Kearney, Susan - The Challenge

Title: The Challenge
Author: Susan Kearney
Series: The Perceptive Ones #1
Pub: Tor
Pub Date: February, 2005
ISBN: 0765348918
Genre: Futuristic romance
Time Period:
Setting:
Hero: Kahn
Heroine: Tessa Camen

Summary:

SHE WAS SHOT PROTECTING THE PRESIDENT, AND
WOKE UP NAKED, IN THE ARMS OF A HUNK...

...a hunk named Kahn, who told Secret Service agent Tessa Camen an outlandish story about traveling through time, saving the world, and a Challenge only she can accept. Kahn offers her proof she can't refute: Tessa has been brought forward through time to save Earth by winning an intergalactic challenge.

Kahn only has a few weeks to train Tessa to use the psi-abilities he insists she has. He is confident in the success of a time-honored method that uses sexual frustration to bring out her powers, but Tessa is dubious. She's a martial arts expert and can fight her way through anything, but she's never had much luck with emotions.

Luckily for Earth, Kahn can be very convincing...

Excerpt:

Chapter One

"Have I died and gone to heaven?" Tessa muttered.

Without opening her eyes, she could feel heat permeating the deep chill that stole her energy as if she'd been frozen. Except for shivers and the tingling that slowly returned feeling to her numb limbs, there was no pain. No gunshot wound.

Just wondrous heat, like the touch of sun-kissed male flesh. Toned, smooth skin, sharing blessed warmth, rocking her. No, carrying her? A large gentle hand smoothed her hair from her forehead and a deep masculine voice assured her that she would soon be warm.

"You will recover."

Expecting the dream to fade, expecting to see a hospital room, a doctor, beeping machines, Tessa delayed opening her eyes. She didn't want to face her fellow agents who would tell her the sad news that she'd failed her assignment and that the President was dead. But she'd never been one to hide from reality. Tessa forced open her eyes. Instead of a hospital room and her detail, she found herself in a room she didn't recognize, alone with a stranger, her head pillowed on his shoulder. Her gaze locked stares with the amber eyes of a blond-haired giant, her hand curled intimately under the vest that didn't fully cover his broad chest.

A bare chest? She must be hallucinating. Out of her head from painkillers, the result of a bullet ricocheting inside her skull. She blinked, expecting him to vanish. He didn't.

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Comments:

The Perceptive Ones series

Book 1: The Challenge
Book 2: The Dare
Book 3: The Ultimatum (not yet published)
Book 4: The Quest (not yet published)