Freckles?
Oh.
It was him. The mountain lion.
Jake. Friend of Chase “Smith”, Vi’s ridiculously over-confident new boyfriend. (Vi had the worst taste in men, honestly.) Favored leaning in the doorway of Chase’s hospital room, watching Lina as she left the elevator with her police security and went into Vi’s hospital room. Watching her when she came down the hallway to check on Chase.
Watching her now.
Long, lean, powerful. Hazel eyes, red-gold hair clipped short. Hard jaw. Controlled movements. And as far as she could tell, covered all over in freckles. This thick, golden-brown layering of them, as if every mote of sun that had ever had the chance to touch his skin had clung to him, unwilling to let go.
Greedy sun, just wanting to get its hot little rays all over that life of him. Would he have the same freckles on those broad shoulders? That hard, flat belly? That tight butt? His…did freckles go to…that is, she’d never seen a freckled man without any clothes before, was it possible that he’d have freckles on his…that the sun would have gotten all hot and greedy with his…
Are you turning into a nymphomaniac in some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction?
Probably worse things she could become. Scared. Weak. Paranoid. Yeah, all the other options made nympho sound pretty enticing.
She cut off the saw and set it on the steel table by the destroyed dragon, then bent to pick up the biggest two chunks of the decapitated head in her gloved hands. Totally ruined. After all that work. Her fingers cramped around them suddenly, in a spasmodic urge to throw them across the room, to scream, to grab the block left and just batter it to the floor.
She took a deep breath and let it out, setting the chunks down, pulling off her thick gloves, pushing back the hoodie of her sweatshirt, pulling out her earplugs. “Little life tip. Never sneak up on a woman fighting a dragon with a chainsaw.”
From the subtle amusement in Jake’s face, he probably took out six crazed chainsaw-wielders with a toothpick before breakfast every morning. “You know, it does seem as if my training should have included more practical tips like that. I’ll have to tell my old instructors they missed a situation.”
“They probably counted on you to have common sense.”
He cocked his head and considered that a moment. “A group of wild teenage males who thought they could become the biggest bad-asses on the planet? I doubt it.”
True. In her eleven years in top-notch kitchens, she’d dealt with more than her fair share of teenage males wielding lethal objects. Common sense didn’t come into it.
“The real question is how do you approach a woman with a chainsaw?” Jake asked. “Any tips?”
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I want to offer a huge thank you to Mercy and Dale Anderson, a wonderful editing team whose support and encouragement and insight into story has meant so much to me. And many, many thanks to authors Stephanie Burgis and Virginia Kantra for all their feedback and wonderful insight into story.
And a huge thank you, of course, to all my readers, as always, for all your support which has kept me motivated to write more books! Thank you all so much.
ABOUT LAURA FLORAND
Laura Florand burst on the contemporary romance scene in 2012 with her award-winning Amour et Chocolat series. Since then, her international bestselling books have appeared in ten languages, been named to the Top 100 Romances of all time by NPR; been chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, Romantic Times, and Barnes & Noble; received the RT Seal of Excellence and numerous starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist.
After a Fulbright year in Tahiti and backpacking everywhere from New Zealand to Greece, and several years living in Madrid and Paris, Laura now teaches Romance Studies at Duke University. Contrary to what the “Romance Studies” may imply, this means she primarily teaches French language and culture and does a great deal of research on French gastronomy, particularly chocolate.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2017, Laura Florand
Cover by Sébastien Florand
ISBN-13: 978-1-943168-17-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected].
The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. www.lauraflorand.com
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