Sandra Hill, Hot and Heavy

Hot and Heavy

ISBN: 0843951605

Navy SEAL Lieutenant Ian MacLean leads his commando team on Operation Rodent; the objective is to eliminate terrorist leader Jamal Ben Hassan in Northern Iraq. The SEALS safely land near their target with Ian entering an empty cave to use as the rendezvous point.

In 1013 Madrene Olgadotter is paraded naked and in chains by Steinolf the Vicious who has taken over her home Norstead. When she continues to display a vitriolic tongue, he sells her to a harem. Over the next three years she is sold nine times, but no one touches her as she curses her owners with a shriveled jewel. She escapes her last captivity in Northern Iraq and hides in a cave.

Madrene surprises Ian and hits him with a rock. She binds him, but he easily escapes. He believes the sharp tongued beauty is Jamal's girlfriend while she thinks he is a caliph's slave. As they become acquainted during the dangerous mission, they fall in love, but neither is sure how much time she has although she will soon find her parents and siblings living comfortably in twenty-first century California.

The latest Viking time travel-SEAL romance is a fun tale starring two protagonists who belong together even if their birth dates are over a millennium apart. Madrene is terrific as she curses males with a shriveling ease until she meets Ian who thinks she is crazy but seems to enchanted by her with an opposite spell that leaves him in a permanent state of hardness due. Readers will enjoy Sandra Hill's latest romantic thriller starring this time a female Viking warrior and the SEAL she tames.

Sandra Hill

Leisure, Jul 2005, $6.99, 384 pp.

Harriet Klausner