Haunted: A Love Letters Novel

by Kristen Blakely

  “Good evening, Mrs. Smith. This is Debra Martinez.”

  “Of course it is. What can I do for you, Ms. Martinez?”

  Formality was the hallmark of Patricia’s interactions; Debra tried not to interpret it as personal coolness. “My son found a puppy—one who looks like a mix of your Bonnie and Clyde. I was just calling to ask if…any of your puppies had run away.”

  “My puppies do not run away, Ms. Martinez. Are you asking if I gave Jewel to your son, or if he stole her?”

  Jewel? Debra winced. Bonnie. Clyde. Jewel. How many more bank-robbing analogies did she need to drive home the likelihood of her son’s theft?

  “I gave Jewel to your son this afternoon as we agreed.”

  “You agreed?”

  “He’s been mowing my lawn for the past year in exchange for the pick of Bonnie and Clyde’s next litter. Well, the next litter has just weaned, so Aidan’s claimed his fee.”

  Debra blinked. Just as well, her jaw was attached to her face, or it might have fallen to the floor. She glanced out the backdoor, at the lawn that Aidan flatly refused to mow. “I…see.”

  “Your son is a hard worker, Ms. Martinez, and a great talker. I’ve enjoyed my conversations with him.”

  A glib liar, more like. How had Aidan managed to conceal his activities from her for over a year?

  “You’re out working all the time.”

  Guilt plucked at Debra. She worked long hours seven days a week at the café and supplemented them with hours as an administrative assistant at the clinic, but what choice did she have? Wishes and prayers did not pay household bills, and Peter, Aidan’s father, could not be counted on for regular child support.

  Debra scribbled out Patricia’s instructions for Jewel’s care and feeding before disconnecting the call. She stared at her son and his gamboling pup as they tumbled over each other in a mad sprint around the yard. She smiled, and in spite of the thermostat set low, she felt warm and content.

  Life still had its moments.

  A small part of her mind, cynical from experience, scoffed at her naiveté. Finding life’s magical moments wasn’t difficult; holding on to them was.

  Aidan had been unusually high-spirited and animated all evening—no doubt entirely due to his new furry best friend—and finally settled down an hour past his bedtime. Debra went to bed shortly thereafter, but a dog’s yelping howl yanked her out of sound sleep. A second later, thunder rattled the house. She flung the covers aside and ran to her bedroom door. In the corridor, a trembling bundle of fur huddled in front of Aidan’s closed door.

  Debra’s heart melted as soft puppy eyes turned up to her. She leaned down, gathered Jewel into her arms, and carried the dog back to her room. Jewel sagged against her and snuggled close as she sat on the bed. “I’m surprised Aidan didn’t flat out disobey me on your first night here and let you into his room.” She stroked the soft fur on the back of Jewel’s neck. “You be quiet now, okay? I need to get my rest.”

  Jewel huffed as if she understood and curled into a ball at Debra’s side. Perhaps the dog slept, but for several minutes, Debra stared up at the ceiling, her thoughts whirring over squeezing a dog—the whelp of an Irish wolfhound and a St. Bernard—into her already razor-thin budget. Where on Earth was she supposed to find the money to make sure Aidan could keep his dream?

  Continue your journey through Love Letters with INFLAMED.

  Love Letters

  ADORED

  I ended up dating an escort, but it didn’t happen the way you’d think…

  I don’t have the time to find Mr. Right…but when a sexy male escort walks into my volunteer clinic for his annual checkup, I’m tempted into accepting his invitation…without realizing all the emotional baggage that comes with it.

  Rowan Forrester might have model-gorgeous looks, but his single-minded attentiveness that boosts my shaky confidence. I know better than to believe his interest is genuine, but his easy sincerity is irresistible.

  Too bad this fantasy can’t last. After all, he’s an escort. And when the truth of his past finally catches up with him…with us…it risks destroying our love, and any hope of a future together. What will it take for us to battle this storm together…and still come out all right on the other side?

  BETRAYED

  I can turn every man’s head…except his.

  I command attention on the haute couture catwalks of Milan, Paris, and New York, but whenever I’m face-to-face with Drew Jackson, I feel like a gawky thirteen-year-old again—in love with a superstar who will never see me as anything more than his younger brother’s ex-girlfriend.

  I tell myself Drew’s no longer a superstar. A long-ago car accident shattered his knee and destroyed his football career. What is he compared to the celebrities who whirl me through one-night stands or Tyler, the brilliant and witty social media maverick who is determined to win my love?

  Drew’s just…Drew. All logic and rationality aside, I want him.

  When betrayal knocks me off my supermodel pedestal, it’s a long way to the bottom. Will my tenuous friendship with Drew survive my career, my fame, and the rocky transition to love?

  CRUSHED

  I need a hero…but not him.

  Losing my job wouldn’t have fazed me.

  Losing my brother and then my job almost broke me. I’m down to my last hundred dollars and ready to accept help in any shape or form when Cody turns up on my doorstep with a job offer. And not just any job offer.

  My dream job.

  I can’t accept. I’m not that desperate.

  Because I know Cody.

  He’s the daredevil black sheep of the esteemed Hart clan, and should never have made it to his twenty-fifth birthday. What he probably hadn’t counted on, though, was his best friend dying instead of him.

  His best friend. My brother.

  I’m out of options, but nothing on Earth could possibly entice me into the arms of the man who killed my brother.

  DESIRED

  I want a divorce. And I don’t know why.

  “The Plan” we made twenty years ago as naive seventeen-year-olds is on track. Married. House with a white picket fence. Two matching BMWs. Two kids. And Gabriel is on track to becoming a partner in his law firm.

  How can one have everything and still need something more…something different? How do I tell the man I married that he’s practically a stranger to me now?

  “The Plan” is about to go completely off track. Far worse, I’m not sure if it’s his fault…or mine.

  ENSNARED

  They were named for the archangels. They should have come with warning labels.

  The two Falconer boys, Raphael and Michael, were named for the archangels. I know they are anything but. At twenty-two, I married Raphael, the first Falconer boy. By twenty-five, I was divorced. I traded my wedding ring for two near-fatal bullet wounds—and it was the best damned trade of my life.

  Now it’s time to go back to the place where it began, where Michael, the second Falconer boy, waits; his life on pause ever since I married his brother.

  He’s convinced I’m there to destroy his life.

  He’s not wrong….

  FLAWED

  I’m out of dreams. He’s full of them.

  I wanted to be an actress. I got as far as waiting on tables while waiting for the call backs that never came. Disillusioned and burned-out, I head out on a lavish, all-expense-paid vacation before facing up to the fact that life has dealt me a big flat zero.

  And then I meet him, and our mutual attraction is immediate and scorching. Jake Hunter is a professional beach volleyball player with gold in his sights. Olympic gold.

  And perhaps another kind of gold. He thinks I’m something I’m not.

  Rich.

  No amount of attraction is going to survive those false impressions and clashing expectations. I’m not going to make it out of this summer fling with my heart intact.

  And neither will he.

  GRACED

  I've out
grown him, but I haven’t forgotten him...

  My ambitions have always been bigger than the town of Havre de Grace, but when my father has a heart attack, I return home to find the town little changed—

  —except that Connor Bradley, the high school nerd, is now the town’s doctor, a Grade-A hunk, and a widower with two young children.

  He doesn’t have time for distractions, not while juggling single parenthood and his clinic on five hours of sleep a night. I’m the girl he remembers as the high school flirt who left Havre de Grace for the bright lights of the city. I’m a dangerous distraction he doesn’t want and can’t afford.

  When Connor’s plans for his first Christmas without his wife are derailed, I know I can step in and save the day for his adorable children.

  But do I want to?

  I’ve come so far, and I don’t know if I can go back…not even for him.

  HAUNTED

  Not all gifts are treasured. Only one can be kept...

  I’ve given up on love, but Christmas unexpectedly ignites my bleak and solitary life with three men who represent my past, my present, and my future.

  Peter Warren, my high school and college sweetheart, who shattered my heart but rules my dreams…

  James Kerrigan, the principal of Havre de Grace Elementary School and my boss…

  Brandon Smith, the dashing New York City lawyer, who promises an escape from the confines of my small town life…

  Which man offers the gift of true love and happily ever after?

  INFLAMED

  There are no happy endings; not for “The Other Woman.”

  In a small town, there’s just no way to start over.

  Eight years after the worst mistake of my life, my life as a single parent is a grind of exhaustion in between spikes of fatigue—an endless struggle to make ends meet.

  But then Sean Orr, Havre de Grace’s newest firefighter, comes to town and shows my son and I a new and beautiful kind of “normal.”

  The happiness can’t last—not for Sean who is on the run from his past. When it catches up with him, will it bring my fragile normality crashing down around me, or will I find the strength to finally define my own happy ending?

  JILTED

  Can love ever measure up to perfection?

  Jon Seifer is almost everything to me. He’s the security that anchors me and the love that raises me up.

  However, I was, at birth, promised in marriage to an even more amazing man who holds a medical degree from Harvard Medical School, works as a cardiac surgeon at Mayo Clinic, and hails from the lofty Brahmin caste.

  Like me.

  And he is a good man. A man I could love given half a chance. Everyone agrees he’s perfect for me.

  And everyone knows that I—an overachiever from birth—would never settle for anything less than perfection.

  So where does it leave Jon…?

  KINDLED

  Second chances. Impossible odds.

  Nicholas Dragov, a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, is the bad boy of ballet. On stage, his grand jeté defies the laws of physics and gravity. Off stage, he lavishes money on fast cars and fast women. His small-town roots are abandoned in the past, until a career-ending injury traps him back home, in the care of the woman whose heart he broke…

  Me.

  I was Nicholas’s first dance partner, but he alone made it onto the world stage. In the eight years since we’ve seen each other, I married, became pregnant, a widow, and a mother.

  Now, Nicholas is home, his beautiful body broken, and his attitude darker and deeper than a volcanic crater. I know how to work with sports injuries, but no amount of training or professionalism can help me endure the man who abandoned me when I needed him most.

  LURED

  He ruined my holiday. And then my life…

  When an accident—his fault...okay, maybe mine—cuts short my bicycle tour through Italy, I’m rescued by a brusque, career-driven American lawyer—the same kind of man who once broke my heart.

  A week in Brandon Smith’s company, however, convinces me that the similarities are superficial. My Italian fling with Brandon becomes the highlight of my life, but can the glow of romance survive the harsh light of reality when we return to America and find ourselves on opposite sides of the courtroom?

  MALIGNED

  Is my past too much for a future with him?

  Life is rosy as an aspiring college graduate and influential fashion blogger, but it wasn’t always that way.

  I have secrets—shameful secrets, precious secrets—and a past that could shatter my carefree present and promising future.

  And then I meet Tom—a brilliant lawyer, single father and devoted brother. Falling in love is easy.

  I should have known better. Life doesn’t have an easy mode. Not for me.

  When he discovers my secrets, will he trust only the facts he can see, hear, and touch, or will he be the first and only man to accept me for who I am—past, present, and future?

  About the Author

  “Heart, Humor, Heat, and Happiness…”

  At 4 a.m., when her husband and three sons are asleep, Kristen Blakely weaves unforgettable characters into unexpected stories.

  Love Letters, starting with Adored, features Kristen's contemporary romance series, which proves that, at the very least, she knows how to alphabetize books.

  Kristen's devious plan for world domination begins with making all her readers as sleep deprived as she is.

  LOVE LETTERS by KRISTEN BLAKELY