Taming His SEAL: Forbidden Desires, #1

By Vivian Leigh

Young Marine Tanner Jones can't seem to click with any of the women he dates. Too distant, too needy, or too lesbian, every relationship ends with a broken heart: his. 

Kristian Champagne is the Navy's finest sailor. Smarter, harder, braver. There's only one gap he doesn't know how to fill. Until he meets Tanner.

Will the two soldiers be able to navigate their own feelings in a world hostile to their love, or will the lives they lead tear them apart?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivian Leigh
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536536805

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Chapter 1

TANNER Jones knew a thing or two about rejection. Seven years of training, fighting, and dating had all beaten the same lesson into his close-cropped skull: never get your hopes up. And he’d failed to remember it yet again.

Kristen, his date for the evening, was a leggy brunette he’d seen off and on for the last two months. The scene of his current lesson in rejection was the dance floor of a club in midtown Manhattan, only a few blocks from his latest duty station. Thudding dance music blared throughout the converted warehouse. Lasers flashed through the clouds of smoke that drifted over the crowd of twenty-somethings in low-cut tops and muscle shirts. 

Kristen danced a few feet from the table where Tanner sat, shaking her ass alongside a girl in a zebra-striped tube top. Tanner eyed his beer and decided that more alcohol wasn’t going to solve his problems. He pushed the glass aside and waded back onto the dance floor. Kristen’s gaze flickered over him, but she didn’t make any move his direction. 

Tanner sidled up beside his date and her friend. He tried to get into it. He tried to shake his ass. Swivel his hips. He even smiled as Kristen turned a shoulder toward him. 

Hey, Kristen shouted. We’re going up on stage. Can you hold the table?

It wasn’t, he noticed, an invitation to join them.

Her clutch sat on the table, sequins glimmering in the flashing lights. Tanner screwed up his courage and said, Actually, you want to get a drink somewhere quieter?

Not really. She grabbed her purse, hardly sparing him a glance. I’ll call you.

The old familiar lie. Tanner nodded, even though he knew she wouldn’t. Kristen disappeared into the crowd, and Tanner made his way toward the club’s exit and the cold New York night beyond.

***

Going back to the barracks wasn’t high on the list of things Tanner wanted to do. His squad-mates knew he had a date, and if he rolled up at 10:30 by himself, they’d mock him relentlessly. So he needed a plan B. A peel of laughter erupted from an open door, and Tanner slowed to look inside. 

Thirty or forty people sat at a long wooden bar. Above them, an electric board showed beer names. Bartenders worked tap handles and distributed frothy glasses. 

Five dollars a draw. A thickset dude with a handlebar mustache sat on a barstool just inside the doorway. You military?

Marines, Tanner said.

Haircut gives it away. The bouncer waved him inside. "No cover,