This HaBO request comes from Courtney, who is looking for a contemporary romance:
Help, It’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember this book…
It’s a contemporary romance. The heroine is kidnapped and the hero is the Navy SEALÂ who rescues her. During the rescue, they get separated from his team and end up in an abandoned building. Along the way she gets a cut on her foot that he takes care of.
While they wait for the rest of his team, she reveals that she’s a virgin and her captors threatened to rape her. She doesn’t want her first time to be that, so the hero essentially lets her have her way with him. The thing that I really remember is that during this he keeps his pants on because “he can get caught with his pants down, but not off” or something to that extent. I think she may end up pregnant but not certain.
And oddly enough, this isn’t the first book we’ve had a HaBO for where the heroine asks her bodyguard/rescuer to be her first time, just in case.
This is definitely Linda Howard’s “MacKenzie’s Pleasure”. Great book – keeper shelf, frequent re-read 🙂
Ditto what Cayenne said. I’m pretty sure this was the same book on a previous HaBO–I’m remembering a long discussion about Sprite in the comments, I think?
And yeah, it’s a super fun book & a definite re-read.
This also sounds like Suzanne Brockmann’s “Everyday, Average Jones”, and the heroine re-meets the hero when she’s seven months pregnant.
Ooh, adding this to my TBR list now, sounds like a fun read.
Yep, Mackenzie’s Pleasure. An all time favorite!
Definitely Suzanne Brockman’s Read it recently. But wasn’t it part of the unsung heroes series? The book started with terrorists trying tkidnapping the girl in Greeze and she is rescued some place in a North African town.
I was so excited to know one right away and of course it’s already answered. 🙂
Definitely Linda Howard! But now I need to look for the Suzanne Brockmann one.
It is definitely Howard’s Mackenzie’s Pleasure and was the book that turned me onto SEALs.
Yes its Mackenzie’s pleasure. I feel a reread coming on. I wish LH would write romances like she used to.
So which is it? I feel like it could also be a different Brockmann book (Harvard’s Education maybe?) but I am rubbish at this. However, I am nearly certain that Howard and Brockmann have both written this scenario.
@kkw It is definitely the Howard, the injured foot thing is what tips it over.
I thought the Suzanne Brockman, too, although I couldn’t remember if her foot was injured. I feel like something was injured. How strange that there are two. Was the abandoned building in a foreign country? Because the SB was. I haven’t read the Linda Howard.
Count me in as another one who was SO excited to finally be able to help, even though I knew that others had surely given the answer by now. *sniffle* 🙂
Not the Brockmann – the heroine was working in an embassy that was taken over by terrorists and used shoe polish to color her hair and disguise herself as a man. The hero and her had sex sans condom on in an airplane bathroom either on their way back to Germany or to Germany after the rescue.
As a total aside, the first time that I recall coming across the “I want my first time to be with you in case we die” trope was actually in a mystery, not a romance. It was Dick Francis’s Risk, with the twist being the woman was *considerably* older than the man. Nice twist.
There’s at least one Barbara Cartland, whose title I don’t remember, like this. H and h are in some foreign jail for reasons, and he overhears the guards planning to rape her. So, he decides to do it first, because he’d be “gentler”. Being Cartland, they got out of jail without the sexxing. It was the one and only Cartland I ever read. I stayed far away from her after that.
I’m no doubt in the minority here, but I hated “Mackenzie’s Mountain,” like hated it with such a passion I have never picked up another of Howard’s books. The only reason I finished “MM” was because I’d bought the damned audiobook.
Brockmann, however, is a virtual must.have.now for me.
I’m afraid to read/listen to “Mackenzie’s Pleasure” even though it sounds like a trope I’d like. Very, very afraid.
I loved the Mackenzie series–some more than others–but Mackenzie’s Mountain was one of my favorites. Any idea, Jill-Marie, why you were so turned off? MP is a strange book–about half and half. The beginning is definitely memorable but after he comes for her and takes her pregnant self off to New Mexico (?) it morfs into another book and then back to another plot. Enjoyed it anyway and now MUST RE-READ–darn you HaBO for your dastardly ways!
@14 HollyG: because shoe polish is such a convincing hair dye. *eyeroll*
@ Heather S Maybe the shoe polish is a nod to The Fugitive? There is an amazing David Sedaris essay (True Detective, I think from Naked [at any rate way before the unconnected HBO series]) about trying to change his identity, and his obsession with the TV show, and how very much the shoe polish doesn’t work.
@Sandra, I am trying to wrap my head around the notion that there was the remotest possibility that anyone might have sex in a Barbara Cartland novel. I’ve only read a couple but was nauseated by the emphasis upon the spiritual aspects of the kiss. When it happened.
It’s definitely Mackenzie’s Pleasure, and she does get pregnant from the first-time sex in the abandoned building. And I’m pretty sure she is being held hostage in Benghazi Libya, which is amazing clairvoyance from Linda Howard. I mean, she wrote the book umpteen years ago, who ever heard of Benghazi?
I’ve read both Howard’s Mackenzie’s Pleasure and Brockmann’s Everyday Average Jones (4th book in her Tall, Dark & Deadly series) and this is definitely Howard’s book. While the premises sound similar, the stories are quite different.
I was thinking Harvard’s Education by Suzanne Brockmann too – except the heroine was an FBI agent (?) sent to a joint SEAL mission – she was a virgin, but not a victim. I hadn’t thought it was such a common trope! But the Mackenzie’s Pleasure people think they have it –
I don’t think the heroine got pregnant in Harvard’s Education, but I could have forgotten. MP, on the other hand, I’ve read at least a dozen times, so easiest HABO ever for me.
Hello all – new here. Stumbled across this thread after I ended up here by way of the post laughing at the ‘saving her life, shagging her arse’ book. Anyhow, bought and read Mackenzie’s Pleasure but what I want to know now is, is there a book about the brother, Chance?
@Squimbelina
Yes, it’s A Game of Chance. It was written a number of years after the original ones though.
I put my vote for Mackenzie’s pleasure. I have read the HaBO and I have yet to read Brockman’s Every day average Joe. In Mackenzie’s Pleasure I remember the heroine is naked and tied up. Mackenzie goes in to extract her but they nearly get caught. I kept thinking in another circumstance that would be hot but instead I was mortified for the heroine. They get separated from his team and end up hiding in an abandoned house in Libya? I think it was someplace like that. It has been awhile since I have read this series. It’s on my favorites shelf. I am definitely rereading this series!