The Closer He Gets. Janice Kay Johnson
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She can’t save herself...but he can
It took the twenty-fifth anniversary of his kid sister’s death to bring Zach Carter home. Determined to solve her murder with his training as a homicide detective, he discovers that his estranged brother has beaten him to the punch and is already on the local force. The two, divided in their parental loyalties and their suspicions, struggle to make headway, until Zach is witness to a fatal beating where the guy left standing is a cop. And a second witness is a gorgeous brunette. Zach is in the impossible situation of protecting Tess Granath from the sheriff’s department while fighting his attraction to her. He’s always known he’s a man who can’t commit. Except now he’s met a woman he can’t walk away from...
They looked at each other across the body.
Momentarily stunned, he just stared for a few beats too long. If she’d never seen a violent death, she might be in shock, he reminded himself. Her right hand was bloody, he saw when he could wrench his gaze from her face. She’d touched the victim when she first fell to her knees beside him. Zach lifted his own hand to see that, yeah, his own fingertips were bloody, too. The guy’s face was a chunk of raw meat. The hands and arms he’d raised in defense weren’t any better.
Recalled by the sound of an approaching siren, he said gently, “There’s nothing you can do. The medics will be here any minute.”
She looked down, then back up. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why?” she whispered.
“I have no idea.”
I love to write stories fresh out of the news. Actually, given my law-abiding (possibly even staid) lifestyle, where else would I get my ideas? In this case, the newsworthy drama provides the perfect setup to challenge my hero, who has zero interest in a long-term romantic relationship. After his childhood, how can he trust a woman not to betray him?
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize where I’m going with this. My stories frequently hinge on the lasting effects of childhood trauma. I firmly believe that our most essential character is formed by the time we leave home at eighteen. Often, way before we leave home.
In The Closer He Gets, I have a hero bearing a lifetime of proof that he can’t rely on anyone. He returns to his childhood hometown to right a very old wrong, and finds the brother who abandoned him—and a woman under siege after she witnesses a horrendous crime. For the first time, Zach has met a woman he can’t walk away from, no matter how much his feelings for her scare him. And in his brother, Bran, he finds another man as damaged by their shared past as he was.
Yep, my kind of story! And, yes, in a flip of the coin, look for Bran Murphy’s story, The Baby He Wanted, to come in May 2016 from Mills & Boon Superromance.
Good reading!
Janice
The Closer He Gets
Janice Kay Johnson
An author of more than ninety books for children and adults, JANICE KAY JOHNSON writes about love and family—about the way generations connect and the power our earliest experiences have on us throughout life. An eight-time finalist for a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award, she won a RITA® Award in 2008 for her Harlequin Superromance novel Snowbound. A former librarian, Janice raised two daughters in a small town north of Seattle, Washington.
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