Description
You just can’t make these things up…
Life has been a rollercoaster through a forest filled with dream-eating squirrels who are hot on my tail.
Okay, it’s not that bad, but it feels like it is at times.
I’m a single mom to my sister’s little girl, and I found out a year ago that Hollywood is making a movie from one of my books.
It would be great news except they failed to tell me they were making the film.
To top it all off, I’m falling for a smirking, self-entitled jerk who almost ran into me the other day.
He’s busy flirting with the single moms at the school play and pretending to be God’s gift to women.
Why is he stealing my thoughts, my breath, and my desire to be independent?
I might’ve made a name for myself writing fantasy, but my life is no fairy tale right now. The last thing I need is to be falling in love with him.
Him of ALL people. Ugh.
There has to be more than meets the eye. And the eye is very, very happy.
This single-father lawyer is willing to save my career and what does he want in return?
Me. Nothing much, right?
It would be easier to stay frenemies with this handsome hunk, but I find myself in the one place I hoped I’d never be.
Desperate for him.
Introduction
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Dedication
To my amazing readers. Love never shows up at the right time or our right time, but it always shows up. To you finding, keeping, or being love.
-Weston
Chapter 1
Laurie
Until two years ago, I’d been living the dream. Maybe it wasn’t everyone’s idea of living the life, but it sure had been mine.
It’d started with a random story idea I’d come up with in the shower. An idea I’d spent every night developing into a story from that day on for the next few years until it was finally done.
At the ripe young age of twenty-three, I self-published my first novel. I never really thought anything would come of it or even that it would get noticed among the millions of great books out there.
I’d spent all those years building the world in that book, though. I refused to give up on it, even after having my manuscript rejected hundreds of times over by agents and publishing houses.
Much to my surprise, the young-adult world I’d created turned out to be a hit. It became more popular than I ever would’ve imagined less than three months after I’d hit the publish button.
Suddenly, publishers were falling all over themselves to work with me. It was a dream come true.
I almost signed on with Knightley Publishing House, my ultimate place to have landed, but then my sister convinced me not to. I got my own team, and in the three years that followed, I produced six more bestsellers.
Living the life, for me, had entailed living in a trendy little apartment in downtown Savannah, planning all the trips I’d always wanted to take, and getting to have Sunday dinners with my family every week. Best of all, I got to write about pretty much whatever I wanted, and I never had a manuscript rejected again.
I was reaching for the stars, and just when I’d begun to feel like I might be able to touch them, it all fell apart. All it took for everything to change was one lousy phone call. A phone call that had lasted all of two minutes, but nothing had ever been the same again.
Now I was living a different dream. It wasn’t my own, but that didn’t mean it was bad. It was simply different.
As I stood in the living room of my new home, it was really difficult to believe it’d only been two years. Sometimes, it felt like a decade had passed since that fateful day. Other times, I wondered if my old life had ever really happened at all.
The new house was nice. It was a charming, single-level, three-bedroom house with a red front door and a decent backyard. It wasn’t big by any means, but at least there was space between us and our neighbors—unlike the way it had been at my apartment downtown.
I sighed when I looked around at all the moving boxes still stacked almost to the roof. Sunlight streamed in through the dusty windows, illuminating just how desperately I needed to get on with cleaning and unpacking.
As I had every morning for the last month since we’d moved in here, I went to make some coffee and prepared myself to get through more than one box today. The problem wasn’t that I was too lazy or even too busy to unpack. It was that most of the stuff in most of these boxes didn’t belong to me.
It had belonged to my older sister, Katherine. My parents had kept it in storage for me since that horrible day, and I was grateful to have it. Unearthing all her treasures and trying to use them to decorate a home to live in with her daughter just wasn’t easy.
Whenever I opened any of the boxes, I was assaulted by memories of her. I remembered the very morning that had been the last time I’d seen her. I’d gone to her house to have breakfast with her and her daughter, Katie.
My niece had been five at the time. She was also my goddaughter, and I adored popping in to surprise and spoil her whenever I could. Thanks to a career that had been becoming sort of lucrative, spoiling her was something I had finally been able to afford to do.
Mere hours before that phone call, I had taken her a kite and promised her we’d fly it together that weekend. We never did.
Instead, we’d spent that weekend at my parents’ house planning my sister’s funeral.
It didn’t seem possible in this day and age that something like a ruptured appendix could claim the life of an otherwise healthy young mother. According to the doctors, it wasn’t a common occurrence, but Katherine just hadn’t gotten to the hospital in time for them to stop the toxins spreading through her body.
An unfortunate tragedy was what they’d called it.
Already on the verge of tears from the onslaught of memories I both cherished and wished I could forget, I reached into my first box for the day. My fingers brushed over something hard with raised edges, and the lump in my throat grew when I realized what it was. Picture frames.
Tears burned my eyes when I started unpacking them. I paused to trace Katherine’s face with my fingers before gently placing each one on our new mantel. There were several of my sister when she’d been pregnant with Katie, some with just the two of them or the two of us, and some with all three of us grinning at the camera like goofballs.
This sucks so darn bad. There hadn’t even been any warning. No time to prepare or say goodbye.
One minute, she had been with us, laughing and trying to be the best mother she could be, and the next, she was just gone.
All of a sudden, there were phone calls from the hospital, doctors, and lawyers. Katie’s father had never been in the picture. He wasn’t really a stand-up guy and Kat had made the choice to be a single mother.