Silver James

I have to admit, I’m starting to like Wednesdays for something more than being Hump Day. Playing #1lineWed over on Twitter is a great way to skim through my WIPs to find the overused words and the awkward sentence structure. Since today’s snippet comes from MONTANA MOON (which releases tomorrow!!), I’m pleased to say there’s nothing I’d really change. Oh! I need to tell y’all today’s theme, don’t I? The words is SHOWER. And yes, my characters seem to take a lot of them. 😆 To set the scene, after a short prologue, this is the opening to Chapter 1. I hope you enjoy and I hope you’ll snag your copy tomorrow when it goes live!
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The phone rang and rang and rang. Tait thrust an arm dripping with soap and hot water out of the shower to grab the damn thing. He checked the caller ID before turning it off. He’d already emailed a partial report. The rest of the debrief could wait until morning. He dropped the phone back onto the counter and retreated under the scalding water pouring from the shower head. He’d been back from the retrieval Hank Patterson, his occasional employer at Brotherhood Protectors, sent him on for all of thirty minutes. Two spoiled rich kids decided to hit the road in Mommy’s Mercedes. He caught the brats on the other side of the Mexican border, minus the Mercedes and in the hands of a cartel far more interested in human trafficking than was good for the two teen-aged girls. Despite saving their lives and other things, they’d bitched at him all the way back to a multi-million dollar log mansion in Aspen, where the father of the car thief handed over a cashier’s check with lots of zeros.

What the hell was wrong with young people today? Tait snorted and pictured himself in a rocking chair on his front porch shaking a cane at those young whippersnappers. Laughing ruefully, he leaned his hands on the granite tile lining his walk-in shower, head bent so the steaming liquid sluiced across his neck and shoulders. He was beat, as he was going on close to 72 hours with no sleep. Back in the day when he’d been running special ops with the SEAL teams, that had been a walk in the park. Even his wolf half was tired. The critter wanted a rare steak, the man a six-pack of beer, and both about 24 hours of curling up in front of the fire and snoozing. Sounded damn fine idea.

Tait “Shooter” McCord was a Wolf. He carried the lupi versi pellis gene on his Y chromosome and that weird little DNA anomaly gave him the ability to shift from man to wolf and back again. He never got sick, healed faster than normal when injured—and considering he’d been a SEAL for almost 20 years, he’d needed that special kick more than once. Tonight, though, he was feeling his age—emotionally if not truly physically. He’d come back to the Crazy Mountains in Montana to lick his wounds after that last mission in Bumfuck, Afghanistan. The operation had been a Charlie Foxtrot from the git-go. They’d only lost two men but the entire unit had been shot up, with half of the team sustaining career-ending injuries. Had he been human, his injuries would have resulted in a medical discharge. He’d received the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart. All three medals made him feel like a fraud. Getting his teammates out wasn’t heroic. It was part of the job. So he’d retired and returned to a place that had been home once upon a time.
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Things are about to get crazy for our intrepid hero. So what about y’all? Any shower words?