utero.
She was tall, taller than most girls her age, but her figure was more like the pictures of her mother that she’d seen on her father’s screensaver. She had the same quiet face with what she privately thought was a small nose and small lips on a large face, her mother’s face. But the nose and lips were perfectly proportioned, and her cheekbones had structure, something supermodels paid money for. The one thing that she’d inherited from her father was his eyes. His eyes were flashy, stormy grey while hers tended to be more soft, more filled with clouds and dreams than ruthless storms. Bedroom eyes, they could be called.
Now, those eyes were caught by a pair of hard eyes, in the reflection of a mirror. He wasn’t taller than her brother, and he wasn’t buff like most of the preppy Oxbridge types. He was unshaven, actually and he wore his monkey suit as one not used to wearing it. He also held the champagne glass wrongly, by the stem, instead of around the middle.
She registered all of these minutiae about him in that first second of meeting his glance in the mirror, dancing in her brother’s arms.
She stiffened imperceptibly, as if against an unknown, invisible threat. The instinctive gesture of prey being hunted by something larger than itself. She turned her head away, deliberately, even though his image was stamped behind the backs of her lids. Not handsome, not excessively sexy.
But he just was.
And she couldn’t stop seeing him.
In the mirror, right before she turned away, he raised his wrongly held champagne glass in a toast to her. And his eyes were hard and ancient and held all the secrets of her universe.
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
Did I tell you, I have always wanted to tell stories? Spectacular, incredible, amazing stories of the bravest people – who do impossible, insane things because it’s the right thing to do. Because it saves the world.
This sentiment is, precisely, the reason why I started writing romances. Because nothing is as brave and inherently honest as discovering two people fall in love. It’s also why I love writing thrillers. It’s about bravery of a different kind, which examines motives, which puts guns in the hands of bad people and which creates explosions in a yacht, or at a playground in Kashmir.
The Knights of Justice are two of my earliest published works, with Warrior Knight being the book I sold to Harlequin, ticking off a professional goal at the tender age of 27. It’s been a wild ride of more than 20 books since those early days but I am still as invested in telling the best possible, plausible version of a story as I was then!
And god, I love Warrior Knight’s story. It�
�s possibly the only time I am obsessed with the villain as I am with the leads, although Krivi is so special to me in so many ways. I hope Krivi, Ziya and Wood have a permanent place in your hearts too, dear reader.
If you want to receive more such letters as well as be the first to know of my bookish news (there’s TONS more to come), then please do sign up for The Writer Gal Letter or get in touch me on Instagram (@aartivraman).
I’d love to hear from you about Warrior Knight and all my other books.
Once again, thank you, for trusting me with your time, patience and money. I hope I’ve earned the privilege of all three.
Till next time,
Xx
Aarti V Raman Aka Writer Gal
Books by Aarti V Raman
GEEKS OF C@LTECH
Still Not Over You
Crossing Lines
The Heart of You
Against All Odds
A Tale of Two Christmases: A Geeks of Caltech Novella
ROYALS OF STELLANGARD
The Soldier Prince
A Night Out With Royals: A Royals of Stellangård Novella
MEMORY DUOLOGY
Forgotten Husband
Make Believe Husband
HOT KIND OF WRONG
The Perfect Fake
Roark
More Than You Want
KNIGHTS OF JUSTICE
Guardian Knight
STANDALONES
The Worst Daughter Ever
Days of Our Lives
BOX SET
The Hot Kind of Wrong (A 3-in-1 compilation)
Something Old, Something New: A Desi Readers Adda Anthology
Aarti V Raman sends out a newsletter – The Writer Gal Letter – which contains exclusive sneak peeks and giveaways and book recommendations! Sign up here to the Writer Gal Letter and receive a free ebook.
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