First Responders

Dr. Ali Torveau knows just how fragile life can be - she sees death and tragedy every day in the trauma unit. Battling the dark forces of fate is her life's work and she doesn't want or need anything else, certainly nothing as transient as love. Plenty of women try to change her mind, but she never has any trouble saying no. Not until the day firefighter Beau Cross shows up in her ER and sets Ali’s carefully ordered world aflame.

Firefighter paramedic Mallory "Ice" James commands a crew of smokejumpers - twenty women and men who eat together, sleep together, and parachute into the face of raging forest fires together - and she has thirty days to whip the rookies into shape. Mallory isn't happy when "Hotshot" Jac Russo shows up unannounced for boot camp along with a reputation for being trouble. Mallory and Jac may not like each other much, but lust isn't something either can control - and they soon discover ice burns as fiercely as flame.

Navy Captain Wes Masters, newly posted to head the White House Medical Unit, is a physician with only one patient, but her job is twenty-four/seven. Her charge is simple - protect and preserve the well-being of the most powerful man in the world - the President of the United States. Her job gets even harder when she has to prove she is up to the task to Secret Service Agent, Evyn Daniels, a member of the elite Presidential Protection Detail, and a woman who challenges Wes on more than just the professional front...

After two years and too many lost troops, Navy medic Max de Milles is ready to go home. Her last tour is up in four days and she will soon be catching a transport to the States. Life is looking good until she gets detailed to evacuate a humanitarian group in south Somalia. Rachel Winslow and her Red Cross team are caught in the crossfire during a vicious civil uprising, but she refuses to abandon her team members as the rebels close in on their camp. By the time Max and the Black Hawk arrive, it may already be too late.

Gillian "Gem" Martin is the lead biologist at a wildlife sanctuary on the Northeast coast and head of the Wildlife Emergency Response Team called in when catastrophes, man-made or natural, threaten the endangered species she studies. Austin Germaine is a troubleshooter, the hired gun for a big oil company, whose job is to help contain leaks and prevent media coverage of a pending disaster until the danger can be eliminated. If it can be.

Jay "Flash" Reynolds has a brilliant future as a trauma surgeon until a truck on a rainy night changes her life. Assistant chief medical examiner Olivia Price is more at ease with the dead than the living - at least the dead never lie. All she needs to do is listen to their stories. What she doesn't need is a surly new resident who would rather be somewhere else. Two women, one with a damaged body, the other a damaged spirit, challenge each other to dare to live again.

Army National Guard Colonel Sawyer Kincaid has served her time dueling with death in the deserts of Africa. Now that she's home, the only sand she wants to see is on the beach in South Florida. Too bad Tropical Storm Leo, swiftly gaining strength out over the Atlantic, is about to draw her in to another life or death war, this time on home soil. Dr. Dara Sims has too many critical patients in the intensive care units at Miami Memorial to consider evacuation, no matter how determined the battle-hardened colonel is to make her. As far as Dara is concerned, evacuate is just another word for abandon. When a state of emergency becomes a state of siege waged by Leo, all she can do is hope the rising waters relent before she loses everyone, herself included.