LUKE’S TOUCH
Tall, Dark, and Deadly / Walker Security novel
By Lisa Renee Jones
Welcome readers!
Writing Luke and Ana was emotional for me. The idea of finding the love of your life and then losing them to a tragedy that feels insurmountable is devastating even in premise. For Luke and Ana, there is history there to draw from, a history that bonds those people together, but obviously, some of that history is painful or they would still be together. Is love enough to bond these two forever when pain and heartache refuse to fade? And in the case of Luke and Ana, will they survive the enemy who wants to kill them long enough to find out?
To begin part two of this journey, I aspire to help you re-enter the world with memories of part one fresh and alive. If you remember, Luke and Ana met at a convenience store that had just been robbed. Ana, an FBI agent, thinks Luke is a bad guy and puts him on his knees, holding a gun on him. Her stepfather, who trains assassins for the government, appears on the scene and knows Luke. He tells her he’s a good guy, but no one who is an assassin is a good guy in Ana’s mind. But then Luke asks her out and tells her that he lost a friend that week and the idea of kissing her is the only thing that feels good right now.
He wins her over.
And so, the romance begins.
Flash forward a year, and the two are engaged. Luke plans to retire from his overseas contract work after finishing a couple of high-paying jobs that will buy Ana the ranch she dreams of owning. Before that retirement can happen, trouble explodes.
At Ana’s bidding, Luke allows her brother, Kasey, to join one of his last missions overseas, which equals a big payday for everyone on his team. The job is to safely transport a princess from one country to another. During this trip, Kasey is secretly running a side mission. Luke catches him handing off a package of some sort to someone at one of the small destination airports. Kasey ends up holding a gun to the head of the princess and long story made very short, Luke is forced to kill Kasey to save the princess and himself.
Meanwhile, Trevor, another one of the men on the assignment, disappears and so does the package. Trevor reappears in the US and beats Luke to Ana to tell her about Kasey’s death, which Trevor calls a murder. He claims Luke is the one running dirty side deals and Kasey confronted him. There is yet another confrontation, this time between Trevor, Ana, and Luke, and Luke is shot. Luke believes Ana shot him over her brother’s murder. In truth, she was certain Trevor was going to kill him, but her gun was knocked out of her hand, and she tried to catch it. It went off and shot Luke. After which, Trevor disappeared, and Luke and Ana fell apart. Supposedly, Trevor died in a car accident several months later.
Flash forward two years after Luke and Ana’s breakup, and Luke is working for Walker Security. He still believes Ana shot him. At some point early in their split, he even changed his phone number. She didn’t know how to reach him. Now, in the present day, he’s on a training drill in Texas with Walker Security, when he gets a call from Jake, a man who’d worked closely with Ana’s now-deceased stepfather, and ran a few of his last missions with Luke, including “that” mission. Jake is living in Estes Park, retired, and near his daughter. But retirement is not on his mind now. He’s being hunted. He tells Luke there’s a hitlist, but before he says more, he’s killed. A man grabs Jake’s phone and challenges Luke. The basic challenge was: I bet I can get to Ana before you do.
Luke charges to Ana’s rescue, finds her, and they have a fiery encounter before they’re attacked. Once they are out of the situation and safe, they begin hunting for answers, but nothing between them is right except the sexual tension, which is off the charts. They clearly still love each other. Throughout book one, you work with Ana and Luke to figure out who is on the hitlist, and why. It all comes back to the package. The two of them are on fire the entire time, wanting each other, but fighting the urge until they can’t fight it anymore. They’re in a safehouse in Breckinridge, Colorado when they make love, talk, and then hit a brick wall about how they get past the fact that Luke killed her brother.
As a side note, Luke’s nickname is Lucifer. He’s a pilot that flew dangerous missions and took impossible risks. He also did some dirty work for the government. He started to believe he was worthy of the name “Lucifer” until he met Ana. He did confess his past to her, but she already knew him as Luke, a good man. She refused to see him any other way. And therefore, Lucifer started to see himself as Luke as well.
Even now, after he killed her brother, Ana calls him Luke and refuses to see him as Lucifer.
Fast forward, Luke and Ana know they have to put their personal issues aside for now, and focus on staying alive and killing the enemy before the enemy kills them. With that quest in mind, if you remember, Luke suspected that Darius, Ana’s longtime friend from the FBI, was dirty, and actually betrayed her and almost got her killed. With Luke and the Walker team’s help, Ana seeks to discover the truth. She sets up a meeting with Darius, which he insists be off the grid, behind a corner store. Of course, the location he chooses already sets an ominous tone. Luke doesn’t want Ana to go, but Ana is a skilled warrior in her own right, and not about to back down.
She goes to meet Darius.
Luke is hiding a few steps away, behind the wall, and Walker has a team there monitoring the situation. But danger is near, oh so near for Ana. She steps toe to toe with a nervous, anxious version of her friend Darius, but he seems to want to talk. He’s about to talk when he is shot dead right in front of her, but not before he sticks a cellphone in her pocket. Luke grabs Ana and the two of them make a run for it. They end up downtown, hiding behind a dumpster when the phone rings. I’m going to start you out by reading the final scene of book one so that we are all back in the moment before book two starts.
And here we go!
I hope you enjoy the journey.
—Lisa
Final scene of book one
LUCIFER
I push off the dumpster and hold out my hand. “Let me have the phone.”
Ana doesn’t resist. She hands the cell to me, and I answer the call, already knowing who to expect. The man I spoke to once before. The man who killed Jake. “What do you want?” I ask.
“The package,” the man says.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And yet, we both know you do. Let. Me. Be. Clear. There are powerful people who want that package. My boss is one of those men. Unless you give it to me in the next twenty-four hours, everyone you have ever known is dead.”
My eyes narrow. “I don’t have it. I don’t know what it is. It must be worth a lot of money for you to be such a drama queen.”
“Don’t play with me.”
“I don’t play unless I’m paid. I don’t have it, but I’ll find it for a price. One million. One week.”
It’s not what he expects. He’s silent a beat that turns into three. That’s two too many for him to know what the fuck to do right now. “Two days and I let your people live.”