Judith’s review of Hot on Her Tail by Ruth D. Kerce
Captain Aaron “Ace” Trainer is assigned to protect a witness who will be testifying against a drug trafficking ring. The problem? It’s a woman he’s known since high school. A woman he’s never been able to forget after the on-night-stand they shared years earlier.
Rachel finds herself in big trouble. She’s gotten involved with an organization that wants her dead. She’s shocked to learn that Ace will be her bodyguard—the same man who treated her so badly after their night of hot sex many years ago. Now her life is in his hands. He’s still hot as all get out and sexy as ever, but he’s also just as arrogant and irritating.
Stuck in the forest, running for their lives, Ace and Rachel put aside the past and rekindle the fire that never went out. This time it’s more than sex and lust—it’s passion that becomes deeply emotional. Only their new found love and trust in each other will be sufficient to save them. Rachel’s just not sure it will last this time around.
This is one of those stories that starts off kind of slow. It is not a simple boy-meets-girl tale; it is far more complicated with suspense, action, undercover bodyguards, witness protection schemes, and so forth. In the midst of this messy situation lies the almost hidden attraction between Rachel and Ace—an attraction that has survived for many years in spite of the fact that each of these people have moved on with their lives from the passionate night they shared in the past. The remembrance of that particular night has never been far from their individual thoughts. In fact, it has often been the subject of Ace’s dreams, and Rachel’s too.
Ruth Kerce is a new author to me, but she managed this complicated story very well. It is not easy to pack so much into this shorter literary form, but I think she carried it off. She has given the reader a sense of the danger and the fear that becomes almost like another person who is living in one’s house and who never goes away. The reader gets the feeling that as hard as Rachel tries to assure herself that she is being protected, she is aware that there are unprincipled people who are willing to do whatever they need to do to insure that she never testifies. The plot is well thought out and the conflicts that drive the story feel real and believable. Undercover with Rachel and Ace is their own personal encounter, one that is fraught with the baggage of hurt and questions, so much so that is seems for a time that the barriers between them are too high. Yet even when they are running for their lives and have almost nothing available to sustain them in any way, their long buried desires re-ignite and become what they could have so easily become long ago: a true and authentic love.
With the heightened awareness most TV viewers have of the witness protection programs and with the problems that are part and parcel to that way of life, it is good to have a short story that deals with some of those issues: fear, risk-taking, security or the lack of it, and a renewed appreciation for one’s life. In a very short space the author introduces the reader to the insidious nature of the drug crime establishment and how far-reaching the tentacles of those who are involved in securing their future at the cost of countless lives. Rachel’s story helps to make that point.
This was a good read – a nice length, a good story, colorful and well-developed characters—all the stuff of which good stories are made. This will be a nice read for a rainy afternoon, or even a sunny few hours under one’s favorite shade tree, or like me, those two hours or so that I am awake in the middle of the night.
I give this work a rating of 3.75 out of 5.
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