Spotlight & Giveaway: Beyond the Limit by Cindy Dees

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Cindy Dees to HJ!

Hi Cindy and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Beyond the Limit!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Oooh, fun! My one-liner description is it’s a smoking hot battle of the sexes to create the first female SEAL.

My slightly longer description: The Secretary of the Navy has ordered the Navy SEALs to get their first woman SEAL…now. The Navy finds an attractive woman officer who they plan to walk through BUD/S training and then make a poster child of. The SEALs have no intention of making her a real SEAL. Pageant queen and media officer, Sherri Tate, has other ideas, however. Her primary trainer, a hot, alpha SEAL named Griffin Caldwell, is reluctant at best about the idea of women on the teams, but Sherri gradually wins him over…in love and in war.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

Umm, perhaps a little context would be wise on these lines. The SEAL team that’s about to be assigned to train the first woman SEAL is at one of their buddy’s weddings. The bridezilla made the fatal error of failing to order them to behave. Hence, they’re raising a wee bit of hell at the reception…

Griffin Caldwell groaned as his buddy—his exceedingly shitfaced buddy—Axel Adams stood up, waving around a flimsy plastic champagne glass in his meaty fist and slurred, “A toast. To the groom. The greatest guy ever to shove a grenade up a camel’s—”
Griffin leaped up and slapped a hand over Axel’s mouth in the nick of time.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I researched this story years ago without knowing that someday I would become an author and write about SEALs. (I worked in a test program for SEALs to jump out of C-5’s, a big cargo airplane I flew in the Air Force. Whenever we flew with a new group of them, my loadmasters delighted in telling the SEALs a woman was flying their plane. I always knew we had a new group of SEALs because one of them would inevitably climb the ladder to the cockpit, poke his head around the corner and check me out. Usually, the next thing I heard was the SEAL groaning, “Fuck me.”
• The SEALs believe the first woman SEAL will come from the Crossfit™ community. The guys who founded the whole Crossfit™ gym/training system were SEALs and teach the same training methods and exercises SEALs use. The top several women Crossfit™ athletes in the world already meet the fitness requirements to make it into BUD/S. It just so happens that none of them have been in the military nor interested in becoming SEALs, yet!
• There is a real, World War Two Army base named Camp Davis exactly where I placed my fictional Camp Jarvis, and it looks pretty much how I described it in the book. I chose coastal North Carolina in the fall/winter to train my women SEALs because it’s the only place in the eastern U.S. with water as cold as the Pacific Ocean that also has nearby military bases. One of the biggest challenges of BUD/S is the hypothermia of swimming in the Pacific, and I needed to simulate that for my women.

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would you use for the audition of the main characters and why?

Ooh, this is a juicy question! I guess I would go for an early scene in the book where they’re starting to feel the personal attraction between them, but he’s still super resistant to the idea of women SEALs. There’s a ton of friction between them at this point, and I would want to see the actors re-create that. Here’s a piece of that scene:

He stared at her, his chest rising and falling every bit as fast and hard as hers. He surprised her by releasing her shoulder to push a strand of hair back from her face, and she froze, fascinated and wary of where this was headed.
“Christ,” he breathed. “I can’t get enough of looking at you.”
Her brow puckered a little. Really? This was about her looks? She sighed. Sometimes she got so sick of how hung up people got at how she looked. She’d won the genetic lottery. Folks could get over that already. She would love, just once, for a man to look at her and see her mind. Or her loyalty. Or her courage.
He muttered, “I want to understand you.”
“What is there to understand?”
“Explain to me what a girl like you wants with becoming a Special Forces operator like me.”
She chose to ignore the ‘girl like you’ part of the question, focusing instead on what motivated her to be here. “I expect I want roughly the same thing you do. To serve my country and do something cool in the process.”
“There’s a hell of a lot more to being a SEAL than that.”
“And that’s what you’re here to teach me.”
“It’s more than a skill set, or even a mindset. It takes…heart.”
“Are you saying women don’t have heart? That we aren’t brave enough? Tough enough? Stubborn enough?”
His face was swathed in shadows, his jaw and nose mere outlines, his eyes unfathomable caverns of black. Still, she couldn’t miss the frustration rolling off him. It was a living thing, twisting around them both, tightening nooselike, pulling them together, yet holding them apart.
Their wills clashed as she stared back, challenging him to acknowledge that she had the mental and emotional wherewithal to match him step for step.

Excerpted from Beyond the Limit by Cindy Dees. © 2019 by Cindy Dees. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

I want people to understand that any woman who cracks the male fortress of the SEALs is going to have a tough, uphill battle. But, the right woman can do it. As for male SEALs, they can be stubborn as all heck, but they’re ultimately reasonable human beings. When a woman finally proves she can do the job, they’ll be willing to work with her. Beyond that, I always want readers to walk away from one of my books remembering that love conquers all obstacles.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

Right now, I’m flying through writing the third book of the Valkyrie Ops series. Every now and then a book seems to write itself, and this one is doing that—thank goodness! The second Valkyrie Ops book is due out next April, and the third book later next year if I had to guess.

As for other 2019 books, three new Medusas books are out this year in May, June, and July, for Harlequin Romantic Suspense. Years ago, I wrote nine books about the first all-female Special Forces team, and I was delighted to be asked to write three more of them for this year!
The first one is about a woman being recruited to the team and learning to be a Medusa in the bayous of south Louisiana. The second book is about a Medusa who’s kidnapped by a group of terrorists. One of the bad guys is an undercover CIA agent who looks out for her and takes down the terror cell with her. The last book is about an attack at the Summer Olympics and the Medusas (and a seriously sexy Israeli Mossad agent) racing to stop it.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Paperback copy of Beyond the Limit (Valkyrie Ops Book 1)by Cindy Dees

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Assuming you were totally buff and the fitness standards were no problem for you, would YOU want to be a Navy SEAL? Why or why not?

 
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Book Info:

Team Reaper has a new mission…
Train the first female SEALs

Navy SEAL Griffin Caldwell is not happy with his team’s top-secret mission, training the first female SEALs. Griffin’s determined to prove that that his trainee Sherri Tate—a former beauty queen no less—doesn’t have what it takes to join the world’s most elite warrior’s club. Until he sees what she’s capable of, and even this hard-nosed SEAL has to admit she’s tough as nails. What he won’t admit to is the attraction sizzling between them.

Navy media officer Sherri Tate is more than just a pretty face. When she’s given the opportunity to achieve her dream of becoming a SEAL, she won’t let anything stand in her way, not even her arrogant trainer, who is too sexy for words.

When a dangerous mission lands Sherri and Griffin in the cross hairs of the world’s most feared terrorist, it’s going to take everything they have to come out with their lives—and hearts—intact.

Book Links: Amazon | B&N | Apple | IndieBound | BAM
 
 

Meet the Author:

Cindy Dees is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fifty suspense and thriller novels. She also draws upon her twenty-plus years of live-action role-playing experience to write epic fantasy novels. She has participated in the Dragon Crest world since 1996 and is the co-author of The Sleeping King.

All my social media links are on my website: www.cindydees.com but in the meantime…
Facebook: cindydees.94 and cindydeesauthor
Twitter: @cindydees
Instagram: dees.cindy