Under the Mayhaw Tree by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

 

As she took off her clothes he put his hands behind his head and watched her every movement. Each one was poetry in motion to his way of thinking. To him, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.  He loved her so deeply he felt it in his soul. She was everything to him and he wanted to be everything to her. His heart was filled with such peace, his body with such longing, he could barely contain the feelings.

The last piece of clothing she removed was her panties and when she turned to the bed, he whistled in appreciation. As he had at the two motels they’d stayed at on the way to the cabin, he pretended not to
notice the healing bruises covering her sweet body.

“Will you get under the covers?” she asked. She sat on the mattress, then stuck her legs under the sheet.

“Hey. You can leave your socks on but you took mine off?” he challenged. “You think that’s fair?”

“I have poor circulation in my feet,” she said.  “Believe me. You don’t want my cold toesies rubbing along your calf in the middle of the night.”

“I believe you should pay a toll for being allowed to wear socks to bed when I can’t,” he told her as he joined her under the covers.

“What kind of toll?” she asked.

“The kind that is exacting,” he said. He slid down in the bed—disappearing beneath the covers—and slid on top of her. 

Meet Dakota & Shane in this standalone second romance!

AVAILABLE NOW!

A gripping standalone adult contemporary romance about finding yourself while taking a second chance at your first love…

Dakota Nakos was always the resilient, strong-willed achiever. But when her father dies and she’s entrusted with the family’s casino, she feels vulnerable, scared, and more than a little emotional –not exactly the best time to see an old lover she’s never really gotten over.

Dakota once meant the world to Shane Garrity. Then suddenly he left town to train as a U.S. Marshal, and their love for each other crashed into a memory. Now he’s come home for her father’s funeral, and one look at the girl he left behind stirs up both memories and regrets, and reignites a fire he feared he’d lost forever.

Dakota may be the same driven girl she always was, but she’s also changed in ways neither could have anticipated. She’s not just a young woman searching for own identity in the Native American community in which she was raised, but one questioning her new life outside her father’s shadow. Above all she wonders if Shane can push past her weakened defenses to rekindle what they once had, or whether the intense blaze between them will ultimately reduce her heart to ashes

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She closed her eyes on a sharp breath, looking soft and vulnerable.

Because I couldn’t help myself, my fingers left her chair and glided up her arms to her neck. Her breaths released from her lips in short pants and I considered touching my mouth to hers.

Would she let me? Would she want me to?

“Yes,” she whispered, the heat of her breaths warming the tiny sliver of air still lingering between us. “But that’s in the past. We had our chance and I . . . I got over you. So let’s leave it there.”

My stomach completely flipped over. “You got over me?”

I studied her lips edge to edge, and they trembled in response. She was so not over me.

I didn’t know what the hell was driving me. I just knew I didn’t like hearing those words. Not one damn bit.

“You got over me?” I growled as my fingers gripped the nape of her neck.

My lips brushed the line of her jaw and she shivered.

“Shane, don’t. Please,” she mumbled, her hands at my chest. “You’ll just leave again and I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

She sounded so helpless and sad. For the first time she was allowing me to see exactly what she might have been feeling, might’ve gone through five years ago. She sounded wrecked—as wrecked as I had been.

My lips trailed to her ear. “Angel.”

I couldn’t wait to read Two of Hearts!  Second chance romance between the girl and her brother’s best friend.  The tropes hit the mark for me.  I was so very much looking forward to Dakota and Shane.  I fall in love with Christina Lee’s characters over and over again, not just every new character she writes about but within each story.

Right away, we see the strength in Dakota with how the story starts.  She’s dealing with the death of her much loved and respected father while taking over the running of the family’s casino.  Shane has return home to attend the funeral of Mr. Nakos.  Chemistry steams off the pages from the moment Shane and Dakota face each other after years apart.

Thank you, Ms. Lee.  I appreciate the research that resulted in this realistic portrayal of Native American community.  I love seeing diversity in contemporary romance.  I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up another story penned by Christina Lee.  She consistently delivers a winning read with memorable characters and dynamic storylines.

Mother, wife, reader, dreamer. Christina lives in the Midwest with her husband and son–her two favorite guys.

She’s addicted to lip gloss and salted caramel everything. She believes in true love and kissing, so writing romance novels has become a dream job.

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 Exposed 

Ethan Frost # 3

By: Tracy Wolff

Releasing May 5^th, 2015

Loveswept

Ethan Frost, the irresistible leading man from the New York Times bestsellers Ruined and Addicted, returns once again in Exposed—a novel that’s perfect for fans of J. Kenner and Sylvia Day.
Will Ethan Frost go too far for the woman he loves?

The moment Chloe Girard walked into my life, she exposed secrets and emotions I always thought were best kept buried.

She wants to move on, to ignore the past. But I can’t do that. Not when she still suffers. And not when the man who hurt her remains unscathed. So when I discover the perfect opportunity to make him pay for what he did to Chloe, I can’t walk away, no matter the consequences.

But there’s a fine line between justice and obsession. As I turn up old crimes and new lies, I know that I’m playing with fire—and risking the very foundations of our relationship.

My love for Chloe is absolute. I just hope it’s enough to save us both.

Link to Follow Tour:   http://www.tastybooktours.com/2014/12/exposed-ethan-frost-3-by-tracy-wolff.html

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After several long minutes, my heartbeat finally returns to normal. I pull out slowly, rolling Chloe over so that she’s cuddled into my chest and I can feel her breath against my neck, her heart beating against my own.

“I love you,” she says, her lips moving drowsily against my sweat-slicked skin.

“I love you, too.”

It’s a vow on my part as much as it is a declaration. Because loving her has never been the problem. I’ve loved her almost from the beginning—I started falling the minute she refused to drink the blueberry smoothie I made her and by the time she’d returned the Vitamix I’d bought her for the second time, I was all in.

Yes, loving her is easy. But keeping her—that’s something else entirely. I’ve already fucked things up with her, twice. I lied to her, tried to break up with her, hurt her over and over again when all I’ve really wanted to do is protect her.

I don’t know how one man can fuck up as badly—and as many times—as I have. And yet, by some miracle, she’s still here. In my arms. In my bed. Though, technically, we’re in her bed at the moment.

That’s something else I intend to change as soon as possible. Not that I have anything against Chloe’s room—or her roommate. But I need her with me, in my space. I need her in my house, her stuff cluttering up my dresser, her shoes tripping me on the way to the bathroom, her sexy-sweet scent hanging in the corners of every room I enter.

I need her things mingled with mine, need her life mingled with mine.

Because no matter how much I’ve fucked up, no matter how many mistakes I’ve made, I can’t let her go. I won’t let her go. Not now. Not ever. We’re tied together, our lives twisted and tangled together long before we had a clue what we would mean to each other. I wouldn’t have chosen our past, how we started out. But it exists. It’s real, and it’s something we’re both going to have to live with—for better or worse.

That’s the nightmare. That one day she won’t be able to live with what Brandon did to her. With the part I played in keeping him safe because I didn’t know better. Because I was blind.

But that’s a future I hope will never happen—a future I’m determined to never let happen. Right now, in the present, she’s still here. Still in my arms. Still willing to give me—to give us—a chance to get this right.

It’s more than I deserve, but I’m taking it.

I stroke her back, murmur nonsense words in her ear as Chloe snuggles close to me. Her breathing evens out and she’s asleep again within minutes. She’s exhausted, the toll of the last few weeks—the last few months—impossible to ignore. For both of us.

I close my eyes, try to follow, but my mind is too crowded to allow any kind of sleep to creep in. Chloe’s words from earlier chase themselves around inside my head—and there’s a part of me that knows she’s right. That knows I’ll be messing with all kinds of old wounds if I keep pursuing this. Opening them up, making them bleed. Making her bleed.

Hurting her any more than she’s already been hurt is the last thing I want to do.

But as I lay here staring at the ceiling, I can’t stop thinking about my brother. About the fact that he hurt her when she was young and defenseless. About the way he continues to hurt her even now.

I flash back to the way he looked at her in my driveway that day when the whole world came crashing down around our ears for the first time. So smug, so satisfied, so convinced of his own invincibility. The nondisclosure agreement—agreements, I remind myself, thinking back to the call I just took—make him untouchable and he knows it. More, he revels in it.

I’m not okay with that.

I’m not okay with any of it. Not what he did to Chloe and those other women. Not how he got away with all of it. And most definitely, not how he’s planning to run for Congress and beyond, building a life for himself making laws that he feels absolutely no compunction to follow.

None of that is okay.

Chloe might be strong enough to live with the past—and a future where Brandon never pays for his crimes. But I’m not. And I never will be.

I am a total Tracy Wolff fangirl.  And Ethan Frost…where can I get him for myself. <sigh> I think Exposed gets me a little closer.  Downer being, I just don’t think Chloe would be keen on sharing him.

Exposed has the reader right in the mix from the start.  Ethan and Chloe are back together and have plans to get married.  While Chloe wants to only forget the past, Ethan has a problem not taking any kind of action.  The dual POV keeps the story moving forward and has the reader feeling it all along with Chloe and Ethan.

I don’t want to say goodbye to anything Ethan Frost so I’m thrilled to see that I can look forward to Flawed.

Tracy Wolff collects books, English degrees and lipsticks and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she is when immersed in a great novel. At six she wrote her first short story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven she forayed into the wonderful world of girls lit with her first Judy Blume novel. By ten she’d read everything in the young adult and classics sections of her local bookstore, so in desperation her mom started her on romance novels. And from the first page of the first book, Tracy knew she’d found her life-long love. Now an English professor at her local community college, she writes romances that run the gamut from contemporary to paranormal to erotic suspense.

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