Tessa’s bestie has been dying for a night of ecstasy with a certain sexy doctor at The Eros Pit. When Tessa winds up with the doctor’s marker at the singles night event, she swaps. There’s no harm in it, not when she knows her best friend will get to have the night of her dreams.
Except Tessa ends up with a Dom she wants nothing to do with – Cooper Livingstone. Danger surrounds him. The sexy alpha is a total badass, fighting wildfires on the front range. He’s potent. Makes her body come alive in ways she has never experienced before. It worries her how much she craves his wicked brand of lovemaking after a single night.
Cooper lives and breathes his daredevil lifestyle. For him, there is nothing like coming up against Mother Nature’s wrath – that is, until Tessa winds up in his bed. Underneath her serene façade lies a feisty, passionate woman who calls to him on an elemental level. After a single night, he yearns to claim the intoxicating submissive. She’s in his blood. He dreams about her taste and her surrender. The need to claim her, make her his in every way, is a hunger he cannot deny. He will do whatever it takes to earn her surrender, and possibly even her love.
But Tessa doesn’t take chances. They’re way too dangerous. She knows far too well how devastating the consequences can be. And submitting to Cooper might just be the biggest risk of all.
Can Cooper convince Tessa to take a chance on him?
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Anya grew up listening to Cardinals baseball and reading anything she could get her hands on. She remembers her mother saying if only she would read the right type of books instead binging her way through the romance aisles at the bookstore, she’d have been a doctor. While Anya never did get that doctorate, she graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri-St. Louis with an M.A. in History. Anya is a bestselling and award-winning author published in multiple fiction genres. She also writes urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and contemporary romance under the name Maggie Mae Gallagher. A total geek at her core, when she is not writing, she adores attending the latest comic con or spending time with her family. She currently lives in the Midwest with her two furry felines.
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.
My new boss is my best friend’s older brother and the golden boy of Paradise Shores.
Me? I’m the misfit single mom who never wanted to fit in…
Being forced to move back to my hometown after a decade away is embarrassing, but I’ll do anything to protect my little girl.
I’ll even wait tables at the elite Yacht Club… now owned by the boy I once had a huge crush on. He’s grown up and claimed his rightful place as King of Paradise Shores.
Parker Marchand was a star athlete and professional sailor who never looked at me twice. He’s strong and steady, everything my abusive ex wasn’t, but I’m a struggling single mom and professional screw-up. What could we possibly have in common?
But Parker doesn’t believe in no win situations. He wants to be my knight in shining armor.
His plan: Charm my daughter. Take me sailing. Out to dinner…and into his bed.
Make me forget everyone but him.
The man I’ve always wanted is within reach, but I’ve been burned too many times to trust again. Parker has a brilliant future and I’m running from my past.
Everyone knows knights in shining armor aren’t real, and I’m too old to believe in fairy tales. Even if Parker is making it hard not to…
Olivia is a twenty-something hopeless romantic who loves billionaires heroes despite never having met one. Taking matters into her own hands, she creates them on the page instead. Stern, charming, cold or brooding, so far she’s never met a (fictional) billionaire she didn’t like.
A voracious reader of romance, Olivia picked up the pen a few years back and what followed was a love affair of her own. Now she spends her days grinning at the steamy banter she’s writing or swooning at happily-ever-afters. Or, to be frank, struggling with writing about herself in third person for the purposes of marketing.
She’s been writing contemporary romance novels since 2018.
They’re all exclusively available on Amazon and enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
(Phew. Now I can go back to first-person love stories!)
