Book Blast & Giveaway: First to Burn by Anna Richland
First
to Burn
The
Immortal Vikings #1
By:
Anna Richland
Released
Jan 27th,
2014
Carina
Press
Blurb
A
Soldier with Secrets.
Immortal
Viking Wulf Wardsen once battled alongside Beowulf, and now serves in
Afghanistan. He's trusted the mortal men on his elite special
operations team to protect his secret, until an explosion lands Wulf
in a place more dangerous to him than a battlefield: a medevac
helicopter.
A
Doctor with Questions.
Army
captain Theresa Chiesa follows the rules and expects the same from
others, even special forces hotshots like Sergeant Wardsen. She's
determined to discover the secret behind his supernaturally fast
healing, and she won't allow his sexy smile to distract her.
An
Enemy with Nothing to Lose.
Even
as Theresa's investigation threatens to expose him, Wulf dreams of
love and a normal life with her. But the lost Viking relic needed to
reverse his immortality is being hunted by another—an ancient enemy
who won't hesitate to hurt Theresa to strike back at Wulf.
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MEET
WULF
Wulf clawed a path to consciousness,
embracing the grinding pain in his left leg as a sign that he’d
emerged from oblivion, until the engine whine and floor vibrations
warned him of a problem worse than his injury. He was trapped in the
second most dangerous place in Afghanistan for a man like him: a U.S.
Army medevac helicopter.
“Easy, Sergeant.” The flight
medic who leaned into view squeezed a bag connected to the mask
covering Wulf’s mouth. “You’re safe.”
While oxygen inflated Wulf’s
lungs, a functioning corner of his brain demanded answers. His
commander would never call an evacuation chopper for him, so who else
had been hurt? Struggling against the painkillers, he tried to
remember everyone’s last positions. Kahananui had been on his
right. He has two little
girls. Five meters ahead,
Cruz had taken point. Was it Cruz? He
pays for his mother’s diabetes drugs.
Wulf tried to turn his head and
search for his teammates, but he couldn’t move. He tensed his abs
and lower back and jerked to lift his shoulders, but again he
couldn’t move. The certainty that one of his men needed him struck
like a spear between his ribs, but no matter how he strained his arms
and chest, he could not move. Not his arms, not his body, and by the
gods, not his legs, despite the agony that intensified in his left
one as the painkillers faded.
“Stop fighting, Sarge.” The
medic was young, mid-twenties at most, but his voice carried over the
chopper racket with the confidence shared by those who served in
aviation.
Free of morphine fog, Wulf
understood he wasn’t paralyzed, only slapped into a neck collar and
strapped to a stretcher, complications that, like his injuries,
weren’t insurmountable. But his teammates couldn’t conquer wounds
so easily. “Whoshhurt?”
“I know it hurts, man. We’re
eighteen minutes out from Camp Caddie, so hang on.”
Dammit, the medic didn’t
understand him through the oxygen mask. He needed to see who
was in this helicopter. Not knowing compressed his chest until he
groaned.
“This will help the pain.” One
of the man’s hands reached for something outside Wulf’s circle of
vision.
Skīta.
He didn’t want the guy to up the intravenous dope before he could
discover who’d been hurt. The last thing he remembered was freezing
in place when the team’s German shepherd had hunkered in a
bomb-alert position in the middle of an apricot orchard.
Like their dog Garbo, they’d
stopped. All, that is, except an Afghan training with them who’d
been distracted by lighting a cigarette and had moved forward two
more paces. The blast had thrown Garbo against a stone wall. Rocks,
dirt clods and metal packed around the improvised explosive device
had pounded Wulf’s helmet and body armor, mangling his leg. Fucking
smoker. Could’ve killed us.
This time Wulf spaced his words as
carefully as sniper shots. “Who. Else. Hurt.”
The medic’s eyes flickered to the
port side of the Black Hawk helicopter. “Two Afghans. At least
one’s not going to make it. And your dog.”
Relief that he’d been swept up
with an evacuation of Afghan National Army soldiers, not one of his
own men, crested with the newest wave of meds. Temporarily woozy, he
slurred his next question, howshGarbo,
but this time the medic understood.
“Ear and head lacerations,
possible broken leg, but the pooch armor did its job.”
His system processed this smaller
dose faster than the earlier morphine, providing only minutes of
peace before the torment of growing fresh bone, a torture he imagined
to be comparable to a drill bit tunneling through his shin, crested.
Locking his jaw stifled his groan,
but barely. He hadn’t endured a lost leg since Antietam. He’d
forgotten. “Hurts.”
“More?” The medic calculated
with his fingers. “Sergeant, you have more pure in you than Keith
Richards.” Eyebrows lost in the top of his helmet, he shook his
head. “Can’t believe you’re lucid.”
This agony blended with memories of
a September afternoon in high corn, moaning next to other Union
volunteers as blood-frenzied flies circled. His pain had been caused
by healing. Theirs, by dying. When he’d recovered enough to carry
his unit’s drummer off the field, the ten-year-old’s eyes had no
longer blinked at the sun. Some hurts were worse than regrowing
bones, took longer to mend. At least today he didn’t face such a
loss.
Instead, he gritted his teeth,
concentrated on the pain of his nails digging into his fisted palms
and planned. Without being able to test his strength or see his leg,
he wouldn’t know the extent of his progress until the itching
started. Didn’t matter. The moment the flight medic transferred him
to someone who hadn’t seen his original injury and the straps were
unbuckled, he’d walk away. He’d done it other times. He had to be
ready because under no circumstances could he end up in the most
dangerous place for an immortal soldier: a hospital.
Author
Info
Anna
Richland lives with her quietly funny Canadian husband and two less
quiet children in a century-old house in Seattle. Like the heroine of
FIRST TO BURN, she joined the army to pay tuition, a decision that
led to an adventurous career on four continents (if standing on the
bridge in Panama that divides North and South America counts as two).
She
donates a portion of her book proceeds to the Fisher House
Foundation, which provides housing for families of wounded soldiers
in the US and Great Britain, and Doctors Without Borders, which
delivers emergency medical care in more than sixty crisis zones
world-wide.
To
find out about her October novella, HIS ROAD HOME, and the next
Immortal Vikings romance, THE SECOND LIE, visit her website at
annarichland.com and sign up for her newsletter.
Author
Links
Giveaway a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thanks so much for featuring First to Burn again! Your elevator ride with my mother at RT in New Orleans always makes me laugh. I recently came back from visiting her - what is this, ten weeks after the convention? She'd held on to the giant media-mail box of RT Convention swag this whole time, after taking it home in her car (I was flying back to Seattle from RT) and when I came to visit she made me mail it to myself! I felt like I was back in college, boxes in my room, asking my mother for packing tape and markers, the works. Goes to show that even in your forties all it takes to send you back to your twenties is a cardboard box at your mom's.
ReplyDeleteI did NOT model the heroine Theresa's mother on my mother, just want to get that out there! Here's one of my favorite descriptions of Theresa's mother, after Wulf and Theresa break things off (briefly) in the aftermath of the Worst Trip Ever (to Rome):
Time heals, Jennifer had spouted at least a dozen times over the past two days. Theresa felt like she was rooming with someone’s mother. Her own mother would have tracked Wulf down and introduced him to her car bumper, but crap like time heals was what she imagined normal mothers like Jen’s said.
For the record, although my mother was known in my childhood to chase miscreants out of our family restaurant with a giant pizza peel, she never considered car bumpers.
Thank you for hosting today!
ReplyDeleteThis was such a good book. It was a great well-written story. Wulf was hot!
ReplyDeleteAnna is a new to me author. Thanks for the intro!! I really loved the excerpt!!
ReplyDelete