Format read: ebook provided by NetGalleyFormats available: ebook, audiobook
Genre: Paranormal romance, Fantasy romance
Series: Earth Angels #2
Length: 138 pages
Publisher: Carina Press
Date Released: February 4, 2012
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, All Romance
Feel nothing. Sara Savitch’s personal mantra has been hard to live by ever since her torrid one-night stand with army doctor Gideon Mandeville. Descended from the Seraphim, angels known as heaven’s soldiers, Sara may be an expert fighter, but she’s an amateur when it comes to relationships.
Physically unharmed, but still battle-scarred, Gideon has returned to Dallas in the hopes of regaining his faith in humanity—and in himself. Instead he’s walked into a nightmare. His father is on a serial killer’s hit list, and has hired a personal bodyguard—the very woman who has haunted Gideon’s dreams for a year.
As Sara works to build an impenetrable fortress around her client, she yearns to tear down the one around Gideon’s heart. With his bitter rejection of warriors, will he ever be able to accept her true nature? Sara must find a way to trust Gideon with her secret as the killer closes in .
My Review:
Although I enjoyed Savage Angel, the second book in Stacy Gail’s Earth Angels series, there were a couple of things that niggled at me just a bit.
Sara Savitch is leading the security team for Noah Mandeville, one of her security firm’s oldest and most loyal clients. Noah is recovering from a heart transplant, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that someone is targeting every single recipient of organs from the same donor that provided Noah’s new heart, and Noah’s next on his hit list.
The complication is that Noah’s son Gideon stole Sara’s heart right before he left on a tour of Afghanistan. He’s returned to help deal with the threat to his father’s life, but he’s been unwilling, or unable, to deal with what happened between himself and Sara at his going away party.
What happened was an absolutely incendiary one-night (actually one-afternoon) stand against a wall. One that neither of them has ever forgotten.
But Sara has no experience with relationships. None at all. She doesn’t understand Gideon’s complete lack of communication. His response to her message that his father had survived his transplant was was beyond terse.
Gideon returns from Afghanistan suffering from an extreme case of PTSD. Even though he served as a doctor, he saw combat. And came back shattered down to his soul.
Because Gideon is so screwed up, he tries to push Sara away and off his father’s security team. He has no idea who or what he is pushing around, and his treatment of her is not merely Neanderthal, but frankly unforgiveable.
Then he finds out what he’s really dealing with. Unfortunately, Sara finds out who their real enemies are. The world is nothing like Gideon thought it was. There are much greater evils abroad than he could possibly have imagined.
There are also angels. Gideon is just lucky that one of them loves him in spite of everything he’s done.
Escape Rating B-: The first third of this story made me want to smack someone, possibly Gideon. It may be because I just finished the first book in the series, Nobody’s Angel (see review), but the title Savage Angel is also a dead giveaway. I knew Sara was an angel, but the story kept trying to be coy about what she was.
Gideon might not have known what Sara was, but the readers do. That was so not the big reveal. It was just annoying.
Gideon starts out as more than an arsehole. I know it was the PTSD talking. And he is trying to push Sara away. Considering that he accused her of having gotten the job of leading his father’s security team by providing sexual favors to his father while the man was recovering from a heart transplant, Sara forgave him WAY too fast. With her skills, she should have kneed him in the family jewels for that remark, and made him grovel for a few days. At least a few days.
On the good side of the equation, once the story picked up steam, it really got cracking. I could see where this tale feeds into a larger story arc. There’s obviously a bigger bad operating behind the scenes, and the tension just got ratcheted up.
More, more!
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