Praise for Impressions of You
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Connect with Christopher Harlan
Praise for Impressions of You
“Christopher Harlan didn't just step in the literary world; he busted the damn door down. He knows how to write a story that will keep you engaged… His characters are well thought out with a depth that surprised me. The romance is beautiful, heartwarming and poignant.”
-Amanda, Tears & Lipstick Smears Book Blog
“Impressions of You, starring Mia Careri and Wesley Marsden, is the love story not only of these two characters, but also of a man's deep love for his family…this is a great story and I can't wait to see what the author does with the extra characters. Great things will come from this author, I have no doubt!”
-Corrie, Goodreads.com reader
“Impressions of You is a debut book by Christopher Harlan that simply told a beautiful story of love, pain and letting go. It was a memorable and a beautiful written story that I simply could not get enough of. I enjoyed reading it immensely… I did not expect at all the situations in this book to be so profound but I was left with a sense of contentment while I was reading this story. Christopher Harlan wrote a book that had real issues which made it so captivating to me. In a way, it gave the story such a different edge.”
-Tanaka, The Romantic Angel Blog
“This book will make you see the highs and lows, and it will turn you inside out and then right you. I loved this read and am seriously looking forward to more from this Author.
Get writing Mr. Harlan.”
Julie, Goodreads.com reader
Other reviews are available on the Impression of You Goodreads Page
Cover design by Kari at Cover to Cover Designs
Cover image provided by Shauna Kruse of Kruse Images & Photography
Cover models: Lance Jones & Faith Danielle
Formatting by Cassy at Pink Ink Designs
Proofreading by Marla at Proofing with Style
This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to anyone who did not purchase the book. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, otherwise) without the written permission of the above author of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. All people, places, and events contained herein are a product of the author’s imagination and are completely fictitious.
Warning:
Content contains explicit sexual content and adult content. It is intended for mature, adult audiences. Parental/reader discretion is advised.
For my wife, Laura, for the countless hours of support and advice that you gave me throughout this process – without you none of this would be possible. And to my babies, Laylah and Holden, just for existing. This is all for you.
“Any action of an individual . . . cannot occur without leaving a trace.”
-Dr. Edmond Locard, 1934
From the outside Wesley Marsden has it all: wealth, good looks, and a genius level IQ, but these qualities hide the depths of his complexity. While he’s a man who’s strong, confident, and in control, he’s also a man obsessed with solving a family mystery and dealing with personal demons that have plagued his relationships for years.
Mia Careri is a special needs teacher; a woman who’s devoted her life to the care and education of other people’s children. Funny, beautiful, and intelligent, she has a job she loves and close friends who are like her family, but something is missing. A slew of failed relationships have her yearning for that connection, that feeling of intense love – the perfect man to have a future with.
When by chance or by fate, Mia and Wesley encounter one another in the most unlikely of settings, they realize that they might be each other’s salvation. As their fates collide over the course of a few months, neither of them will ever be the same again.
WHEN HE TOUCHES me I can feel his confidence.
Outside of this bedroom Wesley is introverted, but inside these four walls there are no crowds to make him uneasy or loud noises to distract him, and his devotion to me is as absolute as the heat our bodies are making together. The lights are off, and only the illumination of the moonlight gives us a view of each other. The darkness in here doesn’t hide, but reveals his true self, and in this room there are only the curves of my body to give canvas to his particular brand of artistry. The skill of his touch is undeniable as his hands caress every inch of my body and his attention to my needs leaves me craving more.
In the darkness of his bedroom I’m the focal point of all his passion; a selfless attention meant only to make my body convulse in unthinkable ecstasy. As he lays me down on the bed and pours the firmness of his body completely over me, I can’t help but scream out his name—Wesley. Wesley Marsden. The dark man with the blue eyes. He’s so big that his form could block out the sun. Escape would be impossible if it were even desired; but I don’t want to escape, I want to disappear in the muscular expanse of the body draping over me, covering me like a warm blanket. It’s underneath him that I find myself; it’s where my body speaks to him, and lets him know that I’ll never leave this room if he doesn’t want me to.
On top of me you have all the control, Wesley, control that I offer you willingly. You swing your hips over mine and command me further downwards, pressing your lips into mine with such force as to render me helpless. I want to be helpless underneath you; to relinquish all control as you put me wherever you want me, and make me feel like only you can. On top of me you have my body—my lungs struggling to inflate fast enough to keep up with the pace of my breath. My whole body is yours: every nerve ending, every sensation, every movement existing only in reaction to what you do to me, and you can do whatever you choose. In these moments, here in this dark room, I’m lost in you entirely; your lips robbing me of the ability to think, taking away my ability to feel anything except the firm embrace of your hand caressing my entire body. The feeling of your breath leaving your body and entering mine fills me with life, as I struggle to remember who I am or how I got into this position. Your body speaks louder and clearer than your words will allow in the daylight, but I don’t need your words anymore, I only need this.
My love for you erupts throughout my body, celebrating you in bursting blood vessels, bringing flushed warmth over me, igniting feelings I’ve never dreamed possible. No one in the world knows you like I do, and no one in the world is as affected by you as I am. Underneath you I’m your servant and I’m your partner; underneath you I submit completely. Your face is my entire reality, and you hold me in your hands so gently, because you know how easily I could break. I never want you to move, I never want you to leave, because underneath you is where I fall ever more deeply in love; where my heart and soul remain forever your possessions.
When we finish he leans into me, and whispers so softly that I can barely hear the sound of his voice. “Don’
t ever leave this place,” he begs. “Promise you’ll stay here with me forever.”
“I will, Wesley,” I promise. “I’ll stay here with you forever.”
October
IF THE NAME OF the place is this ridiculous, I can only imagine what the people inside will be like.
The Drip. It sounds like something the doctor diagnoses you with after you forget to use a condom, not a place to get overpriced cappuccinos. This isn’t my scene at all, but then again my scene is wherever my best friend asks me to go on a Saturday night, even when I clearly don’t want to. Dacia is driving way too fast, as usual. “Slow down, D,” I yell as she takes a right turn that throws me against the passenger door, “I don’t really want to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, but I’d at least like the option to be alive for it.” I’m used to the way she drives at this point, but no matter how many times I experience being a passenger in her car it can still feel like the last lap of the Indy 500. What’s the rush, anyhow, it’s not like they’re going to run out of lattes.
“Perk up, blond Mia, and quit complaining,” Dacia says back, scaring the hell out of me as she takes her eyes off the road to look in my direction. “I promise it won’t be as horrible as that look on your face right now, trust me.” You’re so sweet, Dacia. “For real, you should see yourself. It’s just coffee, that’s all.”
I give her my bitchy eyebrow raise, the one where my eyebrow looks detached from the rest of my face as I shoot it upwards towards my forehead. There’s no mistaking that look, it’s the universal code for what the hell did you say? Dacia shifts her eyes from my resting bitch face back to the road.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I joke. “Just concentrate on the road so your crazy-ass doesn’t kill us.” Blond Mia. Dacia’s the last person I know who still calls me that. I got that nickname from my second grade teacher, Mrs. Penny. There had been two other Mia’s besides me in that school and at least one of them would end up in the same class as me, leaving our teachers to invent ways to distinguish between all of us based on how we looked. Good job on the original name, Mom! There was me, with my long, still naturally blond hair, which fell in gentle rings just below my waist; there was Mia L., with the light brown eyes and short brown hair; and then there was Mia C., the freakishly tall-for-her-age girl. In any given school year we were the Mia squad: long blond hair, short brown hair, and tall Mia. I still have long blond hair, but now it has some purple streaks in it from an ill-advised trip to the salon, and a desperate attempt at maintaining my rapidly dissolving youth. I feel like I’m twenty-nine going on fifty.
I’m thinking about my nickname on the ride in because it seems to be taking forever to get there, despite Dacia’s lead foot and her tendency to treat stop signs as polite suggestions. Why do I let her drag me to places like this? Mia, she said, you’ll love it. The lies that girl could tell sometimes, I swear. Dacia (like, DAY-SHA) is my crazy best friend, and when I say crazy I mean it in the best possible way. I need a free spirit like her in my life; someone who has the power to pull me out of the routinized little comfort zone that I call life, and get me in her car on the way to a place that’s basically a club for teeny-boppers. Even though I don’t really feel like going, it’s been a rough week at work, and I could use some time to unwind.
Long, rough weeks are typical for the type of work I do. The organized chaos of a special needs classroom is hard to explain to people who have regular jobs, and the specific kind of chaos that a class of low-functioning, autistic ten-year-olds could create is completely foreign to ninety-nine percent of humanity. A bad day at my job isn’t like a bad day at the office; it’s unique in almost every way that “bad” could be.
Monday was pretty normal, and in my world “normal” means my kids sat at the group activity table without throwing pencils at each other or without having simultaneous tantrums where me and my loyal teaching assistants, Rachel and Melissa, don’t get hit repeatedly. Tuesday made up for the calmness of Monday—like the teaching gods couldn’t let me go two days in a row without some high quality chaos taking over my world. My student Sara had bitten me so hard on my left hand that she nearly caused me to go to the hospital. She was a carryover student from last year’s class, and I had a good relationship with her, so when she grabbed a hold of my wrist and pointed towards the class bathroom I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until I pulled my attention away from her for literally ten seconds that I felt the sensation of a tight sting on my arm. When I looked down to see what was causing the sensation, I realized that my little friend had taken it upon herself to bite down into my wrist like it was a steak. My screams didn’t seem to faze her much at all. Even as I was getting ready before Dacia picked me up tonight I still had the faint circle of an eight-year-old dental impression in the skin just above my wrist.
The rest of the week had been less physically painful, but equally chaotic: tantrums, bathroom issues, and general unpredictability; ah, the life of a special needs teacher. But for all its chaos, I find incredible fulfillment in the work I do. I like that my job is different from everyone else’s that I know, and different in a way that genuinely helps people’s lives. The sacrifices just come with the territory, but the payoff happens when I get to see them achieve something in June that seemed impossible back in September. That’s when I remember why I love what I do so much.
Regardless of how much I enjoy my job, by the time Saturday night comes around I’m always ready for a well-earned break; one where no one was going to be throwing their food across the room in anger, or playing with their genitals uncontrollably (well, hopefully). When I think about it like that I guess this place couldn’t be so bad after all. The actual bar scene has dried up for me and Dacia. I don’t know if it was the places she was choosing, or just the bad luck cloud that floats over my head, but all the guys we’d meet at the bars were either career drunks, married guys with a tan line on their bare ring finger that they were trying to hide (why is your left hand always in your pocket, sir?), sexual predators masquerading as nice guys, or just your run-of-the-mill douche bags. So after a few fruitless Saturday nights dealing with all the requisite creeps at those places, we had decided to give a coffee bar a whirl, and hoped we wouldn’t spend the night in jail for corrupting minors.
Besides an exhausting week at work, I’m actively licking my wounds from the death of yet another short lived relationship. My boyfriend of two months, Jason, joined a well populated club just two days ago when he became a card-carrying ex of mine. Ex-boyfriend number . . . who can even count anymore, it’s depressing to even try. Jason was never my type, really, and I should have known better than to let things progress like they did.
I’ve always been intuitive when it comes to guys, not just in terms of their true qualities, but also of whether or not it’s going to work out between us. I’m something of a compatibility whisperer. Jason never stood a chance in hell over the long-term; he was stiff, always with a stick up his ass when it came to doing anything that I found enjoyable, and his real love was his boring corporate job. If I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t so much his girlfriend as I was his favorite mistress; his blond side ho when he didn’t feel like answering client emails or hanging out with the boys from the office.
I knew the breakup was coming when I complained over dinner one night that my day had gone horribly, and Jason just sat across the table looking at me like I was nuts for even having the type of job that I did. I don’t know why you deal with those kids, just do something else, he said to me, and then whined for ten minutes about how his team at work was half of a million dollars under their quarterly sales goal, and he was worried they weren’t getting their bonuses this year. Cry me a river. That night had been the beginning of the end for us, and the truth is that I let things go on way longer than they should have. I’ve never been great at the whole being alone thing, and sometimes even a stuffy, corporate jerk is better than an empty house and Netflix with my dog. Why can’t I just meet a good guy for once?
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The giant lit-up sign that reads The Drip—God, I can’t get over what a stupid name that is—is blinding, even from fifty feet away. “Kinda hard to miss the plan, huh,” I joke. Dacia circles the block to find a parking spot, and I can see kids everywhere, populating the streets like after-prom on too much caffeine. After we find a spot I laugh my ass off watching Dacia fail terribly at her attempt to parallel park, and then we make our way inside. It doesn’t take more than a few steps through the door before I’ve died and gone to adolescent, coffee-fiend heaven. Shouldn’t they be home studying for the SATs or something?
The Drip is more like a warehouse than a coffee place, the kind you picture when you think of nineteen-year-old party-kids popping Molly and dancing all night with glow sticks tightly in hand. But instead of drugs and dancing it was fancy coffees, exotic-sounding teas, and bad, Top 40 pop music blasting all around us. Oh well, at least there’s coffee, that always makes things better, doesn’t it? For all its faults, the place was alive with a palpable energy; a life force of kinetic movement and sound that actually did appeal to me, despite the average age in here being about four years too young to get into the actual bar across the street.
After we find a place to sit, Dacia leans over and puts her hand on my shoulder and yells over the music, “Let’s get drinks.” As we approach the long wooden coffee bar the first thing I notice is the sexy barista working the espresso machine. In another life I would have been all over him; the overly stylized pseudo-goth kid, maybe twenty-one, with spiky black hair and the tease of a tribal tattoo crawling up his chest and peeking out of his tight, black V-neck tee. Basically he was my fantasy boyfriend ten years ago, but now I was closer to thirty-one than twenty-one, and I was content to let sexy Goth boy be coffee pouring eye candy. I’m pretty sure I have that eye shadow he’s wearing.
Impressions of You (The Impressions Series Book 1) Page 1