Beckett Jamieson discovers he’s adopted when a lawyer hands him a letter from his mother on his twenty-first birthday. His real name is Robert Bullen, but the Bullen family is involved in criminal activity of the worst kind. He decides to bring them down but ends up badly beaten and temporarily blinded. A Sanctuary agent takes him to a safe house to heal.
Doctor Kayden Summers, Sanctuary operative, isn’t happy about being stuck in the middle of nowhere with an unconscious man. When Beckett wakes, the situation goes from bad to worse. Beckett doesn’t trust him, is as determined as ever to find the evidence his mother hid, and on top of all that, Kayden finds himself attracted to the determined young man.
Can they overcome their issues and eliminate the threat from the Bullen brothers?
Mrs Condit Reads Books Face Value is quick and sexy story about covert operatives fighting crime and falling for love at the same time. I’m definitely looking forward to reading the next book in the series.
MM Good Book Reviews I liked all the secondary characters (except the Bullens) even the FBI guy (although I felt perverse pleasure at his frustration) and I felt so sorry for poor Austin (the family lawyer), we get to see Manny again and we meet Adam who is also with Sanctuary. So how many more stories can we look forward to? *Squee*
Queer Magazine Online Reviews The focus of this story is definitely the crime investigation and Beckett’s growing realization of what really happened seventeen years ago.
Joyfully Jay Reviews As I got to the end of Face Value, I immediately wanted to reach for the next book. And then the one after that. I want to know more, I want more of Beck and Kayden (they are that interesting and they deserve it). I want to see the Bullen family pulled down and justice served. Of course, I also want more Dale and Joseph from The Only Easy Day, as well as Nik and Morgan from Guarding Morgan. Book by book, Scott is building my Sanctuary addiction and now I can’t wait for the next one. The next couple. And perhaps a glimpse of those we have already met and loved.
“What the hell am I looking for?” Beckett Jamieson stood in the center of the room and then spun slowly in a full circle, cataloguing as much as he could. Nothing fit the description of what she had said would be here. There was no carved finial; in fact the bed looked new. Probably a lot newer than the eighteen years ago he was last here. But surely she would have known things could change before his twenty-first birthday. So the carving she talked of, maybe it wasn’t a decorative carving on a bed. He looked at the two freestanding drawer units that served as bedside tables. They were frustratingly simple in their design.
“Come on, Mom. There’s nothing that looks half way carved in this room. Help me out here.” Up until four weeks ago he hadn’t known that his birth mother had left this puzzle for him to solve. He had known since his tenth birthday that he was adopted but he had never felt any compulsion to charge across the States looking for nebulous family or for birth parents who clearly hadn’t wanted him. Not when he was ten and fixated on Transformers, or fifteen when he realized he was gay, or at eighteen when his college years were just beginning. Twenty-one was the magic year; but not through any intention of his.
His mom and dad, Isla and Derek Jamieson, the people who took him in as a small child, had taken any information they may have had on his real parents to their graves a few years before. All they had ever said was that everything would be made clear when he was twenty-one and old enough to be who he wanted to be. Being called in to meet Austin Mitchell, apparently the family lawyer, had been the catalyst for wanting and needing to know more.
The lawyer–“call me Austin”–had handed him a thick file that contained a letter in a sealed envelope and a carefully wrapped package. The label on the package held a simple missive: Happy twenty-first, Robert, with love, Mom.
“You knew my birth mother?” Beckett always looked on her as that. Isla Compton was his real mom. The one constant in his life; provider of cookies and hugs and one hell of a lot of love.
“I knew her well enough.” Austin said this in an utterly matter of fact way but Beckett could see the twitch of his lips and the sadness in his expression. Evidently Austin had known his birth mother well enough to grieve at her loss. Was it possible the older man had known her in a biblical sense?
“Were you…” Beckett wanted to say her lover? her husband? but that would have been rude. He didn’t do rude. “Special to her?” He finished lamely. It was all he could think of and a special relationship could explain why the lawyer was tasked with talking to Beckett on his twenty-first. Maybe this older guy was his birth father? Austin, looking a little shaken at the question, simply shook his head.
“So my real name is Robert?”
“Robert Edward Bullen.”
Beckett considered the name and its initial implications. He definitely wasn’t a Robert. He was Beckett. Beck. In no way was changing his name to Robert happening anytime in his future. There was a tiny teddy bear with the letter–the sort you gave a small child to decorate a crib or a carriage. When Beckett grasped it and felt the soft fur he suddenly wished that it would pull memories of before he was four to the surface. He couldn’t recall a single thing and he placed it on the desk.
“What about my birth dad?” Beckett asked carefully. In his head his mother had been a kid who became pregnant with no husband in the picture. It was easy to forgive her for dumping him if he used that reasoning.
“He’s still alive,” Austin said. Beckett looked up sharply.
“Does he know about me?”
“He knew you. He thought you died in the same car wreck as your mother.”
“So she is dead then. She died and then I was adopted. She didn’t give me up?”
“No.” Austin sighed and briefly closed his eyes. “There was no giving up. She died, you lived.” Austin’s voice was calm and rational. He continued, “I helped her by taking you and making you safe.”
Beckett blinked at the man. He really didn’t understand this. It sounded like the plot of a murder novel. “You made me safe? What do you mean?”
“I think the letter will begin to explain. I will give you your privacy and make some coffee for when you are ready to talk. The computer is yours.” Austin left the room without a backward glance and Beckett opened the package. Inside was a simple flat wooden box with a dark inked stamp on the lid. He examined the letters on the lid and realized they were his birth initials, RB. Sliding open the lid he found a chain. Heavy and gold, it was definitely a man’s chain and it was the size that fitted around a wrist–Beckett’s wrist.
Next book in this series: Still Waters
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