Hot Man With a Badge By Avery Flynn
I blame it all on Tom Selleck’s Magnum PI.
Sure he was a PI not a cop, but who could deny the awesomeness of his mustache and the wriggling eyebrows? Smooth, funny, hot and with an amazing car, he charmed and sweet talked while solving mysteries and taking risks because it was the right thing to do. So when it came to write Dry Creek County Sheriff Hank Layton’s story, it wasn’t an actual sheriff who inspired me, instead it was a fictional private investigator with major-league swagger.
Hank is six-feet, three-inches tall, has short dark brown hair and the Layton family hazel eyes. A former Nebraska Cornhusker quarterback, he married his high school sweetheart and seemed to lead a charmed life that in reality was a twisted mess. He is a tortured alpha hero starting over in life and something about Beth Martinez calls out to him.
That’s what I love about the alpha hero. To fully reach his potential, he has to find an alpha heroine – that one person who challenges him and pushes him to be more than he ever thought he could.
In A Dry Creek Bed, that person is Beth Martinez, but she’s a woman of many secrets – one of which may kill her. So despite her strong attraction to Hank, she’s determined to maintain a distance, even if sometimes she slips.
***
Five days into a two-week vacation, he’d given up his Dry Creek Country Sheriff uniform for jeans, a T-shirt and a scraggly beard that he somehow made appealing. Her fingers itched to feel the prickle of the three-day beard on his square jaw, to run through his thick brown hair that she knew from years of lustful observation curled if he let it grow to his collar. He was the stuff of dreams. Naughty, sweaty, tasty dreams.
The object of her desire strolled across the cracked asphalt to her side. The smell of fresh coffee wafted up from the paper cup in his large hands and mixed with the woodsy scent of his cologne.
“Are you okay?” Worry weighed heavy in his deep voice and he brushed a stray hair away from her face, his eyes searching for injuries caused by the car accident.
Every objection to touching him evaporated and all her thoughts focused on how much she wanted to wrap her arms around his waist and soak up his strength.
“I do believe I can arrest you for looking at someone like that, you’ve got to be breaking some indecency laws.”
Taking a deep breath, she recovered her bearings. Mostly. “You’re out of your jurisdiction, sheriff.”
***
And fireworks ensue.
Hank can’t stop thinking about Beth to the point where he’s afraid of becoming permanently bowlegged. And even though the sexual tension between them is thick enough to trip over, she runs every time he chases.
But when a mysterious developer forces her neighbors off their land, Beth becomes the one person standing between the scoundrel and millions of dollars. Only Hank can help her uncover the truth. Together they risk their lives exposing decades-old secrets and learn that everything is not as it seems in their rural Nebraska town.
Available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, All Romance eBooks, Evernight Publishing and more.
***
Avery Flynn, the author of UP A DRY CREEK and A Dry Creek Bed, books one and two in the Dry Creek series set in Nebraska, grew up in a small town in the western part of that state, a far cry from her present day home just outside of Washington, D.C. It was no accident that she went back to her roots for the small town setting for her romantic suspense.
“When I graduated high school,” she says, “I couldn’t cross the state line fast enough. The older I got and the farther I moved away, the more I realized what a wonderful place Nebraska had been to live. I swore I’d set a novel there as a way to give people a look into the amazing folks that live in my home state.”
The name Avery Flynn is a pseudonym for the author who, at least for now, prefers to remain behind the scenes. She believes having Avery as her alter ego is a very good thing because, as she says, “Pen name Avery is way cooler than me. Her favorite color is hot pink. She drinks single malt scotch on the rocks. She loves the Argentinean tango and stays at Iceland’s Ice Hotel.”
Author Avery has been writing since she was a child and her father gave her a baby blue Brother typewriter. She couldn’t read but nonetheless wrote numerous stories about her stuffed animals in gibberish. She hasn’t stopped since, though she maintains that her spelling has gotten much better and she now prefers to write in English.
Today she’s enjoying her own happily ever after with her dashing husband, three crazy kids and two arthritic dogs. She dreams of one day having a floor-to-ceiling library à la Beauty and the Beast and is working to perfect the coffee IV drip.
http://www.averyflynn.com
http://www.evernightpublishing.com
Twitter: @averyflynn
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Avery-Flynn/177161972329973
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I can’t wait to read this book to see what happens between Beth and Hank. Loves the first book in the series.
e.balinski(at)att(dot)net