Ready to Roll

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Will you do me another favor, and next time you have a shift at work with Wade O’Keefe, will you thank him and tell him that he was right? That his friend is awesome, that I’ve already got a job that I love, and most of all that I’m safe and I’m going to be okay? Thank you.

  And it was signed, You helped save my life.

  When I sent an email back, you know, asking Do I know you?, it bounced. Whoever owned that email address had already deleted the account.

  So, yeah, I told Wade, and he not only seemed to know who it was from, but he also seemed really happy, which was nice because, well, before this, he always seemed so sad. (sighs)

  I wish that he trusted me. I mean, I get why he doesn’t, but… I wish he could just be himself.

  Living the way he does must be exhausting.

  * * *

  SEAL Candidate Petty Officer Third Class

  John “Q Public” Pilkington:

  Why did I do it? What was I thinking?

  Are you kidding?

  I was thinking, “I’m not going through BUD/S Phase Two without Seagull. Shit, if my choice is to do Phase Two without Seagull or to do Hell Week all over again with Seagull…? (shrugs) Looks like I’m doing Hell Week again.”

  * * *

  SEAL Candidate Petty Officer Third Class

  John “Doe” Capano:

  Ditto.

  Phase two? Bring it.

  We’re Boat Squad John, and we’re ready to roll.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Readers,

  Thank you so much for choosing to read this story. If you had fun visiting Izzy and meeting Boat Squad John, I’d appreciate it greatly if you’d post a review or toss Ready to Roll some shiny stars and/or digital buckets o’ love at your favorite on-line bookseller. Authors depend on reader reviews more than ever in this crazy, noisy, option-filled digital world. I’m very grateful, too, when you post, share, tweet, text, and talk about my books! (Thank you so very, very much!)

  So, what’s next?

  That’s every author’s most frequently asked question, even (especially?) after the release of a new book. This time, I’ve got some answer for you!

  Short answer: It’s called Some Kind of Hero, and it’s a full-length old-school (funny, suspenseful, spicy, and filled with plenty of Navy SEAL hotness!) Troubleshooters novel, featuring LT Peter “Grunge” Greene as the hero. Some Kind of Hero will be out in July 2017 in eBook and hardcover from Ballantine Books, and in audio from Blackstone Audio. (Flip ahead to an excerpt!)

  The much, much longer answer must start with an apology. See, I spent a very long time over the past few years not writing a book called All or Nothing. AoN even had a cover and a pre-order button, and for the literal years that I spent not-writing it, it hung there in cyberspace, taunting all of us. As I failed to meet my deadline, again and again, Ballantine Books just kept pushing the release date farther out into the future.

  I am so sorry if you are one of the many readers who pre-ordered that book and were left wondering about the delay.

  It’s all my fault. I just couldn’t get it done.

  Not-writing is supremely un-fun. It was while I was in that intense period of not-writing (also known as the horrible sounding “Writers Block”—ahhhhgghhh!) that my longtime editor encouraged me to keep breathing. “Just sit down,” she suggested patiently time and again, “with no pressure, and see what comes out.”

  What came out first was Home Fire Inferno (Burn, Baby, Burn), a Troubleshooters short story that I included in a charity anthology of military romance shorts. (Proceeds from that edition went to wounded veterans.) Shortly after that, I wrote a prequel to HFI called Free Fall, which features Navy SEAL Izzy Zanella and his teenaged brother-in-law, Ben Gillman.

  And then I outlined Ready to Roll, the third installment in that trilogy of connected stories all set in my TS world. RtoR was supposed to be another short, but as I wrote it, it grew into the much longer novella you’ve just read.

  (And it’s a weird novella, at that, isn’t it? A mix of a sweet YA m/m romance intertwined with an f-bomb-laden Navy SEAL action tale…? And yet, it really worked, at least for me!)

  I’ve always proclaimed that a story is as long as a story needs to be, and not only did Ready to Roll need to be nearly three times as long as I’d originally intended, it was also the story that I needed to write at that point in my creative life.

  Because it introduced me to Navy SEAL LT Peter “Grunge” Greene.

  I was intrigued by LT Greene from the start. (I’d only mentioned him in passing in previous TS books. In fact, in Hot Pursuit, Savannah wants to set Jenn up with him… Yes, he’s that Grunge!)

  And yeah, I also fell in love with Boat Squad John. It was always my intention, with them, to create the next group of tadpoles, reminiscent of Izzy, Gillman, Jenkins, Lopez in the earlier TS books (Note to diehard fans of the TS series: I am fully aware that I have not yet written Jay Lopez’s book. Fear not. It’s coming.)

  But there was just something—something—about LT Peter Greene…

  SEAL officers by nature are slightly removed—slightly distant—from the enlisted men in their teams. And Pete’s an officer who is also a dedicated BUD/S instructor, with a reputation as a hard-ass…

  Yeah, I definitely wanted to get to know him better.

  And that’s how Pete (he calls himself Pete—he’s a little embarrassed by his SEAL nickname) became the hero of Some Kind of Hero. As soon as I finished writing Ready to Roll, I sat down and outlined Pete’s book. And then I sat down and wrote it. In a relatively short period of time.

  (Note to the skeptics: Yup, the book’s written, revisions are done. Some Kind of Hero will come out in July. I promise you.)

  Izzy Zanella’s a major point-of-view character in Some Kind of Hero, too. And okay, I’ll cop to the fact that one of the many reasons I fell so hard for Pete was because he’s friendly with Zanella. Mere words cannot describe how much I love writing from Z’s POV.

  And… since Some Kind of Hero is set a few months after Ready to Roll, I decided to include the guys from Boat Squad John, too. (Okay. As Izzy would say, Busted! Truth is, I set SKOH a few months post-RtoR so that I could include the guys from BSJ. Yes, you’ll see more of SEAL candidates Seagull, Timebomb, and Hans in Some Kind of Hero.)

  Some Kind of Hero is a return to my old-school Troubleshooters books. There’s even a hint of a WWII subplot. The story’s set in SoCal, near the Coronado Navy Base (teeming with SEALs!) in San Diego. The heroine, Shayla Whitman, is a romance novelist struggling with writers’ block (hah!), who happens to live across the street from Pete. And although Shay is swept into Pete’s action-filled world, her unique skill-set as a wordsmith comes into play as she helps Pete re-connect with Maddie, the runaway teenage daughter that no one—not even Izzy—knew about.

  High-jinks of all kinds—funny, steamy, and action-packed—ensue.

  Read on for an excerpt from Some Kind of Hero. (You can even pre-order it, and it will magically download in your eReader, next July! I swear!)

  So that’s what’s next from me.

  Watch for a few weird and fun things coming at you between now and Some Kind of Hero, including an annotated reissue of my early category romance, Give Me Liberty, in both ebook and print-on-demand. (I had to annotate it! It’s set in the early 1990s and the hero owns a video store. Seriously. The kind that rents VHS tapes. We’re talking pre-Blockbuster, people. So my notes are a mix of social/historical commentary, as well as thoughts on writing, or in some cases how not to write…)

  Watch, too for the audiobook editions of Ready to Roll and Home Fire Inferno. (Free Fall is already available as an audio short, from Blackstone Audio, read by Patrick Lawlor. You want to hear what Izzy sounds like when he starts making all that noise inside of my head? Check out Patrick’s pitch-perfect narration of Free Fall or any Izzy-centric story like Breaking the Rules or Into the Storm. Patrick brings Izzy completely to life.)

  Ooh, one last thing! Ther
e’s a scene in Ready to Roll, the second scene in Chapter Nine, from Eden’s point of view. It’s set in “Baby Central,” the on-site daycare center at the Troubleshooters Inc office. In my original draft of this book, I loaded this scene with “reunion” type info about former characters in the TS series and their offspring. I edited that out for this edition. If you are a hardcore TS series reader and want to catch up with those extra characters (and their various babies) you can flip to the original, expanded version of that scene, via the link at the start of the scene. (You can also find the expanded scene at the very, very end of this ebook.)

  Thank you again for spending your reading time with my characters and me. And remember, if you liked Ready to Roll, please do me a huge-large and post an on-line review and let other readers know! (Thank you!)

  I love getting interactive: Twitter’s my social media format of choice—give me a shout @SuzBrockmann. I pop in on Facebook from time to time, too. But if you want to be absolutely certain you’ll get hot-off-the-press news about upcoming releases and appearances, sign up for my e-newsletter!

  Love and hugs,

  Excerpt from Some Kind of Hero

  Chapter One

  Wednesday

  Wait, wasn’t that the Navy SEAL?

  Yes, the man who was frantically waving his arms at the side of the road, trying to flag down one of the swiftly passing cars in the rapidly deepening twilight, was—absolutely—Shayla’s new neighbor.

  She recognized him immediately, even here, several miles from their semi-suburban neighborhood, mostly from his impossibly fit physique.

  Oh, really…?

  Yeah, okay, all right, in truth she recognized the SEAL specifically by his amazing ass. And sue her for being human, but when a man had a pair of shoulders that wide and a butt that was almost ridiculously proportionately not-that-wide… one’s eyes tended to be drawn instinctively down toward that seemingly miraculous not-wideness.

  Truly though, it was the combo of what was covering that noteworthy derrière—a pair of very nicely fitting cammo cargo shorts plus his trademark flip-flops with a snug olive drab T-shirt—that had brought about her initial surge of recognition. She confirmed it—yup, that was definitely her local Navy SEAL—when he turned a head that was covered with regulation-defyingly shaggy, sun-streaked golden-brown hair to reveal his too-handsome face.

  Those eyes had to be blue.

  Even though he’d moved into Shayla’s neighborhood nearly two months ago, she still hadn’t gotten close enough to the man to be absolutely certain, but really, she knew. Neon blue. Had to be. And they probably twinkled and sparkled, too.

  Still, even from a sparkle-obscuring distance, the man was hard to miss. And Shay’s curiosity had pinged when he’d pulled a U-Haul in front of the sweet little bungalow-for-rent across the street and her elderly and possibly omnipotent neighbor Mrs. Quinn had muttered, “Just what we need, as if it weren’t already too noisy here,” before darkly IDing him as a Navy SEAL.

  Navy SEAL, hmm? So yes, Shayla had looked at him and his perfect butt a tad more thoroughly than she otherwise might’ve.

  Tonight however, the man was hard to miss for another reason. He’d practically leaped full out into the middle of the oncoming traffic—and there was a lot more of it than usual for a Wednesday evening near the high school.

  Shayla hit her brakes and leaned forward slightly to peer at him through her windshield, wondering if he’d been attempting to stop that one specific car in front of her, or if any old car and driver would do.

  Bow chicka bow bow! Harry Parker’s irreverent voice-in-her-head now sang a riff that was supposed to imitate the porn-worthy wah-wah of an electric guitar.

  Shut it, she told him silently since he was a fictional character and therefore invisible, and she wasn’t quite crazy enough to start talking to herself out loud. At least not yet.

  And apparently, the SEAL wasn’t picky, because he didn’t wait for her to stop completely before he tried to open her passenger side door.

  “I’m sorry, can you help me, I’m not dangerous, I promise,” he called to her through the closed window, but she was already hitting the button that popped the lock.

  It was pretty clear he didn’t recognize her—probably because she’d never gotten around to bringing over a pie to welcome him, his sullen teenaged daughter, and their obvious lack of a Mrs. Navy SEAL to the neighborhood.

  That was what Harry, in his infinite-yet-fictional wisdom, had recommended Shayla do. Wear a top with a neckline that plunged and bring her hot new Navy SEAL neighbor a homemade pie. It was a brilliant plan, except nearly all of her tops were crew-necked Ts. And then there was that tiny, pesky fact that she’d never baked a pie before in her life.

  “I’m a SEAL, an officer.” It was the first thing the man said as he opened her car door and climbed in. He obviously understood the clout of that, particularly here in US-NavyLand, or as civilians called it, San Diego. “Lieutenant Peter Greene. Thank you for stopping.”

  “You’re welcome,” Shayla said, oddly tongue-tied at their sudden proximity. Her small car seemed smaller than usual because those shoulders were broad. And his movie-star handsomeness stood up to this closer view. In fact, his evenly featured face could’ve gone into the dictionary next to perfectly symmetrical. Or maybe just plain perfect. Also, he smelled good. Like sunblock and fresh air and a scent she assumed was pure Navy SEAL hotness.

  Even Harry was uncharacteristically silent.

  And alas, even though she’d spent her career writing books where this kind of impromptu meet-cute would end with them having screaming animal-sex before the clock struck midnight, Shayla wasn’t as bold as her romance novel heroines. She didn’t look all that much like them, either. In fact, she was lucky that she’d showered and put on real pants before she’d crawled away from her computer in order to drive-and-drop Frankie at his high school debate club practice. Most of the time she just climbed into her car from the safety of the shuttlebay—aka their closed garage—wearing her plaid PJs beneath her jacket.

  She cleared her throat and managed, “What’s, um, going on? Are you okay?”

  But he was already talking. Explaining. “My daughter is missing, and I think I just saw her getting into a car heading north.” He gestured to the busy road in front of them.

  Missing.

  With two kids of her own, that was a word to chill her to the very depths of her soul. Shayla could still work herself into a cold sweat by remembering that horrible day Tevin had gone on a class day-trip into Boston, but hadn’t been on the bus when it returned to the middle school parking lot. That was when they were still living back in Massachusetts, and it turned out that he’d run into his father near the State House. Tevin had stayed in the city to have dinner—and both he and Carter, now her ex, had wrongly assumed the other would call to tell her. Neither had.

  Before Shayla had located the teacher who knew what was going on, it had been a very frightening few minutes—the likes of which she hoped she’d never again experience.

  Now she immediately jammed her car into gear and surged back into the traffic amidst the blaring horns of the drivers she’d cut off.

  “Whoa,” the SEAL said, quickly fastening his seatbelt. “Wow. Thank you.”

  “This is what you wanted, right? Follow that car?” she asked as she jockeyed her way into the faster-moving left lane. Funny how that horrible word, missing, had magically turned him from too-hot-to-talk-to Navy SEAL to far more accessible worried dad. Hot worried dad, sure, but he needed both her help and immediate action, and accordingly her brain had unlocked. “Don’t worry, I’m a good driver.”

  She really is. Great. Harry, too, had gotten his voice back.

  Of course, the SEAL couldn’t hear him, thank God. “Glad to hear it,” he said as he grabbed for the oh-shit bar, which, yes, made his muscular arm do some very interesting and attractive things to his barbed wire tattoo. Maybe it would help if she imagined those strong arms holding a baby,
except…

  Noooo, that doesn’t help at all, Harry said.

  Harry was married. Very married, to the man of his dreams, she thought at him pointedly.

  He laughed. True, but I’m also very not dead, so…

  Shayla hip-checked him out of her head and focused on the task at hand. “Which car are we following?” she asked the SEAL crisply, eyes on the road ahead of her. “Make, model, color…?”

  “Maroon sedan. Buick, maybe?” said the real, non-fictional man sitting beside her. His voice had the vowel-sounds and musical phrasing of a California surfer. In fact, he sounded a little bit like Luke or Owen Wilson, as if maybe they’d all attended the same SoCal high school. “Older model. Extra large. POS with a peeling soft-top. Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop!”

  As she watched, the very stale yellow traffic light in front of her turned red, but she jammed down the gas pedal and blasted through it. Missing. If they got pulled over, hopefully the cop would be the parent of a teenager, too.

  “How long has your daughter been, you know?” She couldn’t say that awful word, as if it were a snake that might bite her if she acknowledged it.

  “Missing?” The SEAL said it in unison with Harry.

  “Last time I saw Maddie was yesterday morning,” the SEAL added, “when I dropped her at school. She didn’t come home last night, and when I called the school to check today, apparently she didn’t make it to homeroom yesterday either, so… Yeah. It’s been about thirty-six hours. Jesus.”

  “They didn’t call you yesterday when she didn’t show?” Shayla was surprised. She glanced over to find him looking back at her just as the headlights from a passing car lit his face. Eyes, neon blue. Check. But not so much with the twinkle, considering his current case of teenage-daughter-induced grim.

  “They said they did, but no,” the SEAL reported as they both continued to search the traffic for the car in question. “There wasn’t a message on the home line or my cell.”

  Yikes. That was pretty extreme incompetence for the high school administration—a dedicated team that Shayla knew and trusted.