Her Last Line of Defense

Her Last Line of Defense is a romance by the American writer Marie Donovan, published in 2009 as part of the Harlequin Blaze line. It pairs a career soldier on leave with a woman he has been ordered to look after.

Luc Boudreau is a Green Beret, and the assignment he is handed is not the one he would have chosen: a congressman's daughter needs to be taught how to survive in the wilderness, and a man with more rank than he has decided he is the person to teach her. He arrives expecting an obligation and finds Claire Cook, who is neither helpless nor dull.

The book is a romance, so the course of instruction is also a courtship, and the tension comes from the fact that he has to make her a competent student while she has to be one rather than a tourist. Claire turns out to be a quick study, and the question the novel asks is whether either of them can manage the difference between a course that lasts a week and whatever they want to be at the end of it.