Title: Before The Morning
Author: +Zee Monodee
Series: Corpus Brides Book 2: The Prequel
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23598414-before-the-
morning
In this stand-alone prequel to the explosive Corpus Brides romantic
suspense/espionage series, found out how everything started when one of the
agency’s deadliest became the target of a rogue faction.
Before the morning
...is the time of
greater darkness...
A trained killer with
borderline sociopathic tendencies
Rayne Cheltham traced out her life's path when she was
twelve: she would marry her best friend and bear his children, and in the
process, stifle the restless edge in her. When he vows never to marry, she
gives in to the darkness and becomes a clandestine agent—until the day he walks
into her world again, and her carefully fabricated façade crumbles.
A former cop burned by
life and his personal demons
When Ash Gilfoy meets a woman who reminds him of his
childhood best friend, he starts upon a path that leads him down into the abyss
once again. The day Rayne waltzes back into his life, he knows she is his
second chance, and the one who will save him.
Each thinks the other
is their redemption...until they discover how deep darkness goes inside both of
them
The secrets between them make them sit on a keg of gunpowder
with a lit fuse in their hands. Rayne’s whole life is built on a lie, and the truth
is threatening to explode in their faces. But that is not the only menace they
have to face. Someone is out to get Rayne, and she must disclose her secret past
before it is too late.
Can Rayne and Ash survive all that’s thrown in their path?
Can they hang on to the last thread of their relationship, and can they emerge,
still together and still alive, in the morning after the deepest darkness?
Amazon CA http://w
ww.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00SU5Y6QQ?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Smashwords http://www.smashwords.com/books/vie
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[2 excerpts options. Please delete one]
Excerpt 1
From the front-facing window on the second floor of the
Shepherd’s Close freehold, Corpus secret agent Rayne Cheltham watched the
ambulance pull away from the curb.
Shivers crept up her arms, and she hugged herself tight to
ward them off.
Get a grip!
She was a professional on an assignment, for God’s sake.
An elite, trained operative from a clandestine agency that handled operations for governments and
international forces as a stealthy left hand. Her superiors entrusted her with the most important
missions—nothing should faze her.
Before today, she would’ve said that nothing could affect
her when she had her eyes on a goal.
But she couldn’t be sure anymore. She’d never had her
past collide with her present like a few moments ago, in the form of her childhood best
friend.
Ashford Gilfoy, better known as Ash. The boy who had
been there to catch her when, at six, she had slipped while climbing the chestnut tree that sat right
on the border between their two houses in Hastings, two days after her family had moved there
from Salisbury. The boy who had taught her how to ride a bicycle without the training wheels on the
long and winding, gravel-covered lane leading to her parents’ mansion. The teenager who had
smashed the nose of the first lad who had broken her heart, at thirteen, during recess in the
schoolyard. The young man she had left seventeen years ago on a platform at London Waterloo, on
the day she’d bid her old life goodbye.
For the first time since that day, she’d stepped back on
British soil, and kismet decided Ash should cross her path.
Why now, of all times? She stood a hair’s breadth away
from closing the contract on this mission. Seven months of intensive infiltration work and she
remained poised to achieve her aim—neutralize Nikolai Grigorievskiy’s criminal operations before
she took out the man. The Corpus always sent her for the kill, but the trick
spelled that she had to make her target’s death appear self-inflicted, at the bare minimum, or an
accident, in the direst of cases. Measles, as such operations were known in their clandestine
world—a planned assassination not leaving any indication of the cause of death. She would then
have to sanitize everything—leave no evidence, no witness, nothing to lead back to her. Unlike her
other agency counterparts, she wasn’t an out-and-out black ops assassin, but a different level of
highly implicated agent provocateur.
In other words, a consummate actress who got to her ends
by manipulating people and circumstances. All those years of drama school, at her mother’s
insistence when, obviously, she’d be too tall to become a ballerina, had come in handy. In fact, her
portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the drama school’s end of year play had caught the eye of the people
who had recruited her into the Corpus. Seventeen years now into the agency, fifteen of
them as Kali, her operative name, a sociopath with no apparent conscience who followed her orders
with diligence. Never had any one of her targets come close to figuring she could be an undercover
agent. Her track record was flawless—each assignment undertaken with one hundred percent
success rate and a marginal body count.
Until today, when she’d almost gotten
burned.
Excerpt
2
Ash blinked. He had to be dreaming. Except that the metal
band on his finger felt all too real—heavy, smooth, warm, and tight. He glanced at the ring, then at
Rayne. It took two people to get married, and she must be the other half of the equation. He didn’t
need to see the glinting, burnished piece of gold on her ring finger to put two and two
together.
Except, here, two and two equalled a whole muck up of
twisted shit. They were married? Since when? How? And worse, had they consummated the
union?
He snorted softly. Who was he kidding? Of course they’d
consummated their wedding. The only thing between him and Rayne lately amounted to sex, the
strings of their friendship just pale, sketchy ghosts grappling for hold where none existed to be
grappled.
As he raked his gaze over her, he caught sight of the deep
red hickeys on her neck. The confirmation he sought. Damn. He clearly remembered lowering his
head to kiss the unmarred column of her neck earlier during the evening when they’d stopped in
front of the Bellagio to watch the play of the water fountains. These love bites had happened
sometime between leaving the Vegas strip and him waking up with a headache, and he doubted
they’d done the deed in public. They must’ve slept together once back at the
house.
The pounding in his head intensified to a persistent
throbbing against every square inch of his skull. Seeing this ring on his hand had relegated the pain
to oblivion—he’d heard shock could do that to a person.
But, married? “What the hell is this,
Rayne?”
His voice sounded flat, and cold. She blinked; her eyes
then grew wide, and she parted her lips. He thought he saw the lower lip quiver. She brought her
arms up, wrapped them around her in a protective hug.
“I...I knew you’d think we made a
mistake.”
The shimmer of tears glimmered in her big, blue-grey eyes.
Damn it, she wouldn’t cry, would she? Because of him? He’d just been curt with her, but he’d woken
up to find out he’d gotten married. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember getting hitched, or even
proposing, or agreeing, to marry her. Bloody hell—most men would’ve gone bat shit ballistic for
less.
She gave a small hiccup and brought her hand up to rub
her open palm against her nose. Bad signs—she would soon unleash the waterworks.
Damn.
“Rayne...” He pulled himself up on the mattress, into a
sitting position. Reaching out, he placed his hands on her shoulders and squeezed gently. “Calm
down. Just give me a minute here, okay?”
She nodded, let her arms drop to her sides and blinked
hard a few times, as if to keep her tears in check.
“Tell me something,” he said as he released her. “Are we
really married?”
She bit her lip, and nodded.
Author, editor, smitten wife, in-over-her-head mum to a
tween boy, best-buddy stepmum to a teenage lad, bookaholic, lover of all things
fluffy & pink, chronic shoeholic, incompetent housewife desperate to
channel Nigella Lawson (and who’ll prolly always fail at making domestic
goddess status)...
Zee hails from the multicultural, rainbow-nation island of
Mauritius, in the southern Indian Ocean, where she grew up on the figurative
fence—one side had her ancestors’ Indian and Muslim culture; the other had
modernity and the global village. When one day she realised she could dip her
toes into both sides without losing her integrity, she found her identity.
This quest for ‘finding your place’ is what she attempts to
bring in all her stories, across all the genres she writes. Her heroines
represent today’s women trying to reconcile love, life, & relationships in
a melting pot of cultures, while her heroes are Alpha men who often get put
back into their rightful place by the headstrong women she writes. Love is
always a winner in her stories, though; that’s a given.
**Find more about the latest on Zee and her works in her
monthly newsletter http://eepurl.com/5GULr
**Read about her life & her books at her website/blog
http://zeemonodee.blogspot.com/
**Friend her on Facebook (she loves to make friends &
meet new people!) https://www.facebook.com/#!/zee.monodee<
/a>
**Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/ZeeMonodee
**Email her at this addy (she loves to talk...prolly too
much, even!) zeemonodee@gmail.com
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