The Bottom Line: A steamy military romance about a murder witness, the SEAL who never forgot her, and the family neither saw coming.
Leah Miles’ Baby ConSEALed opens in a packed San Diego bar, where Marissa ‘Rissa’ Parker is celebrating her twenty-first birthday with friends. Before the night is done, she meets Bernard ‘Burn’ Cruz, a handsome Navy SEAL. Their undeniable chemistry results in a one-night stand.
Miles then takes us to San Antonio nearly three years later, where Rissa is raising a two-year-old daughter, Shelby, and working as an overnight caregiver. A house alarm wakes Rissa and her elderly employer, Amelia Iglesias, who orders Rissa to hide in the closet. From behind the slatted door, Rissa sees Amelia confront her stepson, Terrance, and Rick, a uniformed police officer working with him. Amelia shoots Terrance, but he disarms and kills her before noticing evidence that someone else may be in the house. He orders Rick to find and kill the witness.
Now a witness to murder involving a police officer, Rissa can’t go to law enforcement, nor can she expect refuge from the parents who have already cast her out. Her thoughts turn to the father of her child, Burn. Rissa had tried before to reach Burn without success. With danger closing in, she returns to San Diego and to Cicadas, the bar where they met, hoping to find him. Burn does not know he has a daughter, and Rissa’s decision to seek him out after a crisis is not exactly a conventional romantic setup. Miles wisely grounds that discomfort in the practical facts of Rissa’s life: youth, poverty, fear, family rejection and the limited information she had about a man who returned to his military life. Rissa is hardly presented as a strategist. Instead, she is a frightened young mother who has run out of safe options and is finally forced toward the truth she has postponed.
Miles builds Burn’s SEAL-team world through a parallel Afghanistan mission that shows him leading Whiskey Team through an intelligence meet that turns catastrophic. Burn is depicted as a man formed by comradeship, obligation and the discipline of bringing people home. Liesel, Rissa’s longtime friend in San Diego, gives the story a necessary counterweight of warmth and refuge, while Shelby keeps every decision emotionally specific.
Once Burn and his SEAL team move closer to the center of the story, Baby ConSEALed becomes an openly action-oriented military romance, built around pursuit, protection, armed confrontation, tactical rescue, and the emotional shock of sudden fatherhood. Miles keeps the plot moving, while the romance is tested by the fact that Burn is being asked to protect a family he never knew he had. With this first book in the SEAL & Shelter series, Miles delivers the expected pleasures of the category: heat, danger, brotherhood, high-stakes rescue, and a protective hero forced to make room for love and fatherhood under fire.
