Great opening line.

He's been married three times? Yikes.

Are you stupid, Schumacher? That's your boss's kid!

Ha, Mara plays dirty!

That's a son-of-a-gun. Who sells out their own fiance?

I like Connor's cheek, even if he should be nicer to his dad.

Schumacher is definitely working for the bad guys.

That got real serious, real fast. Jean-Luc is one lean, mean fighting machine.

Jesse is the girl in this relationship.

It's a self-fulfuling prophecy, honey. You think they're being sexist and avoiding you, but you're the one avoiding them.

Lanie is Connor's true mother.

Ruh-roh. Double-crossing bad guys are never good.

That was a beautiful send-off.

Survivor's guilt can't be easy, but like the good doctor said, no one could have done better.

Aww. Men with a baby are so cute.

Well, he wasted no time getting her locked in.

ARC received for review

4.5 stars

The beginning was a little confusing and slow, but then Ms. Burrows made me cry. Loved Jesse and Laine and all the rest of the yummy Hornet boys.

Now what kind of trouble is he going to get himself into...

I love all books by this author they are never a disappointment, and this book is no different. It is really hard to just talk about two or three main characters in this book because there are several that are important to this story, but Jesse and Lanie are my favorites. Their relationship has been one that has been around and changed over the years, where one is always fighting the involvement or the connection between them. Now working together very closely their connection is hard to fight. should they keep on fighting it and will the demons from the past come back and interfere in happiness? Than you for allowing me to read this book and write a honest review.

I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review. I like a good romantic suspense, and this had all the elements. The members of the HORNET team are involved in training exercises on the island of Martinique. After their training, they are supposed to have a weekend of relaxation, however a rival military contractor company has other plans when they take a virologist hostage. Jesse Warrick is the hero in this book, he's a Wyoming born and bred Medic who's battled some PTSD. He's also recently gotten custody of his 15 year old son after the ex decided she couldn't handle the son any longer. There's a lot of tension between those two for the usual reasons. Lanie Delcambre has known Jesse since they were kids. At one time they thought they may be a couple, however that just didn't work out, Y'all know how teenage love is... Now she's part of the Hornet team, and somewhat struggling with being the only female on the team, and her feelings for Jesse. He's struggling with his feelings for her as well, worried that he'll let her down. This is the 4th book in the series, but a stand-alone novel. I will be looking into the previous 3 and the 5th one as well.

Tonya Burrows’s long-running HORNET series has so far, been a breath of fresh air. ‘Code of Honor’ is Jesse/Lanie’s story and as newly-minted team leader, Jesse’s off to a bad start, burdened by his self-doubts, his desire for a childhood friend and a son who doesn’t give him any time of day. A hostage situation at the end of their training however, exacerbates this, throwing the group as well as his teetering confidence into chaos.

Unlike the other paramilitary or security companies formed by a tight group of ex-military buddies, Burrows’s HORNET men are openly broken, psychopathically quirky and badly damaged—physically and mentally—that it’s a wonder they can ever be functioning as individuals let alone as a cohesive security group. But they stumble along, badly might I add, flying by the seat of their pants from a disaster to another while trying to hold themselves together, not dissimilar to a boy-band put together by an executive producer and told to sing/dance in harmony in front of squealing fangirls from the onset.

This bunch of misfits and their antics however, keep me coming back to this series, because it’s entertaining (with some bit of schadenfreude on my part thrown in) to see how they get themselves into deep water (yet again) and then fight their way out of it with nary a thing but their wits and pocket knives.

For most part, I liked the action and the suspense, and the introduction of a kickass former Texas Ranger and Jesse’s blast from the past brought a different dynamic to the misfits of HORNET. Yet while the action flowed, along with an overarching plot that reeled me in, the romance bit gave me pause, because it wasn’t something I could envision at all, or at least, found difficult to buy into.

Had Lanie really never stopped loving Jesse from afar, even though Jesse had moved on so thoroughly that he’d married 3 women after having feeling something for her as a teenager, then only confessing at the end that he’d only wanted her? That it had taken over a decade to make this happen seemed like an unfair deal for Lanie, who didn’t seem to question Jesse’s faux-pas, his personal angst, his inability to see past his own issues and his circling around the block for nearly 20 years before coming back to her.

Admittedly, the second-chance romance is a trope that’s problematic for me. A character tends to struggle more than the other with unrequited feelings and resentment, and sometimes even the admission of having ‘loved’ a person for so long yet doing the opposite thing about it (in Jesse’s case at least) makes it more unforgivable. The story’s focus on suspense meant that Lanie/Jesse’s romance was too easily squared away with love declarations and a simple apology to Lanie about having broke her heart all those years ago seemed to resolve it all for them, even when seen in the light of how easily they could lose their lives in the most unexpected of ways. With an epilogue that quickly shifted the focus away from them and onto Jean-Luc’s half-cocked effort to save a woman he barely knew, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in how Jesse/Lanie was handled as a pairing.

It isn’t to say that the other aspects of romantic suspense weren’t handled well, because those parts of ‘Code of Honor’ were engaging with some emotional twists and turns that secondary characters inadvertently revealed about themselves when they’re thrust into critical situations. So while I’m mixed about this book, I’m hanging onto the HORNET series for that alone, then crossing my fingers for a romance that I can actually get fully invested in.

It had been a while since I have read the other books in this series, and I have to admit I had sorta forgotten what it was about... so I had a quick re-read before cracking on with the latest - and man am I glad that I did. I wouldn't say you can't read this as a standalone - but the characters and their development make much more sense if you read the other books first.

This book seems to have it all: a ranch in Wyoming, a hot cowboy, an ex-Texas Ranger, a snotty teenager, a training mission in an exotic local, a beach front luxury hotel and a hostage situation with our heroes with no weapons, a snake in the midst and no support! This book is jam-packed and very fast paced and makes me want to see who is up next (please be Ian and Tank, please be Ian and Tank!)

Sadly this was a DNF largely due to me struggling to remember exactly what went down in the previous three books in the series as almost three years have lapsed since the last one released. It’s become a case of spending too more time wracking my brain on who’s who rather than following and enjoying the story.

LOVED this book! This novel picks up with HORNET engaging in a training mission, followed by some time at Quinten's Martinique resort. Unfortunately, a epidemiology conference of scientists is also scheduled at the same resort and some mercenaries are trying to get a hold of a team of scientists on the verge of making a monumental discovery. However, the mercenaries' plans go sideways when one of HORNET's members spots them and takes action. Before long, there is a hostage situation and all of HORNET's members are working to try to resolve it. In the midst of all that, Jesse and Lanie are trying to sort their way through their non-relationship and intense attraction to each other.

This novel is non-stop action wrapped around a romance that I just loved. The characters are flawed, feel real, and made me care about their story. While this is part of a series, this is a stand alone novel, however, its so good that you really owe it to yourself to read them all. Fans of the genre will love this book and want to put it at the top of their TBR. The author is on my must read authors' list.