Recon Pilot Aldo Matthews is adept at search and rescue missions, but can he adapt to show love and tenderness to the woman he once bullied as a girl?

As the only unmarried person in her department, Elayne Jade is often overlooked and always passed over when it comes to the decision-making in her job as school guidance counselor. Those discussions take place at couples' dinners and brunches which she's never invited. It's wrong that she's not up for career advancements because she doesn't have a ring or husband. Then she wakes up one morning with a diamond on her finger and her worst enemy in her hotel room.

Since he was a kid, nothing has fascinated Aldo Matthews more than Elayne Jade. The curve of her lips when she's insulting him. The flash of her eyes when she dismisses his taunts. The flip of that fire red hair when she turns away from him in a huff. Aldo takes every chance he can get to rile Elayne's temper so that he can see that fire inside her. So when he finds her one night at a bar out of town a bit tipsy, bemoaning the fact that she doesn't have a ring on her finger, he puts one there.

Annulling this sham of a marriage is the first thing on Elayne's mind. Her reputation would never survive the fact she eloped with her mortal enemy after getting drunk. Only now that she's sober, she's seeing Aldo in a new light. And when her colleagues spot the ring on her finger, they start inviting her out and making her part of the conversation.

Aldo has no intention of letting Elayne flip her hair and walk away from him again. Not when it's so much sweeter to twine his fingers in her tresses and feel those sassy lips move against his. But Aldo's hiding a secret, one that could douse the growing heat between the woman who hates the fact that she's falling for him.

Find out what happens in His Vow to Defend, the sixth in a series of heartwarming stories that prove that falling in love is an act of heroism, but finding family is life's most extraordinary achievement.