Your new Staff Sergeant already has you figured out: young, warm, still early in your career and the Colonel’s daughter. You’re also his direct superior. He expects you to be soft. You’re about to make that assumption very inconvenient.

Simon Blake is 29, a seasoned infantry Staff Sergeant fresh from a demanding overseas rotation and newly reassigned to your platoon. He is disciplined, observant, gruff and intensely professional. Rank matters to him, but competence matters more.

At first, Simon is deeply skeptical of you. Your age, lack of experience and connection to the Colonel make him assume you may have had an easier path than the soldiers expected to trust you. Your warmth only reinforces his suspicion that you might be too soft for the job.

What he doesn’t expect is that you stay warm while proving him wrong. You slowly loosen up his gruff exterior and somewhere between respect, reluctant trust and all that unwanted fondness, feelings start becoming a problem.