In Glory, Kansas, a fairy-tale wedding has local tongues wagging. But through this false engagement, can a wounded warrior and the woman he’s protecting find true love?
Byron Hawkins doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone ever again. The former Black Ops soldier is better at taking lives than saving them. But on a mission in Tunisia to deliver a package to safety, Byron is dismayed to find that the precious cargo is actually a hostage rescue, and that his orders are to take Damara Petrakis back to US soil and hide her in plain sight—as his newlywed wife.
Back in Byron’s hometown of Glory, Kansas, petite, fierce Damara keeps surprising him; she may be royalty, but she’s fully trained in martial arts and will sacrifice anything for her country. As the town rallies around the returning hero and his bride-to-be, he’s finding that it’s way too easy to play the part, and after the hell he has seen, that terrifies him. Byron didn’t want another life to save, but the passionate beauty he’s sworn to protect might just turn the tables and save him instead.
Thanks so much for coming back to the world of Glory. This book isn’t so much about small-town life as it is the things we learn from the family of community. How it makes us stronger than we know, holds us up even when we let them and ourselves down. This book is about learning to forgive ourselves and finding one’s true place in the world, and best of all, being able to give and receive love knowing you’re worthy of it. That seems like such a simple thing, an obvious thing, but for a lot of us, it’s not. It’s something we have to learn, something that has to be proven to us time and again, as our hero and heroine learn.
I enjoyed making this journey with Damara and Byron, and I hope you do, too.
Much love,
Sara Arden
Unfaded Glory
Sara Arden
For Nicolase Mallat
and things both spoken and unspoken.
Contents
BYRON HAWKINS HAD an earworm.
Most people got them at one point or another—a Top 40 hit they couldn’t escape, a catchy ad jingle, a children’s song heard one time too often. A bit of auditory flotsam that’s busywork for the brain, a refrain that plays over and over.
Byron had such a loop, but he wasn’t lucky enough to have anything as innocuous as the last song he’d heard on the radio. He had the screams of his team as they died.
Their terror and pain was always with him whether it was a damning whisper or a roar that sounded like the army of hell.
He knew it was no less than he deserved for his failure. If he hadn’t given the order to pursue the guerrillas, they’d have all made it back to camp. They’d have gone home to their families at the end of the mission.
Instead, they were ambushed and tortured.
Instead, he was the only one who went home.
And Hawkins knew it was his fault no matter what the incident review board had to say about it.
It had been a mistake from the beginning to believe that he could be a good man, that he could redeem himself by sacrificing for his country. Byron Hawkins had always been better at taking life than saving it. He’d been a fuckup for as long as he could remember; nothing was ever good enough. So he’d stopped trying, and life was easier when he didn’t care—when he didn’t bother to try to fit himself into a box that was labeled “supposed to” or “should have.”
When he didn’t give a damn, he didn’t have responsibilities he couldn’t handle. No one trusted him, and no one paid for his inevitable mistakes.
It