Peace, A Jake Stone Thriller (Book Ten): The Jake Stone Thrillers, #10

By T.L. Peters

Snowflake finally meets her match, or matches to be more precise, in this 40,000 word tenth installment of the ongoing saga of Jake and his lovely and ferocious friend, Snowflake.

If this is where you believe the Jake Stone Thrillers should end, or if you would like to read a few more volumes, please post a review or leave a comment through my smashwords author page to my blog.

This book can easily be read as a stand alone novel. So if you haven't yet read any of the other Jake Stone Thrillers, give this short novel a try and see what you think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.L. Peters
• Release date: Feb 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465781031

T.L. Peters

"There's no question that Peters is a master wordsmith." Gerry B's Book Reviews About the author: T.L. Peters is an ex-lawyer who enjoys playing the violin and giving his dog long walks in the woods. In between, he writes novels.

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Peace, A Jake Stone Thriller (Book Ten)

By T.L. Peters

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012, T.L. Peters

License Notes

This e book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

To read more about the author and his other books, go to http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tlpeters.

I grabbed the first volume of The Jake Stone Thrillers for $0.99 and started reading out of curiosity—after a few pages I couldn’t put it down. Mr. Peters writes in a very fresh, authentic style, and the characters have a real charm. The plot is well developed and keeps the pages turning. I’m already buying the next few books in the series. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Tiger03.

There’s no question that Peters is a master wordsmith. Gerry B’s Book Reviews

Chapter 1

Snowflake finally meets her match.

Snowflake dug her long sturdy fingers into the back of Fierce's brawny neck and spun her around before landing two quick left jabs to her daughter's midsection. Snowflake was certain the powerful strikes would deck the much younger and less experienced fighter. After all, Snowflake had never lost a fight, at least not in the final reckoning. Indeed, over the years she had triumphed with relative ease in match-ups against the vast majority of her rivals, both powerful men and vicious women tumbling like dominoes under the force of her lethal hands and feet.

But these latest blows, delivered with the same skilled and ferocious intensity that had become Snowflake's trademark, bounced off Fierce's rock hard abs like tennis balls ricocheting off a brick wall. Astonished, Snowflake took a step backward and tried to gather herself as her daughter once again charged toward her.

What was Snowflake thinking, Jake wondered, squatting alongside his friendly Golden Retriever, Samson, just outside the specially constructed twelve-sided titanium steel cage he and Snowflake had built in an underground bunker right below their remote Western Pennsylvania home. His clever wife should have known better, apparently suffering a momentary lapse in her usually laser-precise fighting instincts.

Snowflake had trained Fierce from the time Fierce was a toddler. By then the kid knew all her mother's tricks, or at least it seemed so to Jake as he observed Fierce clobber Snowflake with a knifehand strike to the throat followed quickly by a flying side kick to the older woman's rib cage. But Snowflake, even well into middle age, was still no patsy and instantly responded with a hammer fist to Fierce's head and a series of quick jabs to the younger woman's kidney and sternum region.

The blows might have debilitated a typical champion heavyweight fighter, male or female, and probably would have killed an average man or woman. But the strikes had seemingly little effect on the six foot four inch, 230 pounds of lusciously sculpted muscle and rock hard bone otherwise known as Fierce Stone, Jake's little girl, the unisex wonder with a fully functioning set of both male and female sexual organs, the hermaphrodite who at her mother's insistence had taken a vow of celibacy, the miracle child to whom Jake had become best friends, and who, under his watchful eye, had apparently grown up to be something of a monster, at least when it came to bare fisted cage matches.

The question remained, though, how she would perform in the outside world when there were no rules and her opponents were determined to kill her. Jake had seen a taste of what Fierce could do at Ocracoke, where on those hard sandy North Carolina dunes she had annihilated dozens of lethal fighters with her bare hands. Still, Jake was somewhat uneasy. For all her skill and power, Fierce seemed to lack her mother's killer instinct. Fierce, the Princeton grad, was a far more thoughtful and deliberative creature, slow to anger, always smiling, constantly looking for the best in people. How would she fare when she was thrown into the cold cruel world all on her own?

For the moment, however, she seemed to be doing quite well, as she landed three successive jabs to Snowflake's chin. She then flipped the older but still rock solid woman over her broad shoulders before folding her up into a tight ball with a combination reverse arm bar and leg scissors. Fierce could do it all, Jake ruminated with fatherly pride—Judo and Karate, both traditional forms and the newer variations, wrestling, boxing, Jiu Jitsu, grappling, kick boxing, ground fighting. Any type of martial arts style you could think of, Fierce was not only conversant with it, she was an expert.

Her mother had seen to that, spending hours in the gym over many years, painstakingly demonstrating to Fierce every possible twist and thrust of her supple body from every possible angle, all geared to eliminating any opponent or collection of opponents crazy enough to take her on. And not only was Fierce a naturally gifted athlete, she had rigorously trained her sterling physique in an exercise regimen that would have taxed your average comic book super hero—a daily three sets of twenty repetitions of 550 pounds on the bench press, a five mile jog each morning that to Jake looked more like a sprint, nightly bending herself into a bone crunching pretzel before she went to bed in a series of Yoga exercises her mother had specially devised just for her nubile frame, and five times a week for an exhausting hour or so and with eye popping speed and dexterity flinging herself around the uneven parallel bars Jake had installed in their back yard.

Fierce seemed ready for anything, and anything might well have been an accurate description of the murky future her mother envisioned for her. Snowflake was usually spot-on with her predictions. But all she could tell Jake of their daughters's destiny was a series of rambling prophecies about some great and fearsome task that only Fierce could perform, sprinkled in with vague nonsense—or at least Jake considered it so—about Fierce representing the first paradigm of some revamped breed of creature heralding the advent of a wonderful new world.

Jake viewed it all as well-intentioned baloney, all but the part about Fierce's mission, which Jake feared might indeed hold some terrible and implacable secret that even he, with all the turmoil he had experienced at Snowflake's tempestuous side for these many years, could only guess at. After all, like any good dad, Jake loved his daughter, and he still considered Fierce his daughter, even with her unique biological makeup.

Despite Fierce's vow of celibacy, which the lawyer in Jake regarded as an invalid oath taken under the clear duress of Snowflake's tyrannical household rule, Jake would have just as soon seen his daughter fall in love with some nice young man, or perhaps woman, Fierce having the unique ability to engage in procreation from either angle, and settle down to raise a family in a quiet and peaceful life, with Jake and Snowflake visiting often as they watched their grandchildren grow up in peace and security. To Jake's more traditional way of thinking, this would have been heaven, or at least a worthy substitute for that distant celestial realm, but his volatile wife had other ideas.

Snowflake's vision of paradise was more on the order of a fire-and-brimstone eschatological revelation in which her sturdy and talented offspring would play a central and combative role. That was why she had thrown her whole being into making sure Fierce grew up strong and confident, maybe a bit too strong and confident, Jake mused, as he watched Fierce hoist her mother high over her head before bouncing the older woman off the top bar of the steel cage.

Snowflake landed on her lumpy but still muscular hips with a stinging thud, and for the first time Jake could remember his powerful wife flinched in rather obvious pain. Fierce stood over her, not at all out of breath or otherwise spent by the struggle, her long blond hair flowing gently over her sleek but still burly shoulders, her lovely face beaming cheerfully, but with a look of studied concern creeping into her brilliant green eyes as her mother began moaning and grunting while unsuccessfully attempting to struggle to her feet.

Jake had never seen Snowflake in such dire straits immediately after a fight, except for the time the mega woman had gotten the best of her in their first desert match in the Mexican wilderness. But that minor and temporary defeat had been decades ago, and Jake had since been lulled into a kind of serene complacency by all his wife's impressive victories over many years. This, however, was not some despicable villain thrashing his dear Snowflake, but his lovely daughter Fierce. Perhaps it was a sign that Fierce was now ready for whatever the heavenly powers had decreed was her destiny.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on your perspective, Jake did not really believe in destiny, and neither did Snowflake. Theirs was a world of free will, relentlessly so, and Jake, despite Snowflake's constant harping and nagging, was not yet sure what sort of future his daughter would choose.

Are you okay? Fierce asked, bending over her still flailing mother while trying to assist the older woman in any way she could.

That was a mistake, Jake thought immediately. Fierce should have known to keep up her guard at all times, especially when tangling with Snowflake, whose motto had long been that you can never fight dirty enough. Snowflake quickly locked her elbow under her daughter's armpit and, with a show of pure physical might which impressed even Jake, who had seen it all before, hoisted Fierce sideways and then rolled the young girl over her back.

Fierce landed in a heap in the center of the canvas, where she quietly proceeded to absorb a relentless pounding by her suddenly reinvigorated mom. Kicks and punches and karate chops, mixed in with a few active and well timed slaps and palm strikes, were flying everywhere, mostly in Fierce's direction. It got so bad that Jake was considering intervening in the fray.

His chief difficulty, however, was that he had no precise idea of quite how he was going to stop the onslaught, short of clubbing his wife over the skull with something on the order of a crowbar, which from long experience he knew might prove miserably ineffective. Fierce solved the dilemma for him by suddenly executing a perfect leg sweep against her mother's curvy gams, a maneuver she had first learned from her proud dad by the way, which quickly knocked Snowflake right off her sturdy feet.

Soon Fierce was again in charge of the match, following up a general clobbering of her mother around the head and shoulders with a rigid choke hold that left Snowflake motioning wildly with