I’ve never loved someone quite like my high school sweetheart. But she shattered my heart to pieces when she moved to California for college and never came back.
Now she’s back in Drakesville and for the first time in sixteen years, I’ve come face-to-face with the only woman I’ve ever loved. Kissing her was a bad idea. Spending countless nights tangled in my sheets was an even worse idea.
She’s only here long enough to make sure her parents’ bar stays afloat. I can’t get attached, when I know she’s just going to leave again.
And I know I’m not reason enough to make her stay.
Temporarily In Love is a small-town second chance autumn-themed romance book. If you love fall and Halloween, you’ll love this book.
Declan’s dark eyes seared across the length of my body like he remembered all the times he had stripped me out of my clothes. He always did like the knee-high boots I wore during the fall.
“You cold?” he asked.
I nodded. “Been in California too long.”
He shed his zip-up hoodie and put it over my shoulders. “Here.”
A memory of this exact scene played through my mind’s eye. Of me not wearing proper attire because I wanted to dress cute for him and him giving me his jacket. But that was sixteen-year-old Declan and Lila; we weren’t those people anymore.
“Dec…”
“Come on, love, let’s go on the zipper,” he said and took my hand.
I didn’t question his slip up. The old pet name rolled off his tongue like it hadn’t been sixteen years since I broke his heart. Like I hadn’t stood in his driveway all those years ago and told him I got accepted to Stanford and wasn’t going with him to Penn State. I told him I wanted to break up, because long-distance relationships never worked, but I’d always love him. That part had been true, was still true, but I never came back to him. I went to California and stayed there while he stayed in our gossipy small town and made a name for himself.
The pad of his thumb brushed against the back of my palm. “Love?”
“Right. Let’s go on the zipper!” I said excitedly, pulling myself away from the trip down memory lane.
We walked over to the ride and waited in line for a few minutes, but neither of us wanted to sever the connection of our hands. I wondered if he was thinking about all the times we had done this before. Of those times back in high school when he was the one dragging me toward the rides. Adult Declan was quiet and reserved, and I couldn’t get a read on him. He wasn’t the boy I fell in love with, but yet, at the same time, he was.
He led me into the cage and made sure I was seated before he slid in next to me. We pulled the lap bar down, and the ride operator clicked us in before shutting us inside the metal cage. We were pressed so close together, I felt his thigh against my own.
I didn’t know why I did it, but I turned to him and found he was staring back at me intensely. He didn’t jerk back when I brushed my lips against his. He threaded his hands through my hair, one of them gripping my neck possessively as he deepened the kiss. We kissed like we hadn’t forgotten, like it hadn’t been years since we were pressed together. We still fit so perfectly.
Then the ride lurched, and I pulled away to grab onto the handlebar above my head as we moved upwards. We screamed our heads off as our cage flipped us around. I held onto Declan’s arm when the ride took us up to its full height and then brought us back down to the ground, all the while flipping us upside down in our cage.
I felt dizzy by the time we were back on the ground, and the ride operator opened the cage for us. Declan got out first, then offered me a hand when I stumbled out.
He studied me. “Okay, love?”
I could only nod.
My heart was doing somersaults, and it wasn’t because I was motion sick from the ride. It was singing with the way this man still turned me inside out. But I couldn’t get ideas like that. I didn’t deserve him after what I did. Not after I had been such a coward and cut him out of my life.
Danica Flynn is a marketer by day, and a writer by nights and weekends. AKA she doesn’t sleep! She is a rabid hockey fan of both The Philadelphia Flyers and the Metropolitan Riveters. When not writing, she can be found hanging with her partner, playing video games, and reading a ton of books.
It wasn’t wedding day jitters. Something was up. I stood up and headed to the door. The camera guy and sound guy tried to stop me, but I ignored them. I opened the door, and Mackie was there in her bridesmaid dress. “Did you need me?” she asked. “No, wait here. I’m just going to talk to Peter,” I said. I marched down the hall toward the groom’s suite. Even more people tried to stop me. That only confirmed that some shit was going down, and everyone else knew but me. I knew exactly what was going on. The security guard stepped in my way. “Get out of my way, or there is no wedding.” I said. The large man stared down at me and didn’t move. “I will have you fired,” I said, in my iciest bitch voice. The man cowered and stepped aside. I threw the door open. There was my groom, making out and groping Cindy! “I knew you were fucking cheating on me, Peter!” He started to speak, but I threw my hand up, signaling him to stop. “Don’t bother. He’s all yours, Cindy,” I said, and then I hightailed it out of there, tearing off the lavalier mic they’d strapped to me as I ran. My slippers slowed me down, so I kicked them off and ran barefoot. I tore down the hall and out onto the church grounds. “Meredith!” a male voice yelled. I looked up to see who it was, and I spotted Nick’s Spyder at the valet. I sprinted over to him, tears streaming down my face. But I didn’t care. Those camera crews would never catch me. Their equipment was too heavy. I jumped into Nick’s car and yelled at him. “Drive!”
Do you enjoy funny, contemporary romances with spicy love scenes?
Because if you do …
You’ve landed in the perfect place.
I’m Tina Gabor, and it’s so much fun getting to write the books I love reading. Gorgeous men and fierce, feisty, and funny women are my jam.
And since there’s nothing like a love story with a dash of sun and fun …
I set most of my in Southern California and Florida. I grew up in South Florida, and now I live in Southern California with my fiancee and a stray cat we named Fred.
To get special deals on new releases and updates on what your favorite book couples are doing after the story ends, go to SparksFlyRomance.com/Tina
What happens in the Caribbean, stays in the Caribbean…
Emily Small has a big heart, a loud mouth, and a terrible taste in men. She’s used to living in her perfect best friend Ruby’s shadow – but when Ruby is left devastated at the altar, Emily becomes desperate to save her friend from heartache… and salvage their non-refundable cruise!
Emily hatches an ingenious plan to soothe Ruby’s broken heart by island-hopping together as an act of revenge. There’s only one teensy problem: the cruise is for newlyweds only. Naturally, they have a solution. They’ll pretend to be a married couple!
But their ten days of fun are about to spiral into a crazy, messy adventure that risks leaving a few hearts broken along the way – because when Emily bumps into the ship’s hot photographer, Max Keeling, she begins to wish she could rethink their arrangement. If her deception gets discovered, would they boot her off the boat? But Emily can’t keep her hands to herself, and her cruise fling could bring everything crashing down.
How can she support her best friend at the worst moment in her life while pursuing an out-of-her-league guy in the Caribbean? And can she somehow find a way to have the best of both worlds?
“That was Tyler,” Emily gulped. Her mouth so dry she wished she had a bucketful of water to drink. “He’s not coming.” Her voice dropped to a bare whisper.
The cousins gasped and clutched one another in horror.
The make-up artist, who had been waiting to do final touch-ups, packed up her case in a flash and squeaked out of the room without a word.
Ruby’s eyes widened, her mouth formed an ‘o,’ and her body vibrated a fine tremor. “Oh no, was he in an accident? I told him not to drive himself. I’ve read so many stories about brides and grooms getting in accidents on the way to the church. Nerves, they said. Should I go to him? Where is he? Was he driving his father’s car or the rental? I hope he wasn’t driving the rental. We have to make it to our suite at the Hilton tonight, and I really don’t want to take an Uber. Or have my father drive. Oh, that would be so embarrassing.”
“Ruby.” Emily grasped her friend’s arm, the fine Mikado silk cool under her fingers. A long-sleeved dress for a late fall wedding maybe was too warm for the Tampa location, but it had been so gorgeous on her friend’s slender body there had been no other choice at the bridal boutique. “He’s calling off the wedding.”
Nausea soured Emily’s stomach.
Why did she have to be the one who picked up the phone?
One of the cousins burst into tears.
Ruby stood stock still in the middle of the bride’s dressing room. “But—”
Rhonda Madison Evers entered wearing a royal blue mother-of-the-bride dress covered in sequins. “My darling. The make-up artist told me the news. How could that man be so cruel?” She curved her arms around her only daughter.
“Mom, I don’t understand. How could he not be coming?” Ruby crumpled to the floor.
“You’ll crush your dress!” Mrs. Evers gasped and knelt beside her. She yanked at her daughter’s arm as if her will alone would lift up the one-hundred-twenty-five-pound woman and her ten pounds of underskirts and heavy fabric. “We can still return it.”
“No, we can’t. It’s been altered.” The bride spoke in a monotone.
“Well,” said Mrs. Evers, “there’s always eBay or Craigslist, I suppose.”
“Facebook Marketplace is better,” mumbled a cousin.
Mrs. Evers shot daggers in the woman’s direction.
“I need to talk to him.” The bride snapped her fingers at Emily. “Get Tyler on the phone. I will just demand that he come.”
Emily gulped and bit at her lower lip, then got up the courage to tell her best friend since grade school the worst thing a best friend could say. “Tyler doesn’t want to get married. Do you really want to force a man to marry you, Rubes?”
“But he promised me. He gave me this ring.” Ruby held out her hand for the cousins, her mother, Emily, and now the florist who’d arrived with her wedding bouquet. A gorgeous pear-shaped 2 ½ carat diamond decorated her left ring finger. “Would he have given me this ring if he didn’t want to marry me?”
“He doesn’t want to marry you, Rubes.” Emily knelt and put an arm around her friend. The bride sagged against her.
The florist quietly set the bridal bouquet on a chair and scrambled for the door.
Emily led Ruby to an empty chair and her mother sat beside her. “He’s an awful man. A terrible, mean, awful man. Who would do that to my little girl?” Mrs. Evers took her daughter by the hand and gripped it tightly.
“Ow, mother, that hurts.” Ruby pulled her hand out of her mother’s grasp and began to nibble on her freshly manicured nails. “What do we do about the guests?”
“Your father is telling them now,” Mrs. Evers reassured her.
“What will we do about the reception?” Ruby pulled the veil out of her hair.
“We’re inviting everyone to meet us over there,” her mother answered. “We’ve already paid for the hall, the food, the entertainment. We might as well have a party, don’t you think, darling?”
“What will we do about the honeymoon?” Ruby kicked off her satin heels and rubbed her toes.
“Well, I guess you’ll have to cancel,” sighed Mrs. Evers. “Maybe they’ll give you credit.”
“No, wait, I have a better idea,” said Emily.
And that’s when the revenge honeymoon took shape. That very moment. And Emily Small’s life would never be the same.
K. J. Gillenwater has a B.A. in English and Spanish from Valparaiso University and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. She worked as a Russian linguist in the U.S. Navy, spending time at the National Security Agency doing secret things. After six years of service, she ended up as a technical writer in the software industry. She has lived all over the U.S. and currently resides in Wyoming with her family where she runs her own business writing government proposals and squeezes in fiction writing when she can. In the winter she likes to ski and snowshoe; in the summer she likes to garden with her husband, take walks with her dog, and explore the Big Horn Mountains. She has written multiple books and plans on writing more.
