Juan Pablo Campos doesn’t do regrets. He’s living the dream as a physical therapist for his beloved New York Yankees. He has the best friends and family in the world and simply no time to dwell on what could’ve been.
Except when it comes to Priscilla, the childhood friend he’s loved for what seems like forever.
New York City police detective Priscilla Gutierrez has never been afraid to go after what she wants. Second-guessing herself isn’t a thing she does. But lately, the once-clear vision she had for herself—her career, her relationships, her life—is no longer what she wants.
What she especially doesn’t want is to be stuck on a private jet to the Dominican Republic with JuanPa, the one person who knows her better than anyone else.
By the end of a single week in paradise, the love/hate thing JuanPa and Pris have been doing for sixteen years has risen to epic proportions. No one can argue their connection isn’t still there. And they can both finally admit—if only to themselves—they’ve always been a perfect match. The future they dreamed of together is still within reach...if they can just accept each other as they are.
One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!
This book is approximately 90,000 words
Also available from Adriana Herrera
and Carina Press
American Dreamer
American Fairytale
American Love Story
Content Warning
American Sweethearts deals with topics some readers may find difficult, including mentions of child sexual abuse and neglect.
American Sweethearts
Adriana Herrera
For everyone who has been able to see even a small piece of themselves in these Dreamers. These stories are for you.
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from American Dreamer by Adriana Herrera
“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Prologue
Thirteen Years Earlier
Priscilla
I let myself into the apartment, wired and excited to talk to J. I’d finally done it: put in all my paperwork to apply for the police academy. My big plan—no, our big plan—since we were like fifteen.
“Hey, where are you?” I called into the empty living area.
“I’m in the bedroom, still unpacking—shit!” he yelled, as what sounded like a bunch of rubber balls crashed to the floor. I hurried over, laughing, and found J on his knees picking up a ton of tennis balls and throwing them into a box.
“Hey.” I leaned against the door frame watching him, his brown skin a little clammy from the summer heat. He had all the windows closed, but like always, refused to turn on the AC until it got so hot we ran the risk of melting. He could still get it though.
He looked up and grinned when he saw me glomming him up.
“You lost something down here.” He grabbed his dick like the dirtbag he was and I almost wanted to forget about what I’d come here to tell him and jump into bed. It’s not like we could get up to anything at my place with my three roommates. But J had this cozy one bedroom with the good mattress two blocks from the D train.
“I don’t have time for your dick jokes, Juan Pablo.”
“Oh I’m not playing with you.” He licked his lips all suggestive and shit. I swear sometimes keeping my clothes on around this fucker felt like a full-time job.
“Stop it, asshole. I got something important to tell you.” It was hard keeping a straight face when he was giving his “papi chulo” impersonation everything he had. He pushed up from the floor, those brown arms flexing every muscle, and pressed up against me.
“You smell.” I did not sound like it was bothering me none, and that slick bastard knew exactly how to distract me from the enormous news I had to share. But maybe this was for the best. I’d sort of gone off script for our plan, by going on my own, and getting him off always put him in a more manageable mood. Not that it would be a hardship.
“What, you don’t like my stank anymore?” He joked as he ran his sweaty chest all over my arms.
I could barely talk I was laughing so hard. “Ew.”
“But you didn’t complain last night after I came in from my run and ate—”
“Oh my God!” I took a step back because all of my body parts were tingling just from the mention of what we’d gotten up to last night on his couch. He’d been a sweaty mess then too and I had not cared.
“Time out, you ass.” I backed into the hallway, my hands up. “I didn’t come over to mess around with you.”
He gave me a “yeah right” look, eyebrows raised high, but he stayed where he was.
“For real, J. I got something to tell you.” He stiffened, and in an instant his face got serious. That was one of the things I loved about J, he listened to me. Like really listened. Being a girl in a Dominican family sometimes meant that you got told about yourself more often than you were given a chance to say what you actually wanted. Even when you had parents that were trying to at least not raise their kid like they were still living in the sixties.
Juan Pablo always listened to me, in bed and out of it, since always. I smiled, thinking how the two of us had been at this forever. We’d grown up across the street from each other. Him in his family’s little house with a garden, and me in my parent’s cramped two-bedroom apartment.
“Yo, what’s going on in there?” He tapped my temple gently, as I tried to breathe through what was going on in my head. “You’re starting to make me nervous, Pris. Are you breaking up with me?” He tried to sound like he was joking, but I wondered if he already suspected what I was going to say. We’d talked about joining the police academy for years. We’d said we’d do it right after graduation. Now we’d been done with school for a couple of months and he was still waffling, so I went and did it on my own.
I kept trying to get the words out and they just would not come. He’d feel blindsided. I knew I should’ve waited, but I wanted to get on with it. I wanted to be in the NYPD, for myself and to fulfill the dream my father was not able to get for himself.
I fisted my hands and pressed them to my thighs, my nails digging deep into my palms. The queasy want-to-kiss-J feeling replaced by a hole in my stomach.
“I signed up for the academy. I start in five weeks. Now it’s your turn.”
He took a step back and his expression went slack, like he had no idea how to react. He took a deep breath and ran his hands roughly over his head, not talking. There was a weird flutter in my chest, like there wasn’t enough air in my lungs. I wanted to ask what he was thinking, but I didn’t.
I felt like throwing up, bile rising in my throat, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would be what finally blew us apart. This would put our lives on different paths. He would do his thing and I would do mine and we’d lose this.
We’d lose us.
Chapter One
Juan Pablo
The flex is really fucking real.
I grinned as I tapped the caption onto the photo of me cheesing with my glass of XO on the rocks in the private motherfucking jet I was taking to the Dominican Republic. I ran my fingers over the corner of my mouth as I posted on Instagram with more hashtags and shit than necessary, but who could blame my ass for doing the most?
“Juan Pablo, get off that phone, sweetheart, and take it easy on that liquor. We haven’t even taken off yet.”
I rolled my eyes, pocketing my phone as I looked behind me to where my parents were sitting. “Okay, Ma, it’s only my first drink,” I protested as I pointed at the glasses of champagne she and my dad were sipping on. “And that’s not water.”
My father smiled at my whining. “It is an open bar, Irene. Let him live.”
My mother shook her head, making her dark curls bop on her shoulders as she moved up to kiss my dad gently on the mouth—both of them looking like lovesick teens, even after almost forty years. “I can’t take you two anywhere,” she said, without even a hint of annoyance. She then turned to the other side of the aisle where the rest of our group was looking on with amusement. “Odette, you have to help me keep these boys in line.”
Okay, so yes, both my parents were on the jet with me. As was my best friend Patrice, his partner, Easton, and Patrice’s parents. We were on our way to our other best friend’s wedding: Camilo. So I wasn’t exactly ballin’ on this trip. Camilo was, however.
He was marrying a zillionaire who seemed to live for showering him with every luxury he could get away with. Which meant we were travelling like fucking moguls. We would be, anyway, if we ever got in the air. We’d been held back because at the last minute a few other passengers were added to the flight.
I turned around to ask P if he’d heard who else was coming when I heard the flight attendant’s radio come alive with a crackly voice giving her instructions.
She smiled in our direction and gestured toward the still open door of the plane. “Looks like our final passengers are here. We should be heading out very soon.” With that she went to meet whoever had finally arrived. This shit of travelling in a private jet was pretty fucking swank. I mean, no security line and you basically just rolled up to the plane, which was waiting in a hangar at the Westchester County Airport. I could fucking get used to this. Also I needed the vacation. I’d been taking my time decompressing after coming off of what seemed like an interminable post-season. This trip to the DR was exactly what I needed.
I heard her before I saw her, talking to her mother and father—whose voices I’d also recognize anywhere—and felt that sickening dip of excitement mixed with barely contained want that always took over whenever Priscilla Gutierrez was near. Fuck, I wasn’t ready for this.
I knew I was going to see her; her entire family was coming to the wedding. But I thought I’d have time to get there. Get my bearings. I never knew how my heart would conspire against my head when it came to Pris—just knowing she was boarding this plane made a tornado swirl inside my chest. My heart started pounding and my vision blurred a little as she chattered with her mother.
I had no clue how to act and for some reason panicked at the thought that she would be caught off guard by me being here. But before I had time to turn around and get some information from Patrice or Easton she was walking onto the plane.
It was November so even though we were headed to the Caribbean everyone was wearing fall attire. Pris was in what I always called her Bronx Girl Chic. Fancy leggings and sweater combo with pristine, matching Nikes. The whole thing was a mess of fall colors, olive green and terracotta and bright yellow. She’d taken her braids out and had her hair pulled back into a messy top bun. Glossy baby hair framing her face.
“Oh wow.” She had that sickly sweet tone she used when she was too tired to even look aggravated, and as I stared straight ahead, it did not escape me that she was avoiding looking at me. Which in a tight space, like a private jet, required a hell of a lot of effort. I mean I was in the wedding party, so she knew I’d be in the DR, but I wondered if—like me—she’d been hoping for a little more breathing room. Or maybe she just didn’t want to deal with my ass.
At thirty-five and after years of working a job that had toughened her, she still looked so much like that sixteen-year-old girl that made my heart race every time I saw her. When she finally looked up from talking with her parents and saw me, she seemed hesitant. Like she didn’t know if she was up for managing my presence. Like thinking about it made her tired.
Fuck, had it really been almost a year since I’d seen her? There had been a time when we couldn’t go more than a few hours without touching or talking. Now months could go by without so much as a word. She of course recovered quickly, not about to give me stank face in front of our parents. Instead, she started greeting everyone and giving me an impressively wide berth given the size of the cabin. With each kiss hello she pressed on a cheek that wasn’t mine—or every smile offered to someone just beyond where I sat in silence—the luxurious and intimate interior of the plane felt more oppressive.
“What’s the good word, detective?” That was my dad. He always asked Pris about her job with more than a little bit of pride in his voice. He’d been her mentor since the day she joined the academy. Just one more way in which our lives were thoroughly tangled together.
I’d tried to tell myself for so long that was why we were better off as friends. Too many people with their noses in our business. But I’d weaned myself off my habit of not confronting my bullshit. Nosy relatives and friends was not the reason why Priscilla and I didn’t work out. No, that was all on us, on me for being a careless fuckboy and on her for being stubborn and prideful.
“Rafa.”
Pris’s affectionate tone as she went in to hug my dad wrenched me out of my seemingly ever-present regrets playlist.
The kisses, hugs and back slaps went on for what felt like hours until she finally got to me, and I knew I wasn’t imagining everyone looking at us. Like she always did, Pris kept it surface and polite in front of the parents. We could go at it behind closed doors as much as we wanted, but our parents would never ever see any of it. Not if she had anything to say about it.
“Hey, J.” She bent down to give me a quick peck on the cheek. But she popped back up so fast I could barely get a whiff of the expensive lemon verbena shower gel I’d gotten her addicted to and now couldn’t use myself because it reminded me too much of her.
“Hey yourself, you looking fresh like always.” I said, proud of myself for not sounding like a thirsty scrub. “You ready for this?” I asked, looking around the plane full of our raucous family and friends. Puerto Ricans, Haitians and Dominicans were notorious for their excitement whenever the time came to go back to their islands. Hell, we practically had our own terminal at JFK airport. We were rowdy by nature, but holy shit when we were on the way to the homeland we could reach rapture levels of celebration.
Pris smiled, looking around. “Let’s hope Thomas got us a DR/PR/Haiti-proof plane, because this open bar is about to pop off.”
My own parents were on their second glass of wine and we hadn’t even taken off. I was about to make an awkward comment about her Nikes when the flight attendant came by asking us to finish up our drinks, since we’d be in the air soon.
That broke the tension and by the time she was done giving us instructions, Priscilla was seated next to me. To be fair, it was the only seat
left and she had Easton, her best friend, on the other side of her. I had no time to fret on things getting awkward or weirdness between us, because within seconds we were all in an easy conversation about the wedding, the obligations and tasks Camilo had given each of us. It was familiar and natural to be with Priscilla, but then again, that had never been our issue. Coming together had always been easy. It was staying that way that never seemed to work out for us.
Priscilla
Things could not be weirder. I was in a very confined space with my parents, who I’d also be rooming with. Because it wouldn’t be a trip to the DR if we didn’t regress right back to my pre-adolescence. It seemed like everyone I knew was on this plane. My best friend, my ex and his parents. Except it wasn’t like that, because Juan Pablo was a lot more than my ex, he was family. Still, things felt awkward now, strained. I felt like my skin was too tight on my face and I didn’t know where to look. We hadn’t talked in months and sure, it was partly because we were both busy people, but we’d always been busy.
After that last time, I told Juan Pablo he needed to grow up and leave me alone. I’d been angry and frustrated, but before he walked out of my apartment he’d looked me straight in the eyes and said, I will. After that, it had been radio silence. No, “You up?” texts in the middle of the night, nothing. He’d stayed away like he said he would, like I’d asked him to.
As I mulled on that I felt something cold touch the tray that served as an armrest and looked up to see a stemless glass of wine, half full of rosé. The flight attendant smiled as she gestured to Juanpa, who was now taking a turn in the tiny, fancy plane lavatory.
“Mr. Campos said you wanted a glass of rosé.” I dipped my head and took a sip. I had maybe mumbled it as I assessed the beverages that people were drinking, but hadn’t said exactly what I wanted. It was a decent guess though. “Thank you.”
She nodded, moving on to my parents and their drink order. “You’re welcome.”
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