Her life changed in an instant.
And he's the only one who could have
prevented it.
From the New York Times bestselling
author of The Pact and The Lie comes a new standalone contemporary
romance about those McGregor men.
Jessica Charles shouldn't have even
been in London when the unthinkable happened.
She should have been back at home in
Edinburgh, perhaps hanging with her boyfriend, having drinks with her
sister or doing yoga with her group of friends. She should have been
going on in her normal, dependable life as always.
But on that fateful day in August, when
a mentally-ill ex-soldier opened fire in public, Jessica's world
changed forever.
Now single and crippled from the
gunshot wounds, Jessica finds herself scared and alone, losing faith
in herself and humanity with each agonizing moment that passes.
That is until a stranger enters her
life. A stranger who makes her live again.
Keir McGregor has always been the
strong, silent type. Throw in tall, dark, and handsome and you've got
pretty much the perfect Scotsman.
Except Keir is anything but perfect.
He's got a past he's running away from and a guilty conscience he
can't seem to shed. But the more time he spends with Jessica, the
more he falls in love with her.
And the more his secret threatens to
tear them apart.
He may have been a stranger to her.
But she’s never been a stranger to
him.
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EXCERPT
“You’re not going anywhere,” he
says. “Sit. I’ll get you another drink.”
“It’s getting late,” I say feebly
but I sit down anyway, my leg giving a protest of pain.
“You need something for that?” he
says, noticing my wince.
“The scotch will do fine,” I tell
him quickly, not wanting him to make a fuss. “But really, I should
go.”
“Why?” he asks from the kitchen. I
hear the top pop off the bottle, the slosh of liquid in the glass.
“Where do you have to be?”
I have to think about that for a
moment. He comes over and holds out the glass. “I won’t keep you
here if you don’t want to be here. But if you do want to be here,
you don’t need to make any excuses.”
I take the glass from him, holding it
delicately in my fingers. He stands over me, a massive wall, waiting
for some kind of response.
“I just…” I begin. “I…” I
take a sip for bravery. Swallow. “I’m not very good at this.”
“Good at what?”
“At…this. Being with a man.”
When he doesn’t say anything to that,
I look up at him. He’s got a peculiar smile on his face, his brows
raised. “You call this being with a man?”
I clear my throat, feeling my cheeks
grow hot. “I mean. I’ve told you before –”
“Yes, how you don’t do
relationships, how you don’t do sex.”
“I never said I don’t do sex,” I
remind him quickly.
His eyes never stop searching my face.
“Then what is it? What are you afraid to say?”
I have the sudden urge to flee and I
know it must show because he suddenly points at me and says, “Don’t
you dare say you have to go again. I want you to go back to what you
said, that you’re not good at this. What is this? Us? You and me?
There’s nothing mystifying about you and me, Jessica. You know
quite well how I feel.”
I stare at him in shock. I do? “How?”
He looks off with an air of impatience.
“I invited you to dinner, you turned me down.”
“But then you said just as friends.”
“And I meant it. But there are
different types of friends. It’s up to you to decide what kind we
are.”
I put my drink down with a clunk. “Holy
pressure.” And now it’s not just my face going hot but my entire
body, flushed from head to toe.
“You’re on fire, little red,” he
says, his gaze skirting over my limbs in such a hungry way I can
almost feel them on my skin. “I have to say, I like this look on
you. Hot and bothered.”
“Back with the innuendos again,” I
comment but my voice is weak.
“No, no innuendos this time. You came
looking for me tonight not because you wanted to confess but because
you want something from me. What is it? What do you want from me?
What do you think I can give you?”
Jesus. This is so utterly unnerving.
His words slice right through me, his eyes still peeling under the
layers, trying to get at something I’m not even sure of myself.
If I lie, he’ll know. I can only be
honest with him.
“I want…” I take in a deep
breath, my eyes breaking away. “I want…company.”
“Company?” He sounds surprised.
I nod. “That’s the truth. I’m
lonely. And I’m afraid. And I’m tired of being both those things.
I want to be with someone who makes me forget who I am. You make me
feel fearless in a way I didn’t think possible.”
There. That’s the truth. Most of it.
It hangs in the air, thickening the tension like flour to stock.
He sits down next to me, has a mouthful
of Scotch. “Wow,” he says, running his hand over the beard on his
jaw. “And here I was thinking you wanted my cock.”
I burst out laughing. So does he, a big
wonderful bellow. The tension in the room eases up a notch.
“Sorry,” I tell him when I catch my
breath. “I guess they can both mean the same thing.”
He sucks in his lip briefly, his eyes
taking a lustful turn. “If you want it to.” We stare at each
other for a few heavy beats. Then his focus trails back to my gaze
and he says, “Why don’t you stay over?”
And there I have it. The chance to know
what those full lips would feel like on mine, what his skin would
taste like. I swallow hard.
Karina Halle is a
former travel writer and music journalist and The New York Times,
Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling author of The Pact,
Racing the Sun, Sins & Needles and over 25 other wild and
romantic reads. She lives on an island off the coast of British
Columbia with her husband and her rescue pup, where she drinks a lot
of wine, hikes a lot of trails and devours a lot of books.
Halle is
represented by the Waxman Leavell Agency and is both self-published
and published by Simon & Schuster and Hachette in North America
and in the UK.
Hit her up on
Instagram at @authorHalle, on Twitter at @MetalBlonde and on
Facebook. You can also visit www.authorkarinahalle.com and sign up
for the newsletter for news, excerpts, previews, private book signing
sales and more.
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