Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
March
WINTER
I didn't know which one of us looked more surprised when
Finn O’Malley walked into the Riverside Café at about ten minutes before
midnight. The café was experiencing a
lull in the post-late night, pre-bar closings time period, and there were only
two customers: myself and a man in his fifties over by the counter.
And now Finn.
“Winter,” he said, his tone a cross between disappointment
and disbelief which I understood immediately. He’d come to this run down
café—far from where he lived and worked—to…well, I wasn’t sure what he’d want
other than get away from anyone who might know him.
And there I sat. The girl who’d had an enormous,
unrequited crush on her older sister’s high school boyfriend. And said older
sister might have been the worst girlfriend he’d ever had. If my speeding heart
was any indication, my crush was far from dead.
“Finn. Good to see you.” He looked terrible—or as terrible
as Finn could ever look. Tall with dark hair set against ivory skin and the
lean, muscular build of someone who did manual labor for a living. Finn would
never look bad.
But grief had hollowed out his cheeks, and his shocking
blue eyes were bloodshot. His inky black hair stood in clumps around his head
as if he’d run his fingers through it multiple times. He wore a gray T-shirt
that hugged his strong frame but had dirt smudges all over it. His worn jeans
displayed dust and grime.
He worked in construction—or more accurately, he flipped
houses, the last I’d heard. Not that I kept up on the doings of Finn O’Malley that much.
His eyes shifted around the restaurant, as he probably
wondered how he could take a seat away from me and not appear too rude. I
solved his dilemma by grabbing my purse and library book and sliding out of the
booth.
“I was just going,” I said.
He licked his upper lip and I about died on the spot. But
I was an adult now. All of twenty-two years. Crushes might have made my heart
squeeze and my knees shake, but they didn’t paralyze me. Giving him a tight
smile, I walked toward the door. He didn’t move, and unless I was going to walk
around a table or two, I’d have to brush by him.
So I did.
And smelled him.
And suddenly I couldn’t leave.
The sour, sweet stench of alcohol was so strong I wondered
if he’d poured a bottle of vodka over his head. It was a familiar fragrance
because my sister had been wearing it regularly for the past ten years. Her
alcohol addiction, among other things, was a reason Finn and she were exes when
many people had thought they’d get married out of high school.
I backed up. “Did you drive here?”
The side of his mouth quirked up—not quite a smile, more
of a wry acknowledgment of my thought process. “I’m not drunk,” he said.
“I…it’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.” I started back toward the booth. “Come
sit with me. My book was boring anyway.”
Good manners drove him to follow even if he didn’t want
to. He dropped into the opposite bench, and I pushed my water glass toward him.
“Thanks.” He drained it in three gulps. I was way too
fascinated with the motion of his throat and the way that his Adam’s apple
signaled every gulp. He set the glass down carefully as if almost surprised by
his own sudden thirstiness.
Due to his long arms, his folded hands reached halfway
across the table. I kept my arms locked by my side so I wouldn’t accidentally
on purpose touch him.
My role was friend, not girlfriend, no matter how many
inappropriate fantasies I’d dreamed up when I was a girl.
The waitress came out and delivered another glass of water
and refilled my now empty one.
“I’ll have a burger. Plain. Order of fries,” Finn rattled
off without looking at the menu. He pointed at me. “You want anything?”
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
The waitress left, and Finn stretched his long legs out
and leaned back into the booth, looking completely wiped. If I moved my legs,
even a little, I’d brush against him. I stayed still because I wasn’t sure what
I would do if I touched him. Something embarrassing, no doubt.
“What are you doing here?”
Clearing my throat, I managed to form a coherent answer.
“I just got off work. Closed tonight.”
Surprised, his eyebrows shot into his forehead. “What are
you doing that has you working until midnight?”
“I work at Atra, the ink shop two doors down.”
“Oh,” he started and then stopped. “I thought you were working
at a marketing firm.”
A tendril of pleasure sprang to life at the idea of Finn
keeping track of me. We may have been friends once, but my sister was the
connecting thread. And when she’d snapped their tie, Finn and I had drifted
apart like florets from a blown dandelion.
He’d floated one way and I’d floated another. We’d lived
in the same city going on three years now—since he got back from attending an
out of town university—but the first time I’d seen him since he and Ivy had
broken up had been at his father’s funeral a month ago.
“No, I was downsized but I still do freelance design work
for them and a couple other companies, but my primary job is commissioned
artwork at Atra. I also help around the shop, doing bookings and stuff. Tonight
I had a late consultation with a friend of Tucker’s. He owns the shop,” I
explained and then shut up, not wanting to ramble.
Finn nodded as if he found this interesting. “Sounds like
you are putting your talent to good use. I always thought your work was
tremendous.”
“Thanks. So what brings you here?”
He looked around. The man hunched over his coffee at the
counter hadn’t moved. “I just got off work too.”
“I thought you were flipping houses?”
“Like you, I had a change in jobs.” His voice was grim. It
didn’t take a genius to guess the change wasn’t a good one like mine was. Or
maybe he was just angry about life right now, which he had every right to be.
“I know this sounds like a stupid Hallmark card, but it
does get better.” I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I placed my hand over
his folded ones. “I promise.”
He tilted his head back, and his eyes fluttered closed,
his ridiculously long lashes feathering across the top of his cheeks. Was he
shutting out the pain or me? Or everything?
After long moments of silence, so long and so quiet that I
could hear the hum of the refrigeration unit that held bottles of soda and beer
behind the cash register, he spoke. “When I was thirteen, my dog Hunter died.
Dad and I had bought him when I was four. He’d developed some kind of doggy
liver disease, and we had to put him down. That was the worst kind of pain, I
thought. But that was like a pin prick, while Dad’s death is like a dull knife
dragging itself across my body one painful inch at a time.”
I bit down on my lip so I didn’t cry in front of him. I
remembered that pain, and hated that someone I cared about had to suffer it
too. “I’m not going to say it’s easy to get over a loss like that; only that it
does happen—eventually.”
He snorted, a rough and unhappy sound. “I have been
drinking. Not going to lie about that.” His eyes opened halfway, which was
probably for the best. The piercing blue came off as too beautiful to be real
and too mesmerizing to look away. “But not tonight. Tonight I decided to throw
my bottles against the wall instead of drinking them, and because I’m a stupid
fuck, I failed to realize I was standing in the splash zone.”
The food arrived before I could respond. He pulled a
napkin from the tabletop dispenser and shoved half his fries onto it. “Eat or I
won’t be able to.”
Obediently I put a fry into my mouth and watched him dig
in. Grief or no grief, he was still eating, which was a good sign. And he
didn’t seem drunk. No slurred words,
no inappropriate comments.
“Sorry I jumped to conclusions,” I said after polishing
off another fry.
“Don’t be. With your past, I can see why you’d be
concerned,” he said between bites. My
past. He was referring to dealing with my sister’s addictions, which had
spiraled out of control after our parents died when she was nineteen.
“She’s better now,” I said. “If you were wondering.”
“Really?” Disbelief was clear in every long drawn-out
letter.
“Really. She hit a bad place shortly after her release,
but she’s been clean for…” I counted in my head, “almost thirty days.”
“That’s good. Good for her and for you.”
He popped the rest of the burger into his mouth and washed it down with the
entire glass of water.
“Did you chew that or inhale it?” I laughed, remembering
the days he’d linger in our kitchen eating anything and everything Mom would
cook.
“I haven’t eaten since noon so if I could have just
pressed it into my face and absorbed it via osmosis, I would have.” We shared a
laugh, just a small one, but I was breathless by the end. His smile was too
much for me, and it was the first one I’d seen from him for so long. It lit up
his eyes and revealed the deep creases on the corners of his mouth and his
even, perfect white teeth.
“No burgers on the west side of the city?” I joked to
disguise my growing and uncomfortable desire for him. Now was not the time nor
the place. He was not ever to be mine.
His grin grew wider. “Why do you think I’m here? Trying to
avoid being seen by my roommates. I don’t know if you met them at the funeral?”
I shook my head. I’d only had eyes for Finn. “I live with four of them. Adam
Rees is one.” Adam was a friend of Finn’s from high school. He had a famous
father. That was about all I remembered, but I nodded anyway, and he continued.
“Their idea of helping me cope is to get me involved in increasingly dangerous
activities.”
“What have your roommates made you do?”
“What haven't they made me do is the question. I've been
to strip clubs, paintballing, ATVing, a firing range, rock climbing,
fishing." Finn tapped a finger on the table to punctuate each activity.
“I've got two former Marines living with me, and I think they’re planning to
push me out of an airplane. So I can't go home."
“You can stay with me,” I said with a nonchalant shrug.
His eyes drifted around my face, lingering on my lips and
then dropping lower. I could feel my unbound breasts tighten under the cotton
of my T-shirt. I hated bras and was small and perky enough I could get away
without wearing them. The only problem was I had fat, eraser-sized nipples, and
right now they were pointing directly at Finn. He stared at them for what
seemed like an eternity.
“Is that right?” His voice was husky.
The air in the room disappeared, and I barely had enough
breath to croak out, “No, Ivy’s there. She and I live together now. Have for—”
I paused, not wanting to bring up her recent incarceration, “—for a couple of
months,” I finished awkwardly.
He made a noise in the back of his throat, one I couldn’t
decipher. “So have you been seeing anyone?”
I didn’t know what to make of that. Why was he at all remotely interested in my
love life?
“No, not recently.
Not since—”—” I broke off again.
“Not since Ivy got
out of prison,” he said dryly.
“You heard?”
“I heard.” He was
done with the subject of Ivy and that was okay with me. It made me
uncomfortable to talk about her while I was perving on her ex-boyfriend.
Anxious to change the subject, I asked, “What about you?”
“I don’t think what I’ve been doing constitutes as seeing anyone. Not since my dad died.
Not feeling it.” His blue gaze pinned me
against the booth. I heard what he wasn’t saying out loud. He had been sleeping
around and from the interested way he was eyeing me, the suggestion was I could
be next. “I’ve been trying not to feel for a while but tonight? Maybe tonight
should be different.”
It wasn’t a question; it was an invitation. And all the
teenage feelings of longing and lust rushed over me until I was dry mouthed and
full of want.
He looked out the window, considering something, and then
back toward me. “You had a crush on me for a long time. Am I taking advantage
of you?”
I didn’t pretend I was confused about what he was asking,
even though it was a bit mortifying to be confronted by my unreciprocated
feelings. I shook my head. “No. I think it’s the other way around.”
“It’s not. Why don’t we get out of this place?” He stood
and threw two twenties on the table and waited for me to lead the way out.
I was acutely aware of his large frame behind me as I
walked carefully across the tiled floor to the entrance. The heat of his body
nearly burned me as he pressed against my back to reach around me with a large,
work-roughened hand to push the glass door open.
He placed a hand on my lower back and guided me to his
truck. It was a monster of a thing with big black tires and a menacing silver
grill.
“You really expect me to climb into this thing?”
He opened the door and in one swift motion lifted me onto
the seat. “I forgot what a bitty thing you are.”
“I’m not small. You’re just very tall. With a very large
truck.”
His hands didn’t release my waist; instead, he moved
closer. I opened my legs to make space for him.
“Don’t worry, Winter. Everything’s going to fit fine.”
With a firm hand on my neck, he drew my face down to his. I heard his lips part
before I felt them press against mine.
A thousand thoughts tumbled in my head. Would Ivy be okay
with this? Should I really be taking advantage of a grief-stricken man? How
were his lips soft and firm at the same time? Could I have an orgasm from just
kissing? Was this what love felt
like?
His mouth took mine in a firm possession—no hesitation. He
wanted this if not me. And I took what he gave me because
when did a girl ever get to kiss the boy she’d crushed over for years? Hardly
ever.
Only in the movies.
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and dug my hands
into his hair, giving into every desperate desire I’d always tried to stomp
down.
He groaned and pulled me tighter to him, the seat somehow
perfectly situated at groin level so I felt the strong, heated evidence of his desire through our jeans. He rubbed
his tongue along the edges of mine. He outlined my lips and then stroked the
flat of his tongue against the roof of my mouth.
Even if I hadn’t had a crush on him, I would have been
weak-kneed. Finn O’Malley knew how to kiss. He wasn’t just thrusting his tongue
into me, he was exploring me, learning me, tasting me.
A large hand cupped one breast and squeezed it tightly. I
cried out, part in pleasure and part in surprise at how the slight pain felt so
good.
“Too rough?” he asked, pulling away.
I shook my head. He gave a half smile and yanked down the
vee of my T-shirt until my bare breast popped out. The overhead light had gone
off in the truck, but there was enough moonlight that anyone coming out of the
café could probably see what we were doing.
But any concern I had ended when he placed his mouth over
my ripe nipple. With the same lavish care he took kissing me, he explored every
inch of my breast. The top received a dozen wet kisses and tiny nips. The
areola he licked thoroughly, and the nipple was sucked on so hard and with such
long draws that I felt as if a string connected my nipples to my pussy. A
string I hadn’t known existed.
While he sucked, he made low growls of delight that fueled
my lust. I squeezed my legs around his hips, drawing him closer, drawing him
inside where only he could relieve the painful ache between my legs.
“Fuck,” he rasped, breaking our connection and backing
away. The cool spring air made my taut nipple tighten even more. “Not here.” He
gently straightened my T-shirt and then tucked me inside the truck.
We drove a short distance to a chain link fence that
opened upon a press of a remote.
“What is this place?” I tried to catch my breath. Peering
out the window into the dimly lit night, there appeared to be nothing but bare
land filled with machinery and surrounded by fences. Beyond it was the
river.
“My new job. Left to me courtesy of Mr. Sean O’Malley.”
There was a faint twinge of bitterness. “Dad wanted to stamp his signature on
the city and chose this downtown revitalization project. But then he died and
left it to me, so I don’t know whether to love or hate him.”
“It’s okay to feel both. Love and hate,” I clarified
unnecessarily.
“I suppose you’re right.” He stopped the truck in front of
a trailer.
“You can cry you know. I did a lot of that.”
“I like to have my emotional release come a different
way.”
“Like what?”
He shifted in the truck seat to look at me. His hand
reached out to cup my face. “You’ve grown into a very beautiful woman. I’d very
much like to take you inside the trailer and fuck you against the wall.”
“That’s kind of a coarse invitation.”
His thumb ran over my lower lip, using some of the
moisture of my mouth to wet my lip. I shivered, and a grim but knowing smile
spread across his face.
“It’s the only kind I’ve got in me. All the tender emotion
has been eaten up by my dad’s death. I want to lose myself in you, Winter.”
He got out of the truck and opened my door, giving me an
expectant look. Was I in or out?
I knew what he was saying. It wasn’t that he loved me,
wanted to date me, or wanted me to be his girlfriend. He’d probably be
disappointed if he saw me next to him tomorrow morning. He’d lie awake
wondering if he had to chew off his own arm to escape. He was offering a hard fuck
in his trailer, not lovemaking in his bed.
I knew all of this and still wanted him.
Maybe the sex would burn away his mystery, and I wouldn't
internally sigh when I heard his name. Maybe it wouldn't. But it was a risk
worth taking, and I planned to get my money's worth.
“How many condoms do you have?” I answered boldly.
His eyes glittered in the moonlight. “How many do I need?”
“Depends on your stamina and recovery time.”
“Honey, you're going to have a hard time walking out of
the trailer when we're done.”
My heart ached at his words, but I took his hand and
followed him inside.
Finn
& Winter’s story will be here on April 13th!
Pre-order
on iBooks HERE!
Special
Price of Only $2.99
Blurb
Winter Donovan loves two things: her sister and her
sister's ex boyfriend. She's spent her whole life doing the right thing except
that one time, that night when Finn O'Malley looked hollowed out by his
father's death. Then she did something very wrong that felt terribly right.
Finn can't stop thinking about Winter and the night and
he'll do anything to make her a permanent part of his life, even if it means
separating Winter from the only family she has.
Their love was supposed to be unrequited but one grief
stricken guy and one girl with too big of a heart results in disastrous
consequences.
Woodland Series Reading Order
Undeclared (Book One) free 4/10
Unspoken (Book Two) $.99 4/10
Unraveled (Book Three) $1.99 4/10
Kobo:
http://bit.ly/LhUSUB
About the Author:
Jen
Frederick lives with her husband, child, and one rambunctious dog. She's been reading stories all her life but
never imagined writing one of her own. Jen loves to hear from readers so drop
her a line at jensfrederick@gmail.com.
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