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  Praise for Megan Crane

  “Crane’s start to her Fortunes of Lost Lake series is a charming romance featuring a delightfully brainy heroine.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “From its engaging setup to its endearing and quirky characters and the incredible Alaskan setting, I recommend Bold Fortune to romance readers who enjoy second chance romances, fish out of water tales, stories where opposites attract, or those set in the beautiful remoteness that is Alaska.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A long adrenaline rush punctuated by sweet and sexy interludes . . . Crane takes her appealing characters on a breakneck adventure around the world. A well-balanced mix of romance and suspense makes this a sure bet for series fans.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Special Ops Seduction

  “Megan Crane masterfully combines romance, suspense, and a dash of family drama in Special Ops Seduction. . . . A strong sense of place, whether it’s the wilds of Alaska or the vineyards of California, draws the reader deeper into this irresistible and emotional story.”

  —BookPage

  “Filled with mystery, suspense, and romance, Special Ops Seduction will have readers interested from the first page until the last.”

  —Harlequin Junkie

  “Special Ops Seduction is a compelling, perfectly balanced read. There is just the right touch of romance, action, camaraderie, and suspense.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Megan Crane’s mix of tortured ex–special ops heroes, their dangerous missions, and the rugged Alaskan wildeness is a sexy, breathtaking ride!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Karen Rose, on Seal’s Honor

  Titles by M. M. Crane / Megan Crane

  The Fortunes of Lost Lake Series

  BOLD FORTUNE

  RECKLESS FORTUNE

  Alaska Force Novels

  SEAL’S HONOR

  SNIPER’S PRIDE

  SERGEANT’S CHRISTMAS SIEGE

  DELTA FORCE DEFENDER

  SPECIAL OPS SEDUCTION

  Berkley Romance

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Megan Crane

  Excerpt from Bold Fortune by M. M. Crane copyright © 2021 by Megan Crane

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and Berkley Romance with B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780593335413

  First Edition: September 2022

  Book design by George Towne, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Megan Crane

  Titles by Megan Crane

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Bold Fortune

  About the Author

  Thank you for picking up this book! This story is for you.

  One

  Bowie Fortune never backed down from a dare.

  Especially not if the dare came from his mouthy kid sister, who might not be a kid any longer, sure, but the principle remained intact.

  Bowie liked to think of his refusal to back down—no matter how ridiculous the dare in question—as evidence not only of the high standards he maintained, but of a life well lived. The only kind of life worth living, to his mind.

  And he’d tried several lives on for size already, so he could tell the difference.

  As he landed his favorite longer-range Cessna on what passed for a runway in the middle of spectacular Montana ranchland, he figured his life was looking just fine. No thanks to Piper and the challenge she’d issued him. But the Rocky Mountains down here in the Lower 48 were giving him a gorgeous early-June welcome, as if summer really was on its way. The sky was big and bright. The land was pretty.

  You could do worse, the Bitterroot Valley had seemed to tell him as he came in.

  He set the plane down sedately and bumped along the countrified runway that was an upgrade from the gravel he was used to in Alaska. And laughed while he did it, because he laughed a lot more than some people considered appropriate—he laughed more the less appropriate they found it—and because sedate was not really his thing.

  Mail-order brides weren’t really his thing, either, but here he was.

  Bowie normally flew charter flights around the Alaskan bush for folks with a taste for the more thrilling things in life. It was a guaranteed adventure—and also something he would have done as soon as he got his pilot’s license, without anyone paying him. That he got to call it his job never failed to make him feel like he was getting away with something.

  He never forgot for a minute that some poor slobs had to sit in airless offices and go to tedious meetings all day, a fate worse than death as far as he was concerned. But then, Bowie was from Lost Lake, out in Interior Alaska, where it was an adventure to survive on any given Tuesday. Not to mention all ten and a half months of winter. He figured growing up off the grid the way he had was what had given him an appetite for taking risks the way folks in big cities took their buses and subways.

  Compared to some of the things he’d done—most recently, flying like a lunatic through spring storms with a pack of equally fearless outdoor photographers, for example—this mail-order bride deal sounded pretty tame. What was pretending to be married, pioneer-style, for one measly little Alaskan summer with a virtual stranger next to the thrill of landing on a glacier at 7,200 feet or playing hide-and-seek in fog and rain with some of the tallest mountains in the world?

  Piper had dared him to take part in this publicity-stunt-slash-contest being put on by a questionable collection of regional locals, mostly because, she’d maintained, he was too unruly and uncivilized to find himself a date, much less a wife. Even if the wife in question was fake and temporary, for the dubious purpose of a little prize money. Assuming they won.

  I date plenty, Bowie had told her with a grin, sitting at the comfortable family dinner table in his parents’ house at the far end of the lake one blustery spring night. How and when and who is a little too much information for your tender ears.

  There’d been a lot of snorting at that from the rest of the disre
putable humans he claimed as his own, but Piper had only smiled at him in that particularly sisterly way she had. As if she pitied him.

  It was meant to get his back up and it did.

  You’ve gone full mountain man and you don’t even know it, she’d said sadly, with a shake of her head. You’ve become the character you play on your charter trips.

  I beg your pardon. I do not play any characters. I provide local color and commentary, as requested.

  But he’d been grinning lazily while he said that because maybe he did play a role or two. If he felt like it. He wasn’t an actor, though. He could still remember the various attempts at community theater at the Mine. The Mine was the center of the lake community. It was a whole village except, unlike most villages, it was all under one roof at the head of Lost Lake rather than spread out around the lake or along a road. There were no roads. The Mine was the bar, the restaurant, all the shops, and a place to shelter from the inevitable weather, too.

  Watching folks he knew parade around in costume, orating in a great big room he couldn’t escape even if he was actively trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, was the stuff of nightmares.

  Piper had rolled her eyes at him. You’re going to die alone, eaten by wild animals, Bowie. Even if you tried to entice some poor woman to take a chance on you at this point, how would you get her to stay?

  Little sister. I don’t know how to tell you this. Bowie had held Piper’s gaze and let his grin expand some. I’m very persuasive in the right circumstances.

  What would happen if you had to actually get to know someone? his sister had asked, as if that was an idle question and she wasn’t directly challenging him. Because maybe Piper was a little bit of an actor herself. No song and dance on a flight past Denali. No flying off at dawn. What if you had to let someone get to know you?

  Bring it on, Bowie had replied immediately.

  The way Piper had likely known he would, because she’d smiled with a little too much satisfaction. I’m so glad you’re game, Bowie, she’d murmured. Smugly. Because there happens to be the perfect opportunity for you to prove it.

  And then she’d told him about the so-called mail-order bride contest taking place this summer. The rules were simple, according to Piper. The ladies who entered chose their men, after a stringent vetting process that would include home visits. Together, the so-called couple would spend the summer exemplifying the Alaskan frontier spirit by performing and documenting as many survival tasks and adventures, as well as good, old-fashioned frontier living, as they could. They were to post a picture every day and at least one video per week to a dedicated social media account, the better to advertise the charms of the area here, that, while remote and unspoiled as the locals liked it, could benefit from some more tourism in the summer months. The contestants were expected to promote the area and the contest, and any disreputable behavior would lead to disqualification, as would anything illegal or even distasteful in the eyes of the judges. The judges were a selection of local officials from villages in this part of the vast Interior who would get together and name one “best old-school frontier couple” at the end of the summer.

  The mail-order bride part was a gimmick and meant as a throwback to how a lot of folks’ great-grandparents had met out here, as no weddings would actually be occurring— at least not as part of the contest. What contestants did afterward was up to them.

  When Bowie had suggested that might be the dumbest idea he’d ever heard, he discovered that said dumb idea had come about thanks in no small part to his own brother, the unofficial mayor of the unincorporated Lost Lake community. Quinn had been more than happy to discuss the whole thing in detail, even though Bowie thought it was about as foolish as that time Mia Saskin, known as Grand Mia to one and all around here, had decided they should have an Adopt a Bear contest. All fun and games until the bears in question took exception to being tracked.

  With both Piper and Quinn going on about the mail-order bride thing, a lot like they were in cahoots, Bowie had been backed neatly into it. He’d had no choice but to laugh like it was his very own idea and sign up on the spot.

  Then act like he’d enjoyed every minute that had brought him out here to Montana to collect his fake bride for the summer, in the hope they might win some money if they made it all the way to Labor Day and proved themselves the most old-school Alaska while they did it. Whatever that was.

  He laughed again now as he climbed down from the cockpit and took a deep breath of Montana.

  “Idiots,” he muttered into the stillness, though it was hard to say which idiot he meant. There were so many involved in this that it was hard to choose.

  But it was done now. He’d chosen to fly down and pick up his bride for the summer because he could, and maybe because he’d wanted to both get his head straight with the nice, long flight as well as get to know the woman in question before they just . . . lived together. In his house.

  Besides, there was no denying it was pretty here, and he’d always been a sucker for a pretty place with the wild still in it. Montana had that going for it. It was gorgeous by anyone’s standards, if a little soft by his. For one thing, there were roads. He’d seen them as he’d flown south. A person could drive anywhere, right on out to the interstate if they had a mind to. All the way to the sea or anywhere else that appealed.

  Not like up in Lost Lake. There were no roads, only preferred tracks, rugged vehicles, and a lot of willpower, depending on the tricky Alaskan weather, to make it down to the nearest small village from their hardy little community. The town of Hopeless sat on a bend in the epically twisty Upper Kuskokwim River and had been named, originally, to indicate the state of mind of the gold rush hopefuls who had not gotten what they’d trekked all the way out into the hinterland to find. These days the locals figured the name kept undesirables—meaning, the kind of looky-loos who cluttered up the Southwest Passage on their cruise ships every summer—far away.

  In Interior Alaska, roads were a luxury. But then, so was summer. Some years it was just midnight sun most of the night and gray skies all day. You made of it what you could. That was some real old-school Alaska right there.

  Bowie let his feet get acquainted with Montana dirt while he stretched a little. He’d flown in over his would-be fake bride’s family ranch today to get a feel for the place. He knew that he had to walk a ways to get to the main house, and he took his time doing it.

  He told himself he was getting the lay of the land. Could be he was also putting off the inevitable trouble coming his way. Because Bowie loved himself some danger. Thrived on it, even. But trouble he avoided like the plague.

  And he’d never known a woman who wasn’t some kind of trouble.

  He had to figure that the kind of woman who would sign up for a bizarre contest in the boondocks was trouble with a capital T.

  It was perfect walking weather today, with plenty of time to appreciate his last few moments of untroubled freedom. A pretty day in the kind of coy spring that marked most northern places he’d been—warm and bright with a punch of lingering cold beneath it. The Bitterroot Valley was putting on a show. There were carpets of wildflowers everywhere. The Rocky Mountains were flexing their rugged beauty on all sides, some peaks still whitecapped.

  If a person had to live outside Alaska, Bowie thought as he walked, Montana wasn’t a bad bet.

  He walked for a good fifteen minutes along the little dirt track before he wound around to the house he’d seen from up above. Then he slowed, because as he approached, he could see folks were already gathered out in the yard.

  Bowie wasn’t the sort to turn down a parade in his honor, but somehow he guessed that floats and a marching band weren’t where this was going.

  He made sure his face was set in its usual amiable, easygoing expression, stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, and slowed his walk to a saunter. And he checked out the scene awaiting him from behind his s
tandard-issue aviator shades while he approached.

  The marines might not have been for him, in the long run. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t learned a few things along the way.

  Like performing a little recon on all things whenever possible. He liked to look lazy and unbothered and infinitely unthreatening, but that was a lot easier when he already knew what he was walking into. In this case, he was going in blind.

  Piper had laughed when he’d suggested that he should have the opportunity to personally vet the woman he’d be spending his summer with. A little theatrically, to his mind, there at her cottage where he had virtuously stopped by to help her out with a little springtime roof repair.

  You’re not the customer here, idiot, she’d told him scornfully, squatting back on her haunches on top of her cabin with the lake behind her like a bright blue frame, this side of the spring breakup that melted all the ice. She’d wiped at her forehead. You’re a contestant.

  He hadn’t liked that much, but he’d run with it. It’s really not fair to the other contestants, though, is it? he’d asked, treating her to his best charming grin.

  Mostly because she was his sister, immune to his charm since birth, and his best grin usually made her roll her eyes. That time was no exception.

  I don’t know what makes you think you have a hope in hell of winning, she’d said, returning her attention to the roof. I think what you should concentrate on this summer is a little information gathering. About yourself and how weird you’ve become.

  Bowie was under the impression that being weird was a favorite Alaskan pastime, and that his sister lived in a glass house of her own strangeness, but he’d only laughed.

  While attempting to look wounded. What? I’m a catch.

  Catch and release, maybe, Piper had replied, her eyes gleaming when she’d looked at him again. I feel sorry for your poor mail-order bride, Bowie. Truly I do.

  If he was honest, Bowie felt the same. But probably not for the same reasons.