Andrew Hollister knew the wounds that make a person the most vulnerable couldn’t be seen. That last mission punched his ticket home. He’d survived when most of his team hadn’t. The physical damage had mended. The mental injuries hadn’t healed as easily. Hell, they hadn’t healed at all.

David Xavier - and all those he loved or counted as friends - would forever be mouth-watering targets to men of evil intent. His wealth could settle a small country's foreign debt. Because of this, from the moment of his birth, his mother obscured his identity. Reborn as the man named Gabriel, however, he walked free into a world where the innocents and the weak cried out for a defender, for the hand of justice, for a guardian angel.

In the Shadow World, he was the god of death, and he was called many names. The monsters he hunted called him Anubis. Those who saw his face died. To Guardian Security, he was a number - a surgical weapon they wielded against monstrous evil. One woman called him Kaeden Lang. Anubis never meant her to be anything except an interlude - a moment of light in the darkness of his life, a one-time escape from the ever-present haze of death.

The CIA didn’t care if Agent Victoria Marshal lived or died in an Afghani hell-hole. Yet, she survived each torture session with single-minded determination, but human flesh has its limits. She knew her time was running short. Jacob King led a privately funded black ops group into that Afghani village to gather intelligence. He didn’t expect to find an American woman. He admired her brave humor in the face of her agonizing injuries. This kind of tough-minded woman was someone Jacob wanted to know, so he asked her for a date…same time, next year.

Loner Boone Hendrix left the military with ghosts that haunt him. He lives with his dog Atlas on a farm in Vermont. Alone. Just the way he likes it. Until he rescues a half-drowned, beautiful brunette from his river. Gemma Newhouse is the daughter of the richest man in America, and from the abrasions on her wrists and her drugged state, she’s on the run from someone dangerous. She’s nothing like Boone expected—sweet, smart, and likes baking—and she ignites a fierce need inside him.

There wasn’t a lot that surprised me. My years in the Navy taught me a lot, my years hunting human traffickers taught me the rest. Meeting a beautiful woman in a bar and spending the night with her should’ve been a blip on my radar. Instead, I spent years trying to forget her. In the middle of a rescue operation, fate dropped her back into my life, but there was a twist—she wasn’t alone.

Alone, isolated from the vast resources of Guardian, Dixon Simmons reentered a world that had left him impossibly damaged as a child. He stepped back into that evil by choice. To protect all he’d come to love, he was willing to pay whatever price was demanded — even if the price was his soul. She went by many names. Her true identity was as dead as her heart. Until him. The man was every bit as lethal as she was and deliciously sexy. Dixon Simmons piqued her interest, and what started as lust turned into another “L” word. She gave a “forever after” with him no hope.

Riggs “Chappy” Chapman didn’t expect to be disrupted at his remote cabin in the woods. But when a stray dog arrives on his porch, he winds up finding a stray woman, too, trudging through the snowstorm in search of shelter. His military days may be behind him, but Chappy is hardwired to protect her from the storm and whatever it is she’s running from.

CEO Lainie Madden has her hands full. In charge of a growing tech company, her work and her employees are her life. She’s sworn off love, because the sad reality is that she stinks at choosing men who aren’t self-absorbed cheaters. But when she starts receiving disturbing death threats and her company’s website gets hit with relentless cyber-attacks, she’s in over her head.

I’m not looking for a hero, and definitely not a fake relationship with my new boss, nightclub owner Dante Fury—over six feet of dark, hot, and dangerous. But he isn’t taking no for an answer. The plan was to run, live under the radar, survive. My life’s been destroyed by some very bad people and everything I know is gone—career, friends, family. I thought I could hide as a bartender at New Orleans’ hottest new club, Ember.