Snowflake Rules (Almost), A Jake Stone Thriller (Book 17): The Jake Stone Thrillers, #17

By T.L. Peters

In this newest action-packed installment of the Jake Stone Thrillers, Snowflake reasserts her prerogatives as only she can in a book that has the look and feel of the final episode of the popular series. As you will see, however, there is more than enough room for Peters to take this ground-breaking series in a new direction. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

"Loads of action, lots of fun."

"Snowflake never gets stale for me."

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.L. Peters
• Release date: Apr 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301219520

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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Snowflake Rules (Almost), A Jake Stone Thriller (Book 17)

By T.L. Peters

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013, T. L. Peters

License Notes

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This book is a work of fiction. Any reference 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.

Bad stuff just comes out of nowhere sometimes.

Chapter 1

Snowflake had sent Jake off to the store to buy three gallons of milk and five dozen cartons of jumbo-sized eggs. Jake's ferocious spouse had recently decided that she was suffering from a lack of protein, and that extreme changes in her diet were necessary to remedy this perceived nutritional imbalance. Jake couldn't see any change in his wife's powerful musculature or in her dizzying arsenal of athletic and pugilistic skills, but Jake was not one to contradict Snowflake lightly, and so he did as he was told.

Fortunately for Jake, since he was lately required to make these excursions on a near daily basis, there was a small convenience store located only a few miles from their backwoods Pennsylvania homestead that offered a nice variety of dairy products for his wife and an abundance of salty snacks for himself. The old fashioned store with its aging clientele was generally a quiet place, but not this morning. As Jake pulled up to the gravel parking lot, he heard loud screams and groans coming from the side of the unpainted two story wooden building. Upon closer inspection Jake could see that a fight was in progress, and not just any fight, but a full-scale brawl involving about a half dozen beefy males and a lone female combatant.

Jake rushed out of his car while trying to discern exactly who was fighting whom, since the flailing of limbs and the spinning of bodies were so intense and violent that it was difficult to ascertain precisely the identity of the opposing sides in this exuberant contest. It might have taken most males quite a while to figure out what was really going on, the various pre- and misconceptions about the relative physical prowess of the sexes, especially when engaged in live, hand-to-hand combat, still being so prevalent in polite society. But because Jake had been subjected to so many beatings by his dear wife Snowflake, and even an occasional thrashing by his darling daughter Fierce, not to mention shellackings by numerous women, both friend and foe, over the many years he had served as Snowflake's part time mate and full time lackey, Jake was able to cut through the cultural stereotypes and perceive almost instantly that the battle was between the half dozen hefty men on the one hand, and the lean and muscular female on the other. Thus armed with not only a deep understanding of the lopsided situation confronting him, and her, but also with the moral clarity that came from his antiquated but still vibrant chivalrous attitudes, Jake rushed into the fray on the woman's behalf.

Jake was hoping to sneak up on one or more of the unsuspecting males in order to land a few cheap shots before his opponents could fully focus on his unexpected intrusion into their private quarrel. But before he could launch even a wimpy jab, his jaw was met with a rather vibrant flying knee strike. Jake quickly realized from the smooth hairless texture of his assailant's skin that this was no male knee but rather a female one. The knee was bony and solid, however, and the muscles, ligaments and tendons supporting it were sufficiently powerful to knock Jake unceremoniously down onto his fanny, from which embarrassing and ungainly posture he had a few seconds to contemplate this surprising turn of events.

Jake soon wrote off the blow to an understandable mistake on the woman's part. It was either an accident, since the woman's taut body was whirling about in seemingly every direction at once to the point that she must have found it hard to differentiate friend from foe, or she had not as yet realized that Jake was jumping into the conflict on her behalf. Perhaps she assumed that every male, at least in the present circumstances, must be her enemy. Having been at Snowflake's volatile and dangerous side for so many years, Jake could certainly understand such a misconception. Whatever the reason for her attack on him, however, Jake was ready to forgive her. He liked and admired strong women, after all, and this woman seemed stronger than most. But before he rejoined the melee, Jake decided to size up with a bit more detail and circumspection both his soon-to-be ally and her brawny male adversaries.

The woman spent so much time in a crouching posture that it took Jake some moments to estimate her height. He deduced, however, from the length of her legs and torso that she stood about five feet eight inches tall, give or take an inch or two. Her weight, he judged from a quick perusal of her heavily ridged belly and taut, sloped shoulders, was about 145 to 150 pounds. Her body was impressive, in other words, but hardly as overwhelming as the Amazonian physiques of his wife and daughter.

The woman was wearing a red tank top and light blue boxer shorts, and it was easy to see that she worked out regularly and intensely since her muscles were lean and hard. She was also amazingly flexible, and Jake watched with admiration as she landed a kick to the top of the skull of one of the unfortunate men just after she had executed a perfect back flip worthy of any world-class gymnast. Jake also observed that the woman placed strong emphasis on knee and elbow strikes, which Snowflake had once taught him was the hallmark of a Muay Thai fighter. Even though the woman's face was creased with intensity and drenched with sweat, she struck Jake as a rather pretty girl, her eyes dark and vibrant, her cheeks nicely ridged, and her hair black and long, though at the moment it was pulled back into a tight bun. She also possessed a formidable set of lungs judging by the fierce screams and yells emanating from between her rosy lips as she continued to batter her rivals with almost rhythmic intensity.

The males were a far less impressive group. Jake had seen their slovenly ilk on many occasions as he had accompanied his wife in frequent jousts with various low-life drug dealers and other criminals over their now decades-long association. They were wearing loose-fitting, checkered vinyl shirts over their protruding bellies and faded jeans over their increasingly wobbly legs. Their jowls were chunky and chafed and rather bloody from all the blows they had absorbed, their arms flabby and soft, and their thighs and calves jiggly and rather awkward as they staggered about attempting to gain sufficient balance to remain in a roughly standing posture. Three of the men were completely bald, and the other three had long, unkempt and rather greasy hair. They were all big, however, each man standing well over six feet and all weighing between 250 and 300 pounds.

The woman, who Jake estimated to be in her late twenties, seemed as unimpressed with her adversaries as Jake was, as evidenced by how she repeatedly dished out a flurry of knee and elbow strikes to various unguarded parts of their bodies while sprinkling in a nice mix of jabs, right crosses and spinning frontal and back kicks to keep them off balance. She was doing so well, in fact, that in the short time Jake had been studying her, she had decked two of her attackers into unconsciousness and was proceeding to box the ears of a third man while the other three stood by in dazed and painful silence.

Even though the woman was clearly winning the contest, Jake did not wish to take any