For the Last Time

She heard him thundering up the stairs, and other than after his near-fatal accident, she could never remember him simply walking. He halted in the door and grinned. “What would you say if I told you I’ve been appointed Defense Minister for this sandbox called Israel?"

Twenty-five years of marriage to Israeli Defense Force Lt. General Yonatan Netanya (Ret.) had been a rollercoaster ride, but at last it had grown comfortable, giving Cheyenne a false sense of security. A distinguished American novelist with 30 best sellers under her belt, she thought she had learned how to deal with power. She’d been married to a warrior for twenty-five years and this was just another battle to be fought! Now Yonatan has been appointed Defense Minister for the State of Israel, one of the most powerful positions in the world, posing a whole new set of problems, not only for him and Cheyenne but for their four children.

Only just settled into their new roles, the Defense Minister divulges a dark secret he has been hiding for 22 years. The shock of his confession drives Cheyenne into the arms of Wolf Barrington, her bodyguard, shattering not only their marriage but the relationship between him and his children as well. Having once lost Cheyenne to divorce, he knew life was meaningless without her; yet because power corrupts, his sense of entitlement allowed him to indulge in an extramarital affair.
Although a multimillionaire, when Joney, their oldest son asks for a loan to buy a polo pony for breeding purposes, he is not only denied the loan but is given a lecture on flagrant spending. When Joney goes behind his parent’s backs and asks his biological father for a loan, Yonatan and Cheyenne feel betrayed and send him away. In spite of all odds, he becomes one of the world’s top breeders of polo ponies.

While denying Joney a loan, they readily underwrite their pampered daughter, Hadassah’s education at the exclusive Julliard School of Music in New York City. However, Hadassah’s love for Eliot, the Defense Minister’s aide-de-camp, is jeopardized when he accidentally discovers the sordid affair the Defense Minister is conducting in the office of the Defense Ministry. When Eliot walks away from the Defense Ministry and disappears back into the bowels of the Israeli Defense Force, he is unexpectedly given command of a brigade; the position he has long lusted after; never suspecting who his patron had been.

Jonathan, his mother’s favorite because he is his father’s clone, endures eighteen months of harsh training for Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli Defense Force’s top commando unit, in a bid to gain his father’s approval, only to make the disastrous mistake of falling in love with a Bedouin tracker’s daughter; an act bound to alienate him from his family for good.

And beautiful, quiet Abishai had never needed his father’s approval as long as he had his mother’s. He even goes so far as to brave his father’s wrath by giving the greenlight to his mother’s affair with Wolf and further exacerbating the situation by choosing the Air Force over his objections.

The next generation was supposed to get it right but life interrupts allowing them to make their own mistakes.

For the Last Time is a sequel to When He Walked Away.