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Genre: Romantic Suspense, Romance

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Jess. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romantic Suspense category.

The summary:

Dodge the bullets…
A Chinese gaming company tricks Amber Fitz into hacking the U.S. Department of Defense to extract weaponry secrets. In a panic, she steals the only copy and runs. Can she trust a newly-formed SEAL team to get her out of China and protect the secrets in her hands?

Solve the puzzle…
Communications Expert Charlie Handly loves a challenge and Amber is one sexy puzzle he’d like to solve. Is she a traitor or an innocent? Why does she remind him of the woman he’s been searching for? The only woman he wants for himself.

Get out alive…
Amber needs one SEAL to help her escape. Charlie makes it clear he wants to protect and hold her close. But his brother and explosions expert, Willy, wants her too…and he’s willing to share.

Here is Jess's review:

Lock and Load is the second book in the SEAL EXtreme Team series. The opening paragraph has to speak for itself.

Communications Expert Charlie Handly checked for messages on his cellular watch. Still no orders. When would his Commanding Officer stop shooting fire out his ass and let them get back to work? It was a lousy thing to bench the whole team for the night Charlie and his brother, Willy, partied with the man’s daughter. Together. In the C.O.’s bed. He grimaced. It was a mistake, but to be fair, why would they ask a sexy lady at a bar who her father was?

Charlie is looking for something more meaningful out of life. He’s begun to develop a friendship with another player in an online combat simulation game, a cross between “Jessica Rabbit and Lara Croft” that he knows only as Hot Girl. During an online battle, Hot Girl confesses that she’s a hacker. She was hired for a job that turned out to involve violation of another woman’s privacy, and she wants to leave the hacking scene altogether. Charlie makes up his mind to ask her out on a date, but after that conversation, she disappears from the game for several weeks.

Amber, aka Hot Girl, has once again accepted a job she knows little about. A mysterious Frenchman named Jacques claims to have gotten her work in Hong Kong, doing network penetration testing for a high-tech gaming company. Despite being searched for weapons at the door, nothing sets off Amber’s warning radar as she breaks through an advanced firewall and discovers weapons schematics. Jacques saves them all to a USB drive, then lies to the “gaming company” and claims that Amber didn’t get through after all.

She finally confronts him back at their apartment and demands to know what’s going on. He reveals that she just hacked into top secret U.S. plans, which are now on the drive he smuggled out—and a moment later, he’s assassinated by a sniper. Amber takes the drive and goes on the run. Eventually she’s captured by thugs from the Triad.

Amber’s dad has a lot of political pull, and Charlie and his team of five SEALs are sent to rescue Amber from Hong Kong. They rescue her from the Triad and hide her on a boat in Hong Kong Harbor. Charlie doesn’t know whether they can trust her, but he and Amber instantly recognize each other through their mysterious online friendship.

Amber hacks another system from the boat, and she realizes that the Triad was only working for another mysterious party who wants her dead. She and Charlie start trying to piece together the identity of the people who killed Jacques, but soon they realize that their enemies may be more closely connected to Charlie’s past.

My biggest problem with this book was Charlie’s brother, Willy. I couldn’t figure out whether he was meant to be sexy, a villain, or a creep, and that confusion made several of the scenes very uncomfortable. The blurb made it sound as if this was going to be a three-way romance, and this is the first interaction between Willy and Amber:

            “Towel?” Willy offered.

            “Please. I’m freezing.” . . .

            “I can fix that.” Moving as fast as a cat, Willy wrapped the towel around her. He rubbed her shoulders and back, warming her up. There wasn’t much room behind that screen. Willy stood so close that his thighs bumped the back of her legs, knocking her off-balance. She had no choice but to lean into him.

            “Relax. I’ve got you.” His voice was a soft purr in her ear. She could feel his heat, and as cold as she was, it took all her strength not to snuggle even closer.

Both Willy and Charlie are putting the moves on her. This continues through a scene where Willy offers to help her escape in exchange for sex. She agrees to his terms, but she’s taken aback when his first response is, “Let’s call Charlie.”

            She just about choked on her tongue. “Together?”

            “Yep. We’ll be gentle, or rough. It’ll be your call.” He leaned closer and whispered in her ear. “Seriously, hot. You will not . . .” He tugged on her lobe with his teeth. “Be sorry.”

            She was already seriously hot. Charlie and Willy at the same time? Her call? Her mind raced to all sorts of images …. Lust pounded through her.

Amber can’t stop thinking about the idea of a threesome. But Charlie isn’t interested in sharing . . . and amazingly, suddenly neither is Amber! Because they have a special connection!

This was jarring enough. But Willy’s sexual advances don’t stop. He gropes her while she’s sleeping, makes gross comments about every woman around, and keeps hinting to Charlie that he isn’t willing to relinquish his “claim” on Amber.

At this point, I started thinking that Willy might be the villain—I would have enjoyed seeing Charlie beat him up. But ultimately, there was no resolution with Willy at all. Amber and Charlie have sex (just the two of them) and profess their undying love for each other. The last we really hear of Willy is when he makes another inappropriate comment and one of the other team members almost hits him, but Charlie just says, “Might as well give it up . . . No amount of pounding will ever knock sense into him.”

I could have accepted Willy’s behavior as part of a kinky threesome plot. I thought he would have made way more sense as a villain. But the fact that the rest of the team is okay with this and just shrugs it off was confusing and unsettling. There are also a lot of punctuation errors, typos, and some weird racial stereotypes.

Lock and Load wasn’t the worst book ever. It had a decent plot, even if it didn’t provide anything really original. Ultimately, though, the only thing that left a lasting impression on me was the hero’s disgusting rapey brother, so I’m going with a C–.