Isn't It Bromantic (Bromance Book Club #4) by Lyssa Kay Adams

            If he was going to get through this, he would need a distraction, more than just the daily job of rehabbing his body. Something he could disappear into to avoid the reality of his situation. For the first time in months, Vlad opened the drawer to his nightstand and withdrew the pages of his manuscript.

            He traced his thumb across the title, Promise Me.

            His story with Elena was on its last chapter. If he couldn’t have his own happy ever after, maybe he could try again to write one.





Promise Me





March 1945

            Ninth Air Force Base

            Erlangen, Germany


“It’s almost over, isn’t it?”

            Tony Donovan sucked on his last Lucky Strike and then snuffed out the glowing butt with the toe of his size 10 boots. It melted a speck of frozen grass before extinguishing in a final puff of smoke.

            Almost over. They’d been saying the same damn thing since D-Day. We’ve got ’em on the run, boys. Germany’s beat. Just a few more days. Nothing left of Jerry but young boys and old men.

            Usually, the declarations were uttered with enthusiasm. But his jeep driver, Private Rogers, spoke the words with the disappointed whine of a kid who was afraid of missing the fireworks on the Fourth. Tony understood on one level. The kid was eighteen years old—a jittery, impatient type who got in line to enlist the minute he met the legal age requirement. But instead of storming the beachhead of his hero-fevered dreams, he found himself saddled with the inglorious task of driving around a weary war correspondent who’d seen more combat than half the soldiers in the army.

            But that’s where Tony’s empathy ended. Private Rogers had no idea what he’d been spared. The sounds and smells and images of war would forever haunt Tony’s sleep. The horror of what man could do to man. He’d seen enough to know that no one should ever have to see it. But Tony would still give anything to trade his pen for a rifle.

            But since a pen was the only weapon he was allowed, he had vowed at the beginning of the war to wield it until the end. And now he was about to set out on what could be one of his most dangerous assignments yet. With Allied forces pushing through Nazi Germany from the west and the Russian Army clearing a swath from the east, rumors were spreading of prisoner of war camps being evacuated by the SS all across Germany and Poland. The prisoners—most of them American and British airmen—were being force-marched through the bitter conditions to places unknown. Reports had been trickling in of prisoners dropping dead of exhaustion and starvation. He needed to get on the move, but his goddamned photographer was late.

            Not just any photographer, though.

            Anna Goreva.

            There wasn’t a GI in the European campaign who hadn’t heard of her. Beautiful and brave, she’d once distracted her own jeep driver so much by simply smiling at him that he crashed into a ditch. Some people dismissed the story as gossip, but Tony knew it was true. He’d been in the back seat.

            When his boss told him that she’d be accompanying him on this assignment, Tony had argued to no avail.

            “You need a photographer who speaks Russian and has been on the front before,” George Burrows, his editor, had told him. “You’ve got one. Now go. She’ll meet you in Erlangen.”

            Tony shoved his hands in his coat pockets and stamped his feet to stave off the now-familiar sting of cold. He should have fought harder. He should have been more up-front about the reasons for his concerns. Like the cold air, the memory of their parting a year ago stung like a slap in the face.

            A gust of wind knocked her bag from her hands. It opened at her feet, and she lunged for several pieces of paper that fluttered out. One landed on the toe of his boot. He grabbed it before she could and turned it over. The gentle face of an American airman stared up at him. Anna swiped the photo from him and shoved it back in her bag.

            “Who is he?”

            “Nobody.”

            “I doubt you would carry around the photo of nobody in your bag.”

            Her body language gave her away. He was more than a friend. Someone important. Tony had to unclench his teeth. “Is he one of your lovers?”

            “That is none of your business.”

            “Isn’t it?” Jealousy raged inside him, hot and irrational. He had no right to feel any claim on her. They’d shared nothing more than a single passionate kiss, and that had been the result of a near-miss with a German mortar. “I’m your boss, Anna. The last thing I need is some khaki-whacky Jane at my side who wants to wage her own personal charm offensive across Europe—”