Today’s selection is from chapter four of FROZEN SUN, the third book in the Nathan Active series.

In it we find Nathan’s girlfriend engaging in a bit of competition with his mother. Her secret weapon: tuna sandwiches!

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At noon, right on time, Lucy Generous looked up from her console to see Nathan come out of the stairwell and walk toward her dispatch station, that smile on his lips.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Tuna sandwiches,” she said with a smile of her own. “I won’t tell Martha if you won’t.”

Nathan, she knew, was well aware of what they were having for lunch. She had been making the sandwiches that morning when he stopped to pick her up for work. He had watched as she sealed them in ziplocks and dropped them into a shopping bag with two Diet Pepsis and a big package of tortilla chips. It was a running joke between them, how Nathan’s birth mother was trying to lure him into traditional Chukchi ways by feeding him traditional village foods, while Nathan clung stubbornly to the habits he had learned from his adoptive parents in Anchorage. One of those habits was the tuna sandwiches—with mayonnaise and a touch of mustard—Lucy made them for lunch at least once a week.

As she pulled off her headset and lifted her coat from the back of her chair, she wondered if Nathan knew how serious this particular joke was. Every time she made him a tuna sandwich, she wasn’t just giving him food he liked—she was doing something for him that Martha wouldn’t do.
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Frozen Sun