The Hero She Deserves (Unbroken Heroes) by Anna Hackett Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, contemporary romance
Series: Unbroken Heroes #4
Pages: 252
Published by Anna Hackett on December 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads
When he goes to investigate a blaring smoke alarm, the last thing he expects to find is Hollywood’s hottest actress…naked.
Deputy Sheriff Sawyer Lane likes the pace of life on Maui. After years as a Navy SEAL and in Ghost Ops, he likes that no one shoots at him. Coming to the island saved him. He still can’t sleep, but he’ll take the sun, sand, and solitude.
Then Oscar-winning actress Hollis Stanton rents the house next to his and torpedoes his solitude. When she sets her coffee machine on fire, he meant to help, not see every glorious inch of her from her russet-red hair to her red-painted toenails.
Soon, they’re running into each other everywhere, and it doesn’t take all of Sawyer’s finely-honed skills to know she’s in trouble and hiding from something. Or someone.
Hollis Stanton usually loves her life—movie roles she enjoys, an Oscar on her mantel, financial security. She’s come a long way from the poor, gangly redhead in hand-me-down clothes. But one stupid party held by a powerful movie producer changes everything.
She accidentally overhears something she shouldn’t have.
Now, someone is following her, breaking into her house, and crashing into her car. Her plan is to lay low in Hawaii. What wasn’t in her plan is the big, muscular, and rugged deputy sheriff next door. Nor is their scorching attraction.
When danger closes in, Hollis realizes Sawyer is the real deal—a hero with scars, who helps those in need.
A hero who will do anything to protect her.
My Review:
And she absolutely does. After all the fake heroes she’s played opposite in all of her movies, Oscar-winning actress Hollis Stanton deserves a real hero of her own just when she needs him the most.
Even if, at first, she’s not willing to admit that she needs anyone to keep her safe, or that Deputy Sheriff Sawyer Lane is the hero she’s been holding out for all along. For more than just the present danger.
(And yes, I invoked that earworm deliberately. If this story doesn’t make Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” ring through your head, here’s the video to fix that. You’re welcome.)
One of the unfortunate things about information and cellphone cameras being available everywhere, all the time, is that a person can run but they literally cannot hide, at least not if they’re a movie star like Hollis Stanton.
Hawaii, like Alaska still is to some extent, used to be a place that was so far out there – far out in the Pacific Ocean – that once upon a time a person could run away from themselves and whatever demons were literally chasing them.
Of course, the demons that were only figuratively chasing them, the demons inside their own heads, came right along with them. After all, no matter where you go, there you are.
Hollis Stanton is being chased by very real demons. She overheard something she shouldn’t have at a party hosted by a shady Hollywood mogul, and then weird shit started happening around her. So she ran, to the house of a friend outside the tiny village of Paia, on Maui. She covered her tracks as best she could, but she’s a hot commodity and anyone who sees her instantly recognizes her.
Sawyer Lane, very much on the other hand, left the SEALs and Vander Norcross’ Ghost Ops team with a whole lot of demons. But Sawyer’s demons are inside him, and he brought them along with him to Paia.
The place, the job, the friends he’s made there are helping him lay those demons to rest, but it’s a long process that still gives him plenty of sleepless nights. Like all of the nights. Still.
At least until the fire alarm goes off in the ‘vacation home’ down the road, and his sometime neighbor calls Sawyer to ask him to go down and check it out. And finds himself checking out Hollis Stanton, ALL of Hollis Stanton, standing on a teetering chair in just a slipping towel trying her damndest to shut the damn thing off.
It’s already too late for her coffee maker. And it’s too late for Sawyer Lane – and Hollis, too – they just don’t know it yet. And might not survive the conflagration to come.
Escape Rating B: Just like the story reminded me of “Holding Out for a Hero”, the hero in the story reminds Hollis Stanton of the hero of the Jack Reacher TV series. The book’s cover does a damn good job of leading the reader in that same direction, although your reading and TV viewing mileage may both vary.
One of the things that I’ve loved about all the entries in the Unbroken Heroes so far, The Hero She Needs, The Hero She Wants and The Hero She Craves (and if you’re sensing a theme here you’re right) is that the heroines get their rescue parties started all by themselves. Not that the heroes don’t help a LOT, but the women of this series have all been active – and effective – participants in everything that happens around them.
Hollis, in spite of her timely escape to Maui, has a bigger set of blinders on than the others. Or she’s a bit more naive or has been just a shade too overprotected and oversheltered as a Hollywood star – in spite of her hard-knock start in life.
She keeps thinking she’s escaped when it’s clear that she hasn’t. To the point where I wanted to hit her with a clue-by-four before the story did it for me.
OTOH, Sawyer fit right in with the rest of Vander Norcross’ former Ghost Ops. Which reminds me, for such a badass, Vander (his book is The Powerbroker) is one hell of a mother hen. And seems to have always been one. It’s a fascinating combination.
The interesting thing about this romance is that both Sawyer AND Hollis have serious cases of the “I’m not worthies” and yet, it works BECAUSE they both do. He has demons from his service – as all the men from the Ghost Ops team have unsurprisingly had so far. Her demons are old and familiar – also familial. Her mother STILL doesn’t appreciate, approve or understand – but is more than willing to make demands and milk her daughter for money at the drop of a hat.
Like the rest of the Unbroken Heroes series, The Hero She Deserves is a story where the hero and the heroine rescue each other from demons that they initially weren’t willing to even admit that they couldn’t handle themselves.
That justice was finally served and evil got its just desserts turned out to be the icing on an excellent reading cake, as have been all the books in this series, and absolutely the author’s work in general.
There’s one more Ghost Ops member left for Vander Norcross to mother hen into his happy ever after, and we’ll get that story early next year. It looks like this last entry in the series, The Hero She Loves, will be set in Alaska, so I’m especially looking forward to it!
