by Sienna Ciles
Table of Contents
Accidental Valentine
Grab a FREE Book!
Copyright
Book Description
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
Keeping His Secret - Sneak Peek
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Hard for Her - Sneak Peek
Chapter 5
Blind Faith
Also by Sienna Ciles
About The Author
Keeping His Secret
A Bad Boy Romance
By
Sienna Ciles
www.SiennaCiles.com
Table of Contents
Accidental Valentine
Grab a FREE Book!
Copyright
Book Description
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
Keeping His Secret - Sneak Peek
Copyright
Book Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Hard for Her - Sneak Peek
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Blind Faith
Copyright
Book Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Also by Sienna Ciles
About The Author
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Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for downloading and reading my book. I dedicate this book to you and hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. It’s always exciting seeing my ideas and stories come to life on the pages of my books.
A HUGE thank you to Ellie Danes for the Valentines Story. There’s never a shortage of great ideas coming from her mind and I’m blessed she shared this one with me.
I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to me on Facebook by visiting my fan page.
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Thank you!
Sienna
Copyright
First Edition, February 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Sienna ciles
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination.
All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.
License
This book is available exclusively on Amazon.com. If you found this book for free or from a site other than an Amazon.com country specific website it means the author was not compensated for this book and you have likely obtained this book through an unapproved distribution channel.
Book Description
It was going to be the perfect night.
A book, some wine, good girl friends, no men.
The perfect way to celebrate Valentine’s day and being single.
Until Stefan Doss appeared, by accident.
He’s a mountain of tattooed muscle with an attitude and a secret.
He could have any woman he wanted,
But he wants me, needs me, to do him a favor.
One night. Just pretend. Just for appearances.
So much for my quiet night.
I have a feeling it will be anything but quiet.
Accidental Valentine is a hot and steamy holiday bad boy romance novella that’s hot enough to melt your chocolates.
Chapter One
Emma
“Hey, Em! Can you check the orders for next week and see if I remembered to put in the double freesias?” I turned around in the office chair that I’d only just sat down in and glided over to the computer to pull up the order. Nora could have checked it herself, technically—she was only on the other side of the back area, working on a bouquet—but I was happy enough to help, just to have the excuse to stay seated for a bit longer.
The day before Valentine’s Day was always the busiest of the year, with Valentine’s itself right behind it. Most people tended to at least manage to get their orders into us by the day before, but there were always a handful of last-minute folks who either came in for pre-arranged flowers, or who called in desperation the day of, hoping to get something delivered.
I’d been working overtime the whole week, so that I could get the actual day of Valentine’s off; it was my bargain with my coworkers and with Nora. I worked every day for the week leading up to the “big day,” and then the day itself I stayed home. For someone who worked at a florist’s shop, you’d think I would love the concept of love, and in a way, I did. But I didn’t love Valentine’s Day. It always just seemed so desperate, so fake—so commercial. Guys buying their girlfriends overblown, impersonal bouquets of flowers and teddy bears and candy to make up for ignoring them the rest of the year.
I looked at the order for next week, scrolled through to where the freesias would be. “Yep! Double order, see it right here,” I called out to Nora.
“Can you check how many orchids I put in?”
I nodded to myself and scrolled. “Five hundred,” I called back.
“Awesome. Take ten to yourself,” Nora told me, and I nodded again, pushing away from the computer desk. My feet ached, and the small of my back had a gnawing kind of soreness that I knew would only go away after an hour or so in a hot bath. But the day was almost over, and then I would be able to go home, have a glass of wine, that hot bath, and tomorrow I’d be going out with some friends to celebrate our singledom.
“Almost time for the last delivery run of the day,” Sabrina called out as she came into the back area from the loading bay outside. “Tell me I can be done in the next hour.”
“I’ve got about three and a half bouquets to finish, I think Ginger’s got another four she’s working on,” Nora told her. “Where did you leave off, Emma?”
“I’ve got two,” I replied, stretching against the tightness in my shoulders. “Then I’ll get the shipping manifest printed out, and you
can take all the stuff to its proper recipients.”
Sabrina smirked, and I took a moment to admire the fact that in spite of being out in the sun half the day—even the limited exposure from the truck—Sabrina still looked like an updated, slightly punk-rock Morticia Addams: pale skin, black lipstick, her dark hair pulled back into an easy bun, and wearing as much black as she could around the pink and green polo that Nora made us all wear when we did deliveries.
“Last big push of the day, ladies,” Nora told us, and I checked the time; I had another five minutes off of my feet before I needed to get back to work.
“I’ve got my last few just about done,” Ginger announced from the front of the shop, where she’d been working and watching the register and the door for the past hour. We’d been taking turns, all of us: staying up front with our work, at least one of us at a time, in case a customer came in and then rotating to the back to be able to focus on the task at hand a bit more. Most of our orders over the past couple of weeks had come in via the site, but of course, there were plenty of people who wanted to get flowers for other occasions, or who wanted to place their orders in person.
“Thank god it’s almost over for today,” Sabrina said, sitting down in the chair that I vacated.
“I don’t know why you’re so hopeful—you actually have to work tomorrow,” I told her, stepping up to the table I’d taken.
All four of us worked more or less in silence; Sabrina began loading things onto the truck to take them to their destinations, Nora finished her set of bouquets—most of them made up of the more delicate, expensive flowers we had—and helped load, checking the items against the orders we had on file. I finished up my bouquets and started cleaning up my station.
“Last call! I’m about to head out,” Sabrina announced at the door. I ducked outside for a moment and took the manifest she’d printed out, comparing each of the bouquets loaded in the back with the list in my hand. She was going to be out for an hour, at least; but she’d make overtime, which Sabrina always preferred to getting out early.
“Good to go,” I said, hopping out of the truck and heading back inside.
“Do me a favor and run all the reports for the day, Emma?”
I nodded to Nora’s request; she’d been working as hard—if not harder—than any of us, which was the way things usually went, but being as how she was in her sixties already, all of us—Sabrina, Ginger, myself, and the one or two helpers who worked at the shop part-time—kind of looked out for her a bit.
“You know, I half expected to see at least one bouquet for you,” Ginger told me as I pulled up the sales and other reports for Nora.
I rolled my eyes. “That would require meeting actual men in person, and that is something I am determined not to do,” I told her, clicking print on each of the reports.
“One of these days, Emma, you are going to get that feeling,” Nora chimed in from the break area where she was making herself a cup of tea. “If a cantankerous shrew like me could catch a husband, you will, too.”
I rolled my eyes where she couldn’t see me. I’ve always liked Nora, and I’d heard enough from her about her husband—who’d passed away only about six months before I came to work for her—to believe that he really was one of the rare “good ones,” but I could do without her insistence that I would one day find my knight in shining armor and let myself be carried off to a happily-ever-after.
“Nora, my beloved boss, I am just this side of thirty,” I pointed out. “Before I even gave up on dating, I was constantly being told that I was too old for men my own age and too jaded for older men, so I will just keep all my romances vicarious.”
Ginger laughed and started assembling the things I was printing to put them in the binder where Nora could go over them all. “What are you reading now, anyway?”
“Yet another lovely fantasy,” I said with a little grin. My reading habits were the sign that Nora and Ginger both took to mean that I hadn’t really given up on romance, just that I was—in their opinion—too scared to take the plunge.
“Is it at least a steamy one this time?”
“Not so far, but there are signs that it will be,” I replied. “Here, let me just finish up tallying the orders for the day, and we’ll be set to close down.”
I went over the big stack of pre-Valentine’s orders, nodding as I compared them to the manifest that had gone with Sabrina. I came to the end and frowned. There was an order that had come in late the night before, to be delivered to an S. Doss. “Nora, did you do the S. Doss order earlier?”
“What S. Doss order?” Nora came into the back area of the shop and stared at me in shock.
“It’s a three-hundred-dollar delivery,” I told her. “Please tell me you did it and it went out with Sabrina while I was on lunch break or something.”
“I didn’t see it,” Nora said, sounding a little startled. “Oh, Christ, see if you can get her back.” She snatched up the order form from me and started hurrying about the back area. I picked up the phone and called Sabrina’s mobile number, but she wasn’t answering; either she couldn’t hear it, or she’d already reached her first delivery. Either way, it wasn’t going to be easy to get her back to the shop and probably wouldn’t be worth it, That would just make her run late on all the other orders.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. I’d glanced at the address and while it wasn’t exactly close to the shop, it would have been farther out of the way for Ginger or Nora than it was for me. I jumped into the work with Nora, helping her arrange the expensive bouquet in its keepsake vase. Whoever S. Doss was, someone wanted to impress them very much: the bouquet was a premium one, with roses and calla lilies and ferns and out-of-season blooms tucked in for volume and interest. A few of them were ones that we only ever kept a few of stocked, and it was just lucky for S. Doss’ flower-sender that the ones we had were not already in someone else’s bouquet or mangled too much to be included.
While Nora and I worked on the almost comically large bouquet at warp speed, Ginger went to work writing out the card; we offered, as an option, handwritten notes to go with the flowers, and Ginger was actually an excellent calligrapher.
“I couldn’t get Sabrina and, at this point, coming back would just make her late,” I told Nora as we finished up the bouquet. “I’ll just take it on my way home.”
“You are so sweet, Emma,” Nora told me, stepping back to admire the results of our combined efforts. “Ginger, done with the card yet?”
“It’s just dry now,” Ginger told her, hurrying over to us with the card in hand. She tucked it into the bouquet, in the little custom holders we used, and I picked it up.
“Can you go ahead and clock me out, Nora? I trust you,” I said.
“I’ll clock you out in about thirty minutes and cover the time you’re out on the delivery,” Nora said, and when I would have argued, she gave me a stern, almost grandmotherly look. I decided it wasn’t worth wasting time to discuss the issue with her and carried the bouquet out to my car.
It took me a little longer than I’d originally anticipated to get to the address that had been included in the delivery order, but I finally made it. And it was pretty clear to me that whoever these flowers were for, they were on the higher end of the hog. The building had all the features that the rich and paranoid loved: a gated entrance into the premises, an intercom system to let people in via someone sitting at the front desk, and a shimmering glass and steel exterior. In the coolness of the lobby, I looked around and saw marble floors, hardwood paneling on the walls, all the things I would expect for someone living in that part of town. Probably someone’s kept woman, in a neat little condo. Maybe a mistress, who has to be content with flowers the day before instead of attention the day of Valentine’s Day, since her man has to at least pretend to be faithful to his wife a few times a year. I made up an entire story in my head, embroidering it as I made my way up in the elevator.
I found the unit number and straightened my polo, smoothed the skirt
I’d put on that morning against my legs, and shifted the bouquet to make sure it would look right when the person came to the door to accept it. I rang the doorbell and waited.
The first shock I got was the fact that instead of a woman, maybe done up with plastic surgery, or just model-lovely, the person who answered the door was a man, with short brown hair and brilliant blue eyes, with a dusting of five o’clock shadow covering his cheeks and jaw. He was in the midst of working on a bow tie, and his eyes widened as he spotted the huge bouquet in my arms.
“Come in, I guess,” he said, stepping back from the door and still worrying at the cloth around his neck. “You can put it on the table over here in the living room.” I revised my estimate on the situation of who S. Doss was; apparently, she had someone living right there with her.
“Delivery for S. Doss,” I told the man, watching as he went to the dining area and picked up a half-full glass of red wine. “Is she available?”
“I’m S. Doss, actually,” he said, sipping the wine. “I can sign something if you need me to.”
I set the flowers down and watched as he tried to somehow work on his tie while sipping his wine. I was about to point out that he was making a disastrous choice when the wine glass tilted, spilling over the front of his shirt.
“Oh!” I stared in awkward dismay, not knowing how this man, who had the lean, slightly built look of a cowboy, even if he wasn’t dressed at all like one, would react.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, tugging the bowtie free of the collar. He quickly pulled the tails of the shirt out of his dress pants, and I watched in a mixture of surprise and fascination and horror as he just unbuttoned a few of the buttons and pulled the whole thing over his head, turning his back to me. It was then that I spotted it: a tattoo, on his upper right shoulder. Hot and memorable, a phoenix curled around a blood moon, taking up about half the shoulder blade. I saw that he had a few other tattoos as well, scattered over his arms. But that one tattoo was enough to send a jolt through me.
There is no way… what were the odds that two people in the world had that exact same tattoo?