Heart Song Anthology by Carolyn Faulkner (summer reads txt) 📗

so in love with, before she seemed to lose it to Krone, but halfway through trying to help her rediscover who she once was and who he wanted her to be again, he realized that it wasn’t his place. He wanted her to become speedily found because she seemed lost to him, but he couldn’t hold her accountable to who she used to be. He couldn’t dictate how she found herself after all this madness his company had caused in hunting them. He couldn’t control how she processed her own trauma and who she would become, after she had moved on from it, and he realized he didn’t want to.

She could regain her fire with more ferocity than he had ever imagined, if he just let her process, she could burn brighter than before, once she had overcome what had been done to her. He would just have to give her time and commit to loving whoever emerged on the other side of these dark times. She might not be the same, but she would always be beautiful and perfect to him.

The woman who saved him from himself and given him a reason to live, that’s always what she would be to him. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.” He kissed a tear off her cheek. “My life.” He kissed the other cheek and though the salt from the first still lingered against his tongue, she tasted sweet. “My sweet Cora.”

Sniffling, she was still smiling despite the tears, the intensity of their connection overwhelming her as it had in the bath. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Asher. I love you.”

“And I will always love you,” he promised. “We’re still Cora and Asher, we are just more secretive about it.”

She smiled at him, stroking his scruffy cheek with pruned fingertips, then extending one solitary pinky out between them. “Pinky promise?”

He chuckled as he shifted to meet her pinky with his own, the two fingers curling together in the most innocent of promises. “Pinky promise that we will always be Asher and Cora, no matter what happens or who we have to pretend to be, we’ll always be together.”

He leaned down, claiming her mouth again and sealed the promise with not just a pinky, but a kiss too.

The End.

Bethany Bliss

Bethany Bliss currently resides in the Shenandoah Valley with her family and bureau of pets. She started writing at a crisp young age, mostly to overcome her dyslexia that kept her in Special Ed through elementary and middle school. Though it started as an exercise, it evolved into an alluring hobby that at first was just that. The longer she wrote, however, the more her family and friends encouraged her to seek out a publisher.

When Bliss is not spending hours crafting sexy heroes and kick-ass heroines, she enjoys outdoor activities such as gardening, and indoor activities such as holistic medicine research, kickboxing, and reading. She hopes to one day write fulltime, bouncing between a modest homestead and oceanfront condo – whichever has the best Wi-Fi connection.

Don’t miss these exciting titles by Bethany Bliss and Blushing Books!

Bound By Chains

The Final Rebellion

Silver Meets Gold – Book One

Silken Violet - Book Two

Claiming Her Empire

The Bladed Tiger’s Empress - Book One

The Warrior’s Treasure - Book Two

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boundtoblushbliss/

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Amazon:

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St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Pajama Party

April Hill

Chapter 1

Happily married woman that I am, I always get a little wistful around Valentine’s Day. I never really understood, until recently, how many people are out there, looking for the right someone to love. Looking almost desperately, it seems, on Internet dating services, in sleazy singles’ bars, and all sorts of other unlikely and possibly perilous venues. My own romantic story seems so simple, in comparison. I met my husband when I was a struggling artist and he was a cop responding to a 911 call I had made to report my car stolen. Patrolman Neil Garrett was the first officer on the scene, and he was really sweet about the whole thing when it turned out that my car had not been so much stolen, as sort of repossessed. (A small disagreement with a car dealership called “Crazy Lou’s No Money Down Emporium,” wherein Crazy Lou wanted to be paid every month, as opposed to when I actually had the money to pay him – dates which tended to fluctuate rather wildly at that creative period in my life.)

Under the totally accurate impression that I was a beautiful but starving artist in need of a couple of free meals and a masculine shoulder to cry on, handsome Officer Garrett asked me to dinner that very night, and didn’t even seem offended when I ate like a famished plow-horse and commandeered both doggie bags. (I was poised to take the leftovers from the table adjoining ours, until my handsome date explained that doing so would violate some silly public health ordinance.) Four weeks and some twenty-eight lovely free dinners later – on Valentine’s Day, as it happened – he asked me to marry him. A couple of months after that, when Crazy Lou got busted for selling stolen cars and my car got cruelly impounded as being part of Lou’s illicit loot, Neil suggested that we get married right away, so I could continue to paint, to eat on a regular basis, and to get to my real job at Kmart every day. Good timing, all around, since we discovered shortly after the wedding that the extra weight I’d been putting on wasn’t because I was deliriously happy, or eating regularly. Michael Andrew Garrett arrived in late October, just in time for our first Halloween together as a happily married couple.

The real problem with finding the right someone to love is that men and women are completely different. But of course, you know that. Everybody knows it, but only women truly understand it, and make adjustments for it. Which is why women allow the