by Nicole Casey
Love, Again
A Second Chance Romance Collection
Nicole Casey
Copyright © 2018 by Nicole Casey. All Rights Reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the proper written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
Contents
Can’t Get Over You
Prologue
1. Blake
2. Mal
3. Blake
4. Mal
5. Blake
6. Mal
7. Blake
8. Mal
9. Blake
10. Blake
11. Mal
12. Blake
13. Mal
14. Mal
Epilogue
Leaving to Stay
Prologue
1. Jude
2. Geneva
3. Jude
4. Geneva
5. Jude
6. Geneva
7. Jude
8. Jude
9. Geneva
10. Geneva
11. Geneva
12. Jude
13. Jude
14. Geneva
15. Jude
Epilogue
Six Years Later
1. Draven
2. Yvette
3. Draven
4. Yvette
5. Draven
6. Yvette
7. Draven
8. Yvette
9. Draven
10. Yvette
11. Draven
The Viera Triplets Series
The Billionaire’s Past
Prologue
1. Damon
2. Emilia
3. Damon
4. Emilia
5. Damon
6. Emilia
7. Damon
8. Emilia
9. Damon
10. Emilia
11. Damon
12. Emilia
Epilogue
Read an Excerpt of Snow and the Seven Men
1. Sasha
2. Sasha
3. Sasha
4. Sasha
5. Sasha
6. Dan
Author’s Note
Also By Nicole Casey
About the Author
Can’t Get Over You
An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Baby Fever 2)
Prologue
MAL
Seventeen Years Ago
Ella was gushing about something in her room as I walked by and I couldn’t help but stop in the hallway and listen.
I was a boy after all, and if I could get dirt on my only sibling, I would take it any way I could.
“He’s always looking at me, Bree. I think he’s going to ask me out soon!” my sixteen-year-old sibling cooed into the cordless phone. “He’s so good looking!”
I rolled my grey eyes upward in disgust. At thirteen, I’d just begun to notice girls but my sister had been dating for over a year. I knew whomever she was talking about this time was just another in a long line of idiots who would be dropped like a hot potato when she got bored. Ella was nothing if not predictable.
“I know,” Ella continued, sighing dreamily to whomever was indulging her stupidity. “I think he’s the one.”
I couldn’t resist striding into her room, puckering my face into a kissing expression.
“Ella’s in love!” I crooned, dancing around as she looked at me, aghast that I had overheard her dumb conversation. “Ella and dumb ass, sitting in a tree—”
“MALCOM!” she screamed. “GET OUT!”
I ignored her, of course and continued to dance around in the irritating way only a young teenager could. I didn’t see the paperback book before it hit me squarely in the head. She had great aim, I’ll give her that.
“GET OUT! MOM! MOM!”
I grunted and spun to leave before my mother could come to investigate the ruckus but I was too late. She must have already been upstairs folding laundry or something because my foot wasn’t even in the hallway before my mom loomed before me, her hazel eyes flashing.
“Mal, what are you doing?” she growled, folding her arms over her chest firmly. It wasn’t hard to see where I’d gotten my height—she was Amazonian, truly and she seemed even bigger with the annoyance etched over her face. Mom never needed to raise her voice—just looking at her when she was bothered was enough to turn my bowels to water.
“Nothing!” I lied quickly. “I was just saying hi!”
Ella’s bedroom door slammed behind me with finality, reverberating the hallway so hard the family pictures on the walls shook. I was left to deal with my mother’s wrath.
“Why must you always torture your sister?” Mom sighed.
I shrugged and grinned at her, hoping to disarm her with my boyish charms.
“She makes it easy.”
I leaned in conspiratorially, hoping to bring Mom into my fold before she unleashed a punishment on me.
“She’s got new prey in her view.”
Mom’s delicate eyebrows arched and her eyes narrowed.
“What does that mean, Malcolm?”
“She’s talking to Bree about a boy at school.”
I exhaled with relief as I saw Mom’s eyes flash, knowing that she had shifted her focus toward my sister and temporarily forgotten me.
“That girl…” she muttered, shaking her head. She reached for the doorknob and opened Ella’s bedroom door.
“MOM!” Ella howled and I stood back, smirking with content. “GET OUT!”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that, Ella Miranda Laurier! Get off the phone this instant!”
I loved that feeling of self-satisfied smugness which enveloped me, knowing that I was singlehandedly responsible and I watched the scene unfold with an indescribable deliciousness.
“I’ll call you back, Bree,” Ella muttered into the phone and hanging up before turning to glare at my mother indignantly. “What?”
“Who is this boy?” Mom demanded. “Didn’t you just break up with Ryan Milner?”
Ella’s look was meant to cut me but it only added to my internal glee. What was it about siblings at that age which made us hellbent on making one another miserable?
“GET OUT, MALCOLM!” she howled at me but I remained in place. Ella turned to Mom.
“I’m not saying a word until he goes!” she snapped and Mom turned to me.
“Go to your room, Mal.”
“Aw, come on!” I protested. “You wouldn’t even know about this if it wasn’t for me.”
Unlike Ella’s, Mom’s look did chill me to the core and I hung my head and shuffled away. I knew the death stare when I saw it.
“Close the door!” Ella yelled after me as I begrudgingly turned away but I didn’t. I barely moved two feet, ducking around the corner to listen to their conversation.
“Who is this boy, Ella?” My mom demanded without preamble. “You need to slow down and let yourself be a kid.”
“I’m not a kid!” Ella protested. “I’m sixteen!”
I heard Mom grunt and I snickered to myself. I wondered if she was going to forbid Ella to see this new guy.
“Mom,” Ella said, lowering her voic
e. There was a plaintive note in her tone.
“Mom, Grayson’s different. He’s so handsome. Every girl wants to date him and he’s been looking at me over everyone else!”
“Ella,” Mom said sternly. “If every girl wants to date him, it’s probably because he dates every girl! You need to focus on your school work right now and—”
“That’s not true! He’s new in town. He hasn’t dated anyone!”
I had a weird tickle in the back of my mind. Was my sister chasing after the guy who had just moved in across the street? I’d only gotten a glimpse of him a few times but something about that whole family bothered me. Maybe it was the way the girl, presumably Grayson’s sister, stared at the window of her bedroom and watched the world go by. I never saw much of her outside of school but from what I saw of her, she always had her nose stuck in a book. She reeked of boring with her bespectacled brown eyes and little nose. I couldn’t even tell you her name. They’d only been in Sterling for two weeks, arriving in the middle of the semester and disrupting everyone like they were somehow better. The new girl hadn’t tried to get to know anyone but who would want to know a geek like her anyway, even if she was kinda cute when you squinted at her sideways. Not that I did, of course. What did I care about her?
“Ella be that as it may, you’re becoming boy crazed. It’s not healthy and you’re going to end up hurt if you keep this up!” Mom insisted. I could hear the worry in her voice and I wondered why she cared so much about what Ella did. What was the worst that could happen?
“God! It’s like you were never a teenaged girl!” Ella grunted in frustration. “Don’t you care about true love?”
I barely managed to stifle the guffaw but I clamped a hand over my mouth. I definitely wanted to hear the end of this.
“Ella,” Mom tried again. “I won’t stand in your way if you want to date a boy. Your father and I have always maintained that you won’t learn if you don’t make your own mistakes but I’m telling you right now, this Grayson boy doesn’t sound like a good fit.”
“You don’t know anything about him!” Ella exploded, her tone reaching that annoying whine which made me cringe. “He’s perfect!”
I rolled my eyes again and turned away from the bedroom, shaking my head in disgust. Ella said that about every moron she dated. I didn’t put much stock into this new one.
I guess I’ll meet him soon enough, I thought with some glee. I couldn’t wait to put the screws to this new one. I hoped Ella would invite him over for dinner soon as she tended to do. She never learned from her mistakes, no matter what Mom and Dad hoped for her.
I trudged back to my room and closed the door quietly, plopping onto my bed to look at the poster of Green Day on the ceiling. As long as I lived, I would never understand Ella or any other girl for that matter.
I made a pact to myself from that moment that I wouldn’t ever act as stupid as my sister in the matters of the opposite sex. My eyes shifted toward another poster which was hid from general view and I smiled to myself. Britney Spears stared at me with those alluring brown eyes and I felt a familiar lurch in the pit of my stomach.
Except for you, Britney, I giggled silently. I’d do anything for you.
1
Blake
Twelve Years Ago
There was something to be said about winter in Colorado. Nothing good in my opinion but the locals seemed to like it just fine. If I was forced to think about it, I’d realize there was an ethereal beauty about the snow-capped landscape, even if the temperature was not fit for human habitability.
I’d lived in Sterling for too long, I felt that I was looking forward to nothing more than getting the hell out of Colorado to start college in the fall but as I walked through town, my hands freezing inside my mittens, I wondered if I would survive another icy winter there before heading back to my home state of California. It was a conversation I’d had with myself every winter for five years and yet somehow I always managed to survive despite my convictions that spring would come and my parents would find my perfectly preserved body in a block of ice somewhere outside the high school.
It never ceased to amaze me that my parents had up and moved us to a place like Sterling when they had both been born and raised in the San Bernardino Valley too. If I remembered correctly, they cited something about work, a story that neither Gray or I had much believed but at the time. After all, they were both freelancers. They could work from anywhere. It seemed unlikely that they had to pick the middle of nowhere to “work.”
But we stayed, even though both Grayson and I had kicked and screamed, citing every argument we could about Colorado. We were part of Sterling’s fabric now, much as I hated to admit it.
I pushed my way inside Lulu Belle’s and slipped off the wool mittens, stuffing them into my pockets as I approached the counter. A lot of good the coverings did—I could feel the cold of my skin clear through my coat.
“Hi, honey. What’ll be today?” It was the older barista, the one with the nice eyes and gentle smile. The one whose name I could never remember. I hated that because I knew it was something simple too.
“A white hot chocolate please,” I replied, digging into my purse for a five-dollar bill. “Extra whipped cream.”
“Coming right up.”
She rang in my order and I left her to keep the change as I stepped aside to let the next person in line approach. I froze when I saw who it was and quickly turned my head so he wouldn’t see me but it was an exercise in futility. Of course he’d seen me.
“Oh, hey Blake,” Chance muttered uncomfortably. “I didn’t see you there.”
I forced a smile and nodded.
“That’s me,” I quipped. “Inconspicuous me.”
His mouth twisted into a scowl and I wondered if it was because he didn’t understand the word “inconspicuous.” I hoped so.
What did I ever see in this buffoon? I asked myself but it was dumb. My heart was thudding in my chest as we stood, inches apart, pretending to make polite conversation.
To my relief, he quickly gave up the charade and turned his broad, quarterback shoulders away from me as if he’d already forgotten I was there.
“Americano,” he ordered. “Two sugars.”
He didn’t bother to return his attention on me but I was basically used to that—we’d dated for three months and I was well accustomed to being ignored by Chance in public. In private, he’d been all over me, however.
The barista handed me my drink and I snatched it up eagerly, thanking her as I moved away. I didn’t want to be around Chance for one second longer than necessary. He seemed to have sucked the air right out of the room with his arrival.
Or was that just me?
I looked around for a place to sit, the café already filled with the after school crowd but there was no one I knew. Well, that’s a lie—there were lots of people I knew but no one who would welcome me into their fold willingly. So what if I’d been in Sterling for half a decade? I wasn’t one of their blue-blood kindergarten buddies. I was still the weird chick with the glasses who was more concerned with getting good grades than going to the mall.
For a while, when I was dating Chance, I had thought that maybe, just maybe, I’d have a chance to be part of the “in” crowd but that hadn’t lasted. I had no idea why he’d asked me out in the first place but pathetically, it had been the best three months of my time in Sterling.
But now that’s over and I’m back to being the resident nerd, I thought grimly, walking past another table of averted gazes. I found a single wing chair by the gas fireplace and sat down with my books. I wanted to do some studying in peace before going home. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to focus once Mom and Dad started at one another’s throats again and I had a project due for science which was an extra credit. I wasn’t failing the course, not by a long shot, but I wanted to ensure my grades were stellar for graduation. June couldn’t come fast enough in my opinion.
“Did you ever end up putting out for him?” A l
azy voice asked me and I looked up, my back immediately tensing. I didn’t need to look. I knew that irritating, deep tone. It haunted my nightmares.
“What?” I snapped, glaring at Malcolm Laurier through my glasses. I’d heard him just fine but I was biding my time, thinking of a snappy comeback. Why did he always manage to catch me off guard?
“You know that’s why he asked you out, don’t you? He thought he could fuck you.”
Like the prude I was, I balked at the loose use of his expletives. It reminded me of hearing my parents go at it and it was a rote response to tense at the “f” word, stupid as it was.
Instead of answering, that quick retort failing me as always, I lowered my head back into my backpack and continued rummaging through the contents for my science book.
“I was just wondering if you finally put out which is why he dumped you.”
