365 books in 365 days Challenge ... book #13

The Heart of a Mercenary - Loreth Anne White
Mills and Boon Intrigue

Single title-
Harlequin Mills and Boon, 2007
ISBN: 9780263857405

Reprint-
Heart of a Hero By Request
Harlequin Mills and Boon, 2011
ISBN: 9780263883398

My rating


From the back cover:

"Hunter McBride - he'd buried his past and his emotions long ago to become the ultimate warrior. His mission was to get the proof of a deadly toxin out of the Congo jungle - with or without the innocent beauty who possessed it. But with every minute counting down to disaster, Sarah showed Hunter how to live again. Could he discover how to love again before their time - and the world's - ran out?"

Once again this was a book I read from the By Request version as above.

This is the story of American nurse Sarah who, after a humiliating divorce, decided to volunteer for an Aid program in the Congo. She witnesses a brutal engineered disease being exposed to people and the massacre of the medical station she was working on. She manages to flee with samples of the deadly disease. Hunter is a mercenary with a private military group, with a very dark past, hired to find and stop the terrorists releasing the disease in the US. He intercepts Sarah's distress call and goes into the jungle to find her and escort her and the samples through the deadly Congo jungle that is in the throes of war to safety.

I enjoyed the relationship part of this book, it was written beautifully and the two characters have great chemistry together. Sarah is a great female character who, at the beginning, is emotional damaged and weak but with the help of Hunter and the challenges she has to face in order to make it out of the jungle alive finds strength and courage and learns how to be herself again. Hunter's the classic tortured soul military man, totally focused on his mission, but through getting to know Sarah, and having to keep her moving he learns that he can have a future and be happy again, which was also written very well.
The terrorist plot was very detailed, and at times a little hard to follow, but I struggled through! This story reminded me like a more romantic version of the TV series 24!

While Sarah and Hunter's story is completed and stand alone, the terrorist plot is not solved. I have found out that this book is part of a mini-series by Loreth Anne White, titled 'Shadow Soldiers', so if you are interested in how the plot continues then grab the others in the series.

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