All Chapters of Solid Heart (Unseen Enemy 7): Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

In the end, it was surprisingly easy for him to find the bitch who had taken his family away from him five years earlier. But even if it had been difficult, even very difficult, he’d still have managed it. He’d made up his mind to find her, after all. Finding her was all that he’d thought about during those long days and longer nights in his prison cell, and he was the kind of man who saw things through, one way or the other. Always and every time.He found her easily because – incredibly, unbelievably – she still practiced clinical psychology under her real name. Even after what she’d done, after how totally she’d destroyed his life, she still had the fucking arrogance to use her real name out there in the world. More than anything, that told him that she stood by what she’d done to him. She wasn’t sorry, or ashamed, or losing sleep, or repentant, for all the harm that she’d inflicted.More than anything, that told him that she needed to be punished. She needed to be stopped, stopped

Francine fought down the urge to roll her eyes. Did she remember him? Ummmm… yeah. Hell, yeah. What hot-blooded woman would ever forget Mark Hayden? The man was a trained doctor, he was a former battle surgeon, he was a bodyguard. Throw in his mint-green eyes sparkling with humor and intelligence against his café-au-lait skin, and his hulking, mountain-of-muscle frame, and he was also panty-meltingly hot. Like, scorching, burning, five-alarm, call-every-truck-in-town hot.“Sure,” she said now, her voice a bit chilly. No sense encouraging him, she figured. In both her personal and professional experience, guys who looked like this were all-too-aware of it, and seemed to expect women to fling themselves at them as their due. “How are you, Mark?”God, the way she said his name, with that sexy rolling ‘r’, that hard, breathy ‘k’. Francine was from Canada, from Québec, and her French accent was faint, but still present. He’d never forgotten that smoky, almost dirty voice – so at odds with

“Is that what you do?”“Sure do.”“Shut up,” she said, delighted at this tidbit of information. “What kind?”“Oh, military romance, all the way. Some romantic suspense, maybe the occasional paranormal romance.”She laughed aloud. “Vampires?”“Nope. Shifters. I’m very partial to wolves. Shape-shifting, growling wolves that move in packs.”“Shut up,” she said again.“OK, no. I’m totally lying. I’ve never read a racy romance in the whole of my life. But I had you going for a minute there, huh?”“Yeah.” She felt every ounce of tension just ease out of her shoulders now, and she started to eat with enthusiasm. “Yeah, you got me.”How Mark wished that that were true… that he had her. That she was his, his all the way, his all the time, and his everywhere. In his life, in his arms. In his bed, and in his heart. He’d make room for her in all of those places.“So.” Francine smiled up at him, a real smile that made his cock strain against his zipper yet again. “Why don’t you want Mei to know th

“Alexandra? Is Rick there?”More silence. Francine dropped the questions, since it was possible that Alexandra was hiding from him, and couldn’t make any more noise.“OK, never mind.” Francine exhaled slowly. “It doesn’t matter right now. Right now, you just keep breathing. We’re coming.”As the storm worsened around them, Mark concentrated hard on the road in front of him. He may have been a damn good driver, but no sense getting cocky or overconfident. Especially since it sounded like the woman at the other end of Francine’s phone really needed them to get to her in one goddamn piece.He used every short-cut he could think of, maybe even invented one or two himself. The whole time, he was very, very aware of Francine next to him. She was pale and rigid with fear, he saw, but every time she spoke to Alexandra, she was nothing but reassuring. Hell, her sweet voice was even having a soothing effect on him, and God knows, after years in the E.R. and in war, and facing down nut-bar stal

Francine snuck around the side of the house. She was strangely calm, now that she had something to focus on. Mentally, she ran through everything Alexandra had ever told her about her husband, discarding some things as useless, filing others away as weapons.Rick Mayer was a controlling sociopath, Francine knew. He’d ‘saved’ Alexandra from her bleak, desperate existence in a small, southern town. Back then, she’d been a broke trainee nurse, stripping to pay the bills. He’d taken her away from all of that, and groomed her to be the perfect wife – restricting her diet, putting her on an exercise program, dictating her wardrobe, correcting her accent and grammar, weighed her daily – and God help her if she failed in some task that he’d set for her. Chipped nails were rewarded with punches; a one-pound weight-gain was met with a broken wrist; any sass or talking back resulted in a hospital visit. Alexandra had no friends, and Rick had forbidden any contact with her family. She was comple