Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(82)

Ruthie Knox and Alexis Hall were instrumental in the development of the writing and story and looked at many drafts, and what’s more, provided support I’ll remember for the rest of my life. They supported my voice, these characters, and met me where I was at to see that this was good, then better. Their brutal, honest, and loving feedback kept me going. Also, Alexis, thank you again for Fred.

Thank you to beta readers Amber Lin, Shari Slade, and Serena Bell. Serena Bell’s read, particularly, was so dear to me. I absolutely could not do any of this without you.

I want to thank, too, the science and math teachers and professors I’ve had through the years. I’ve been lucky that every single one was influential and passionate. Whenever we can, we must remove barriers and correct underrepresentation in the sciences. It’s a big world, and we need all hands on deck.





PHOTO: ? ELIZABETH WELLMAN


MARY ANN RIVERS was an English and music major and went on to earn her MFA in creative writing, publishing poetry in journals and leading creative-writing workshops for at-risk youth. While training for her day job as a nurse practitioner, she rediscovered romance on the bedside tables of her favorite patients. She writes smart and emotional contemporary romance, imagining stories featuring the heroes and heroines just ahead of her in the coffee line. She blogs at wonkomance.com and at her site maryannrivers.com.





After Midnight


Serena Bell





Chapter 1


December 31


11:41.

11:42.

11:43.

At this rate, it would never be midnight, and Miles Shepard would never say a permanent good night to this sadistic son-of-a-bitch year.

He stuck his phone back into his pocket and let his eyes wander over the party. They were in someone’s twenty-second-floor condo, all brushed nickel and rice-paper lamps and screens and edgy modern furniture. Well-dressed Bostonians—they’d left their Uggs and Pats jerseys and twenty-year-old Sox caps home tonight—monitored TVs tuned to network coverage of New Year’s events in various U.S. and world cities. The collective effect of an apartment bedecked with garlands of black-and-white streamers and metallic silver balloons, full of women in cocktail dresses and sparkly tops and ass-hugging jeans, was—well, if it hadn’t quite carved through the numbness that had been Miles’s constant companion for the last few weeks, it had at least chipped into it.

His childhood friend Owen was talking to a tall blonde in high-heeled boots, skin-tight silver pants, and a black velvet tunic. She towered over him, but it didn’t appear to intimidate Owen in the slightest. Owen grinned and told the blonde something, with his usual complement of hand gestures, and she smiled back and dipped her head.

Owen was one of those guys with mysterious appeal—he was thin to the point of near scrawniness, with a head of hair that was as unruly as a yellow dandelion, but women found him easy to talk to. Miles guessed that a month ago you could have said the same about him. These days, Miles wasn’t talking much, so if anyone was saying anything about him tonight, it was, “What’s up with the block of stone in the corner?”

The thing was, Miles knew Owen had his back. If anyone trash-talked Miles, Owen would be ready with a slap-down. When Miles had called him last week to say he needed to get the hell out of Cleveland and had no place to go, Owen had picked him up at Logan Airport, opened his condo to Miles, taken Miles to his sister’s house in Newton for Christmas, and otherwise tried to convince Miles his world hadn’t ended. As if maybe it was in some kind of weird suspended animation and at some point they’d unfreeze Miles and let him have another chance at it.

So for Owen, Miles would endure this party, even if it stayed 11:44 forever, like some punishment straight from the hyper-imaginative Greek gods.

A shriek cut through the hectic bounce of “Come On Eileen,” and he looked up to see a woman dancing her heart out. He definitely wasn’t completely numb, because his gaze fastened on the jiggle of her breasts under her shiny black tank top. Blood didn’t exactly rush south—it moved thickly through his bloodstream—but at least it was moving. Those were some awesome breasts, and he didn’t only mean awesome-cool: He meant awesome in its original awe-inspiring sense. They were the size and firmness that typically had to be purchased, but he knew real when it danced, and those were one hundred percent real.

His eyes traveled upward and—whoops!—met hers. She’d been watching him stare at her breasts as if he were an eleven-year-old unschooled horny boy. He made a wry apologetic face, and she laughed. Man, she was pretty, and not in a cover-of-a-magazine standard-issue way. She had strawberry-blond hair cropped pixie short, an adorable, mobile face, elfin ears, and a long, skinny nose. He didn’t usually go for short hair, but it worked on her, probably because the rest of her was so indubitably female.

And now she was dancing and holding his gaze, and his face heated as his blood picked up pace and got serious about things. His gut clenched, his dick was heavy, and she was moving for him. Still holding his gaze. The way she danced—it wasn’t sexual, not really. It was just uninhibited. Kind of … joyful. She had this grin on her face that was nine-tenths of what made her so pretty. Most people never looked that happy about what they were doing.

He wanted to cross the floor and—

And what? And proposition some woman he’d never met before in a city that wasn’t his when his life was in knots?