Operation Endgame Blog Tour!

Hello amazing follower friends! Welcome to my spot on the Operation: Endgame Blog tour! I am so excited to be a part of this tour...why? Two words...Military. Hotties. I myself am a total sucker for men in uniform. I worked at my township's government headquarters for over two years and I got to see my fair share of cops and firefighters so I think that might be where I picked up my uniform fetish, but there is NOTHING compared to the snappy, crisp, totally HOT look of a man in his military best. So what does that have to do with Operation: Endgame? Well, the Operation Trilogy will all be about Air Force Hotties falling in love! And  the first book in the series is absolutely EPIC so I will definitely be reading the next two...if only to get my fill of hot Air Force officers! To show you guys a bit of the smexy, fabulousness that exists inside the pages of her new book I am super lucky to have Christi herself here to tell you all about what makes a good relationship. Being Friends First! 

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Author bio:

As an avid reader her entire life, Christi Snow always dreamed of writing books that brought to others the kind of joy she felt when she read. But...she never did anything about it besides jot down a few ideas and sparse scenes.

When she turned 41, she decided it was time to go after her dream and started writing. Within four months, she'd written over 150,000 words and hasn't stopped since.

She's found her calling by writing about sexy, alpha heroes and smart, tough heroines falling in love and finding their passion. She's truly living the dream and loving every minute of it.

Her tagline is... Passion and adventure on the road to Happily Ever After. She's loving this adventure!

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Why friends to lovers?

One of my favorite tropes to read is friends to lovers. As a result, when I sat down to write my first book I knew that this was a trope that I wanted to use. The reason I love featuring friends to lovers is that in these stories, these couples already genuinely like and know each other. They already have that bond.

For Jake and Cassie, the hero and heroine of Operation: Endgame, they’ve been best friends since they were 10 and 8 years old.  That’s a twenty plus year history between them as friends. I don’t care who you are, when you know someone that well, it provides such an amazing foundation to the relationship.

Jake and Cassie have an even stronger bond though because of Chris, Cassie’s twin brother. Originally these three were the Three Musketeers throughout their West Texas neighborhood. The three of them were inseparable until they became adults. Even then, the guys both went into the Air Force and all three of them have maintained close ties. 

But that bond is also what stresses their relationship for Jake and Cassie. The book starts with the sudden death of Chris, an Air Force F-22 pilot. Jake is a pararescue jumper (PJ) in the Air Force and his team are called out to extract the downed pilot, not knowing that it’s his best friend Chris. Weather moves in and the extraction is delayed by 18 hours in which time Chris is tortured and killed. Not only has Jake lost one of his best friends, but he feels responsible because his team didn’t make it there in time. Guilt.

After the funeral, Jake and Cassie are both having a difficult time dealing with their grief and in a moment of passion turn to each other. This simply compounds Jake’s issues because he promised Chris that he’d never touch Cassie. Guilt…again. It can be a big-time motivator between friends.

But that’s the amazing thing about good friends. Regardless of what happens, they can be called and counted on when things get really bad. Six months after Chris’s funeral, things have gotten really bad for Cassie. As a semi-celebrity from her military history work on a videogame, she has a stalker and it’s up to Jake to come home and protect her. They’ve barely talked the last six months, but they still have that bond of friendship that’s absolutely unbreakable. And then it becomes more….

So what do you think about the friends to lovers trope? Are you a fan or not?

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 First of all I want to thank Christi SOOO much for being here on the blog! I absolutely adored Operation: Endgame, which surprised me because I'm not a typical fan of romance novels without something paranormal or steampunk to spice things up. Then again Operation Endgame shows that there is much to be said for a plain old romance to warm your heart. And then I totally agree with Christi about the friends first scenario. My own friends used to joke that it takes me at least four years of being friends with a guy before I'll even consider going on a date with him. I don't think I'm quite THAT bad...but it does take a lot of trust and friendship for me to truly find myself falling in love with someone. How about you readers? I'd love to hear some stories about your friends-first-then-more relationship! (It will give me hope for my current best friend-hopefully turned lover? :P