Fifty Minutes Away Trilogy · Book 2
The Special Kiss
Kayla is gone. Emily is running out of time. Victoria and Natalya have already chosen their next target.
The Special Kiss follows Emily as the hunt for Kayla pushes her beyond the limits of an ordinary investigation. The Russians are no longer content to stay at a distance, and their wicked calling card is about to become something Emily experiences for herself.

- Book
- 2 of 3
- Format
- Ebook
- Type
- Suspense
The case stops being professional.
About the book
Emily is used to forcing progress when an investigation stalls. Kayla’s disappearance gives her no such comfort. With the likelihood of foreign captivity growing by the hour, every conventional route feels too slow and every remaining option demands more risk.
At the same time, Emily keeps rationalising why Shawn needs to stay close. His girlfriend is missing, yet Emily’s attraction to him is becoming harder to compartmentalise, especially after what she has already allowed herself to watch and enjoy.
The Special Kiss is where the lines begin to collapse. Emily’s pursuit of Kayla, her growing fixation on Shawn and Victoria and Natalya’s interest in the detective leading the case all start feeding into one another, until solving the investigation and compromising herself begin to look dangerously similar.
Character, pressure and choice
The tension at the centre
Victoria and Natalya are not simply two traffickers on the run. They belong to an international network with money, reach and resources far beyond anything Emily is equipped to confront alone.
Kayla, meanwhile, begins learning what captivity actually means. Far from home and surrounded by wealth, beauty and armed protection, she is forced into a new life while her body’s response to the people controlling her threatens to complicate even her own sense of resistance.
Then, the Russians discover who is leading the investigation. Emily’s looks, appetite for risk and willingness to bend rules immediately fascinate them. To Victoria and Natalya, Glasgow’s hottest little rule breaker does not look like a threat. She looks like potential.
At the centre
Five people. Every boundary under pressure.
Ambition and corruption
Emily
Emily is already blurring the line between investigation and desire, having pleasured herself while watching footage connected to Shawn and Kayla’s case. She is trying to solve a disappearance, manage her growing feelings for Shawn and stay ahead of two women who have begun imagining her as their next irresistible asset.
Loyalty and temptation
Shawn
Kayla’s loving boyfriend is strong, handsome and fundamentally decent, but he has already proved vulnerable to Victoria’s advances. Now Emily’s presence gives him another source of temptation at exactly the moment he should be thinking about nothing except bringing Kayla home.
Risk and appetite
Victoria
After another profitable trafficking job, Victoria knows Scotland is dangerous territory. That does not stop her from wanting to see the detective hunting her. Returning to engineer a meeting with Emily is reckless, but Victoria has never been good at leaving something beautiful unexplored.
Intelligence and escalation
Natalya
More than Victoria’s lover and lure, Natalya is one of the sharpest minds behind their operations. When the idea of confronting Emily is raised, she embraces it enthusiastically, already curious to see how far the detective can be pushed.
Captivity and adaptation
Kayla
Trafficked to a heavily guarded mansion in Russia, Kayla begins confronting the possibility that home may no longer be part of her future. Her captors are beautiful, wealthy and terrifyingly secure, and the more her body responds to them, the more frightened she becomes by what prolonged captivity may be changing inside her.
Your next Bret Vautour story
Why read The Special Kiss?
Attraction is a weapon on every side of Emily’s investigation.
The Special Kiss turns up the heat on every side of the investigation. Kayla has to survive life with the people now controlling her, while Emily pushes deeper into a case she is already taking far too personally. Victoria and Natalya, meanwhile, become fascinated with the detective pursuing them and start planning to put Emily in the same position as the women they usually hunt: stripped of control, locked in steel and forced to discover what their special kiss really means.
The reading sequence
Continue the trilogy
Desire. Decision. Consequence.
Emily knows exactly what those handcuffs mean.
She lets Victoria and Natalya close them anyway.
Fifty Minutes Away Trilogy · Book 2

