Can the Excel junkie and his new bestie with benefits design a lasting relationship given the right variables, or is their formula for love riddled with miscalculation?
Rita Ryan: What happens when the World’s Hottest Nerd asks you for an extrovert adoption? You friend him, of course. Swapping favors lets you ask him to review your resume and helps you land the interview of your dreams. Maybe you exchange hopes…future plans…kisses. But you definitely don’t give Ed your heart. After all, love was never in the plan.
Ed Delancey: How do you handle it when your scheme to make new friends lands you with the woman of your dreams? You hang on and enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts. The saucy grad student may know how to push your buttons, reveling in bringing you to the brink, but her job search makes her strictly off-limits. Hiring her is out of the question. Ditto, giving her your love.
Amelia Simone is a reader turned writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Along with caring for her young family and enjoying food and wine adventures with her husband, she spends a lot of time in the backyard gardening and reading during her free time. (If you plant enough stuff, no one notices if you accidentally kill off half.)
When the weather cooperates, you can find her on her deck sipping coffee and writing her next book. Amelia believes that everyone has a little frog in ‘em, and a little royalty too. She enjoys writing light, hopeful romance about everyday people with the banter and teasing that make life fun. When the real world gets to be too much, she moves on to the sci-fi world she created for a little paranormal relief.
Beatrice Callahan loves lists. Sometimes she even makes a to-do list of things she’s already done, just to go check, check, check and feel accomplished. So it’s easy to understand why, when her divorce is finally final and her ex is all moved out, Bea takes a cool, close look at her life…and makes a list.
It’s not exactly a bucket list.
It’s a love list.
Bea loves the outdoors, so she puts visit 10 National Parks on the list.
She loves animals, and on goes get a puppy.
She loves the beach, and she adds take a dream vacation to the list, and decides to do that one first. After all she’s been through and all she’s lost, she needs time to relax, rest, and reset.
On the first day she arrives in Hilton Head Island, she meets Grant Turner, the man whose house she’s renting for her fabulous beach vacation. He’s just there to make sure she settles in properly and has enough towels.
But when Bea asks for recommendations around the island, Grant quickly becomes her tour guide and then a friend and then…more than friends.
Bea turns to her lists when things get confusing and her love list morphs once again… Can she add fall in love at age 45 to the list and check it off?
The front door opened as she stood from the couch. Grant poked his head into the house. “Bea? Oh, there you are.”
“Come in,” she said.
He did, his frown appearing and deepening as he did. “You’re right. The air’s off in here.”
“Yeah.” She ran her hands through her hair, getting a momentary shock over its length. The style was still so new, she’d forgotten she didn’t have any hair to push back. Having Grant in the house brought a new kind of electricity she didn’t quite know how to hold. One couldn’t contain such a strong current anyway, but Bea really wanted to try.
Let him handle the air conditioner first, she told herself as he went through the house and out the back door. She followed him at a safe distance, still getting plenty of musky, male notes of his cologne.
Bea honestly felt like a twenty-year-old meeting the man of her dreams for the first time. The racing pulse, the nervousness in her chest that reached up and clouded her thoughts. Her life had been a whirlwind of fun when she’d first started dating Nort. New places, different friends, a world of possibilities opening before her.
She felt the exact same way now, after a couple of decades of normalcy, with predictable—code for boring—days, generic conversations, and stale kisses. Her children had brought a new challenge every single day, but her romantic relationship had chilled quietly on the back shelf while the kids grew and then moved on.
She hadn’t realized Nort had done the same, and she wondered as she watched Grant kneel in front of the air compressor at the back of the house if anything would’ve been different if she had paid attention to how unromantic their relationship had become.
Maybe he wouldn’t have cheated on you with his secretary, she thought. The oldest situation in all the books and movies she’d watched her whole life had happened to her. She’d never given any thought to how the women in those fictional stories must’ve felt—until she had to deal with the crushing reality herself.
And crush it did. Hopes, dreams, plans, lists.
But she had a new list now, and while she’d only been on Hilton Head Island for just over a day, she felt wildly behind in accomplishing the items her friends had starred for her.
Visit the beach and listen to the ocean.
Fly a kite you don’t think you can control.
She’d listened to the ocean this morning, and the waves whispered things like, Choose to be happy, and Let yourself breathe again. Not only that, but she sure had felt like she could fall in love again that morning, with the sunshine bathing her and her thoughts rumbling around how to text Grant and get another meal with him.
USA Today bestseller Elana Johnson writes adult contemporary beach romance. She is the author of over 130 books across two names, and there’s nothing better than sun, sand, and swoon-worthy kisses! Unless it’s a sweet-and-sexy cowboy – read those under her pen name of Liz Isaacson. Learn more about her sweet beach romances at www.elanajohnson.com. Join her texting group by sending the word SAND to 474747 and get exclusive sales, freebies, and more.
Hella is one witch who is done with relationships. Having rid herself of a clingy nymph, she’s determined to stay single and savour everything her fae town in Geneva has to offer—with no strings attached. The trouble is, it turns out breaking up with a king isn’t as easy as she’d thought. Her ex just sent a legion to kidnap her and take her to the faerie realm of Lucia.
And he wants to make her his queen.
Grant MacKinnon is one wolf shifter who prefers a quiet life. His home in a glen in Scotland, his small wolf pack, and fine whisky is all he needs. The trouble is, a witch in the fae town in Fort William just cursed him to die if he doesn’t find his fated mate and bring her to her. Now he craves a female he’s never met, one he was convinced didn’t exist, and he refuses to believe she’s really his one true mate… until he sets eyes on the beautiful blue-haired lass.
And his wolf instincts howl that she was made for him.
And when he realises she’s in danger and another male wants her as his queen, MacKinnon will stop at nothing to protect her and claim her as his mate.
She stormed to the chair in the corner of the room, picked up his jeans and turned on him. She glared at him as she threw the jeans, hitting him in the face. He dragged them down, a stupid dumbfounded look on his face.
One that told her he couldn’t see what he had done wrong.
And he couldn’t believe she wasn’t doing as he wanted.
“Get out,” she snapped and flung her arm towards the bedroom door. “And never come back here.”
He growled, “I cannae do that. If I leave, I die.”
Colour her curious.
He pulled down a breath and his lips flattened, and he looked as if he was fighting himself.
When he spoke again, his tone was softer, his brogue less pronounced.
“If you don’t give me release, I die, Hella. You must accept me.” He cast a glance at his hips and then lifted his gaze to lock with hers again. “I’ll be gentle with you, if that’s what you fear.”
Hella rolled her eyes. “I had lion twins splitting me in two the other day. I don’t need a gentle man.”
He growled again, flashing his fangs this time, and tensed as he fisted his clothing. “How many males have ye accepted into your wee body? It matters no’. You’ll bed no more.”
His accent seemed to be an emotional barometer. The more heated he got, the less understandable he became. She was tempted to roll her eyes at him again to see just how deep into his Scottish roots she could push him.
“I’ll do what I want and who I want, and if you try to stop me—” She hesitated as the way he had reacted to the shackles filled her mind. She didn’t want to torment him like that again. Maybe she could try something else.
If he wouldn’t leave, then she would make him.
She pivoted on her heel and swept away from him, her shoulders tipped back and her head held high, the perfect image of a witch one would be wise not to mess with. The wolf’s gaze scalded her back, tracking down to her bottom, and he loosed a low, sexy growl.
Hella refused to let it affect her.
The wolf was about to be shown the door and if he had any sense, he would take the hint and leave her alone. She had her own problems to deal with and every second she wasted on the wolf was a second Ethyrian drew closer to realising she had escaped Lucia.
She hurried down the stairs to her shop.
The wolf followed.
Still naked.
Hella huffed as she glanced at him and he leaned against the wall, folded his arms across his chest and crossed his ankles. Shameless male.
“Put some clothes on,” she snapped and tried to shut him out as she unlocked a case behind the counter and plucked a book from the shelves.
When she turned back towards the counter, her gaze collided with his.
He grinned salaciously at her, irritatingly sure of himself while she was flustered and unsteady, rattled by his presence. “You don’t want that. I can see in your eyes you want me, lass. I can smell that you need your male.”
Hella gagged. “Gross.”
And diligently kept her eyes off the impressive hard-on he was still sporting as he pushed away from the wall and stalked towards her.
He was far too big.
If she did accept him, as he kept putting it, he would split her in two.
She was just considering possible spells that would help her get around that when his knees gave out, he went down hard and clocked his jaw on the edge of the wooden counter.
Ruining his carefully affected image of confidence and swagger.
Hella resisted the urge to peer over the counter and check on him, and continued leafing through the book instead as she dryly said, “Have a nice trip? Send me a postcard next time.”
The wolf’s arm shot up from behind the counter, his hand slammed down onto it and he hauled himself up. He growled as he shook off the blow to his ego but he looked groggy, which worried her.
Was he telling her the truth about the curse?
Would he really die if she didn’t add him to the tally of notches on her bedpost? She intended to find out the answer to both of those questions.
I’m a NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY and International Best-Selling Author writing passionate paranormal romance books and series for adults.
I love to create detailed worlds, twisting plots, mind-blowing action, intense emotion and heart-stopping romances with leading men that vary from dark deadly vampires to sexy shifters and wicked werewolves, to sinful angels and hot demons! All of them alpha as you would expect in paranormal romance, and every book with a guaranteed HAPPILY FOREVER AFTER!
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