The Hostage

The fourth installment of romance writer Carolyn Wren’s series The Protectors was the 2013 novel The Hostage; however, the entire series has since been renamed Love Under Fire and the novel itself has been reissued as Emotions in Chains. The novel pairs a kidnapped businessman and his undercover agent rescuer. Although they are each other’s best hope for mending the psychic scars of what they have been through, a lifetime of hiding her identity keeps the agent from giving in to her attraction.

The novel opens on a dark holding cell where wealthy businessman James 'North' Northam awaits death at the hands of his captors. He has been beaten, chained up, and made to kneel on an uneven cement floor while their demands for an exorbitant ransom go unmet. Although he has always thought of himself as tough, a “ruthless businessman in the boardroom,” this torture has threatened to break him completely.

All hope seems lost when, out of the blue, a short woman with a sexy, breathy voice breaks into the room, eliminates the hostage takers in quick succession, frees North from the chains, makes sure he is safely outside in the care of emergency personnel, and then disappears without a trace. He doesn’t know this, but he’s just been rescued by Omega, a top-secret operative whose specialties include sharpshooting and nighttime recovery missions like this one.



After his rescue, North can’t get the woman out of his mind, not least because he didn’t have a chance to thank her before she took off. Drawing on the same dogged perseverance that has led to his business successes, he decides to track her down in order to tell her how grateful he is that she was there for him.

Omega has since melted back into her other, “real” identity: Meg Pryce, an elementary school teacher in a small town in the middle of the country. She doesn’t need North’s thanks, and in general, wants to keep the two parts of her life as separate as possible so as not to endanger either herself or her students.

But when North somehow tracks Omega to the town where Meg lives, she is forced to face the fact that she finds him deeply attractive in a way that makes her want to break some of the rules she has always lived by.



North tries his best to figure out whether Meg really is Omega, despite her continued denials and obfuscations. He is both kind and at the same time relentlessly persistent in a way that readers say should read as stalker-y, but somehow works. He hovers around her home and work, takes her on impromptu picnics, all while trying to charm her into revealing more about herself. What he finds out is that Meg is cool and deadly calm under pressure, driven above all by a need to protect others. That is why she is a schoolteacher – she sees “children as someone she needs to defend, to look after.”

When none of his overt approaches work, North decides to simply lay down his guard completely. In a scene that Wren calls the most romantic in the novel, he “sits outside Omega's front door, not even knowing for sure if she's inside, and relates the story of his capture, and why he was so obsessed with finding her because she haunted his dreams and pulled him back from the edge when his memories became too much.” Because he is no longer trying to get her façade to slip away but is instead revealing his own capacity for love and a mile wide romantic streak, North manages to get past Omega/Meg’s defenses, and the pair finally connects romantically.

This is when a new threat shows itself. Some of Meg’s reticence in opening up to North comes from her ongoing PTSD and the physical injuries she sustained at the hands of the monstrous Aden Todd, a mission target who proved too devious for Omega’s agency’s plans. Now Todd has started to hunt Omega in retaliation, and the burgeoning relationship between Meg and North distracts her from following all of the ways she normally protects and hides herself.



When North finds out that Meg has decided to strike out on her own to capture Todd before he can get to her, he is terrified that the woman of his dreams will be hurt or killed. However, Meg now knows exactly how Todd operates, so just in time, she can get the drop on him.

The novel ends with Meg and North together for good, and with Meg already planning her next mission (which is narrated in the next novel in the series).