From "Border Heat" by Teri Thackston

Secret Service agent Tucker Daye is trapped with the Game Warden Shannon Walker and the President's Daughter at a Texas wildlife management area, threatened by killer drug runners and an out of control wildfire:
Tucker stood with his back against the door and cast a quick glance around the immediate area. He saw the game wardens’ Jeep, the two rented SUVs, an empty road…and miles and miles of mountainous desert.
And the smoke.

The only thing that moved was that smoke. In fact, it danced and swirled as if it was alive.
His chest tightened and he found it difficult to breathe.

It’s different, he told himself, remembering the roiling black clouds of smoke that had surrounded that western African embassy. This is not like that.

He tried to focus on something besides the smoke. The first thing he noticed was that there was no sound. The intensity of the quiet had the hair standing up on the back of his neck. It was an instinctive reaction that had developed over the years to a point that he knew ignoring it could prove fatal to someone.

I need to get Chloe out of here. I can’t be responsible for losing the two most important people in the President’s life.

From "Highway to Vengeance" by Brian Springer

Almost exactly 72 hours after my wife was murdered, I found myself sitting alone in front of the eight-foot long, four-foot wide, six-foot deep, still-uncovered rectangular hole that held Josie’s coffin, and inside that, her body.

Every waking minute since Josie’s death had been hell, but the previous two hours I felt like I’d been residing in the ninth circle. Wave after unending wave of anonymous faces offering up hollow words of regret, apparently oblivious to the uselessness of their words.

Neither the speakers nor the words uttered to me mattered in the least, but I nodded my thanks to every concerned individual, going through the motions of courtesy that were expected of a grieving husband, the whole time wishing I’d had the balls to not even show up. It’s not like Josie would have cared. She knew how much I loved her; hell, chances are she wouldn’t even have wanted me to come watch her suffer the indignity of being put under the ground forever.
The important thing was that the whole process was now over, which meant I could go to work on hunting down the men responsible for her murder without any further distractions.