by Meg Benjamin
Andy blinked at him. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “You’re the greatest organizer I ever met. I love that about you.”
His heart gave a mighty thump. He drew a deep breath into his suddenly tight lungs. “How soon, Andy?”
“A couple of weeks,” she said, smiling. “After we clean up the King’s place. I figure he can cook us a couple of briskets for the reception.”
Chico nodded slowly. “And some chicken. Maybe we could use the event center at the Rose. I’ll call LeBlanc. We’ll work something out.”
Andy shook her head, still smiling. “I’m sure you will. Now let’s take those beans home. I’ll make you some dinner.”
His heart seemed to contract as he looked at her. His wife. His barbecue joint. Well, partly his anyway. Had he actually been bored once? It didn’t look like that was going to be a problem again any time soon.
“Yeah,” he said, extending his hand to pull her to her feet then wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s do that.”
About the Author
Meg Benjamin is an award-winning author of contemporary romance for Samhain Publishing. Her books have won an EPIC Award for Contemporary Romance, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, the New England Romance Writers Beanpot Award, and the Holt Medallion, among other honors. Meg lives in Colorado. Her website is www.MegBenjamin.com and her blog is http://megbenj1.wordpress.com/. You can follow her on:
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Meg loves to hear from readers—contact her at [email protected].
Look for these titles by Meg Benjamin
Now Available:
Konigsburg, Texas
Venus in Blue Jeans
Wedding Bell Blues
Be My Baby
Long Time Gone
Brand New Me
Don’t Forget Me
Fearless Love
Promise Harbor Wedding
Bolted
Sweet music doesn’t come without a few sour notes.
Fearless Love
© 2012 Meg Benjamin
Konigsburg, Texas, Book 7
MG Carmody never figured her musical dreams would crash against the reality of Nashville. Now the only thing she has going for her is her late grandfather’s chicken farm, which comes with molting hens that won’t lay, one irascible rooster, and a huge mortgage held by a ruthless opponent—her Great Aunt Nedda.
With fewer eggs to sell, MG needs extra money, fast. Even if it means carving out time for a job as a prep cook at The Rose—and resisting her attraction to its sexy head chef.
Joe LeBlanc has problems of his own. He’s got a kitchen full of temperamental cooks—one of whom is a sneak thief—a demanding cooking competition to prepare for, and an attraction to MG that could easily boil over into something tasty. If he could figure out the cause of the shy beauty’s lack of self-confidence.
In Joe’s arms, MG’s heart begins to find its voice. But between kitchen thieves, performance anxiety, saucy saboteurs, greedy relatives, and one very pissed-off rooster, the chances of them ever making sweet music are looking slimmer by the day.
Warning: Contains hot kitchen sex, cool Americana music, foodie hysteria, and a whole lot of fowl play.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Fearless Love:
Joe swore he could feel her stiffening from three feet away. He’d known a lot of people who didn’t like talking about their backgrounds, and at least some of them were screwed up beyond all redemption. MG Carmody gave no evidence of being any more or less neurotic than the next person. Of course, the next person at the moment happened to be him, and he wasn’t exactly a model of mental health himself.
Which made her great reluctance to talk about herself particularly intriguing. “Did I say something wrong?”
She blew out a breath. “No. It’s just not very interesting. I came down here because my grandpa got sick and needed someone to take care of him.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Tennessee.”
“Doing what?”
Long pause. “Writing.”
Writing. Well that covered a lot of ground. “Writing about what?”
“Oh, you know. Love, death, the usual. There’s my driveway.” She picked up her pace slightly.
Joe matched it. “So you wrote fiction? Novels? Or maybe journalism. I guess you could say that deals with love and death too.”
“No. I just… I wrote, you know? So where were you before you came to Konigsburg?” She sounded a little desperate.
“Oh here and there,” he said easily. “I was in New York, then New Orleans for a while. Then I moved to Texas, worked in Austin and Dallas, got the job with Resorts Consolidated.” He felt a little guilty all of a sudden. There were parts of his life he didn’t like talking about either. Who was he to expect her to give him all the details? “Did you grow up around here?”
She seemed to relax slightly. “No, my mom lived in New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. I grew up there, but I came here to visit every summer. I helped my grandpa with his chickens.”
“Do your parents still live there?”
“My mom does. My dad took off when I was little. I don’t know where he is now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I never really knew him. My mom took her maiden name back, and I did too—I’m a Carmody more than anything else. My mom’s a tough broad. She brought me up on her own. I never felt like we were missing much.”
“I’m sorry about that too.” He slowed down slightly, hoping she would too.
She stopped, looking back at him. “So where are you from?”
He let himself grin. The yard light near the chicken house made it easier to see her face at least. “Aw, darlin’, can’t you tell?” he drawled, letting his accent deepen. “Baton Rouge.”
She grinned back. “I guess it is sort of obvious, now that you mention it. Did you grow up there?”
“Yes, ma’am. Lived there until I went off to learn how to cook. Only it turned out my mama’d already showed me how to do most of that.”
“Big family?”
He shrugged. “Big enough. I’ve got five brothers and sisters and a shitload of cousins. All of us lived in the same neighborhood.”
“So what did you learn in culinary school?” She turned back toward the front porch, but at least she was walking more slowly now.
“How to cook for a restaurant, which is sort of different from how to cook. Also how to survive in a restaurant, which is more important.” He almost hadn’t done that, of course, but he’d managed to pull it together in the end.
She turned to face him at the foot of her front steps. “Do you like it here?”
He paused. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked him that before. “Yeah. Overall, I like it a lot. How about you?”
“I haven’t been here long enough to have an opinion.” She paused. “Except that’s not exactly true because I lived here at Grandpa’s every summer for seven or eight years.”
“Not the same, though, is it,” he said slowly.
“No, it’s not exactly.” She sat down on her top step, staring up at him. “But in a weird way, it is. I mean, my grandpa was sort of an old style farmer. He’d go to town maybe once a week, if that, just to go to the HEB supermarket. He never went to a restaurant or a movie. He didn’t drink. He had a television set from the Stone Age. I think he even felt bad about buying food at HEB. He thought he should be able to grow everything he needed himself.”
“What about your grandma?”
She shook her head. “She died a few years ago. Cancer.”
“No other relatives around?”
She shrugged. “Well, there’s Grandpa’s sister, my Great-Aunt Nedda. She’s into real estate. But she and Grandpa weren’t close. We hardly ever saw her.”
He sat down beside her on the step. “So why ar
e things not that different?”
She sighed. “Because I still don’t go into town that often. Hell, I don’t even take the time to put gas in my car. Between the chickens and the Rose, I’m a real drone.”
He leaned back, resting his elbows on the step behind him. “Chef’s hours are a bitch. It’s a wonder any of us have any home life at all.”
“You don’t get out either?” She raised a faintly disbelieving eyebrow.
“I don’t get out as much as I used to, but I make it into town occasionally.” Actually living in the country had been a safety measure for him. It wasn’t as easy to wander out to another restaurant or bar for a drink or five to let the adrenaline wear off. “We got Sunday and Monday off, you know.”
She nodded slowly. “I know. I’m looking forward to it.”
He watched her for another moment, her face pale in the moonlight. She seemed to be deliberately looking away from him. He turned and looked up at the star-filled sky. “Ever been to the Faro Tavern in town?”
She shook her head, still not looking at him. “As I recall, that was one of the places my grandpa wouldn’t even walk by. He didn’t exactly call it a den of iniquity, but I think that’s because iniquity wasn’t part of his vocabulary.”
“It’s changed a lot since then.” He turned to watch her again. “New management a while ago. Guy named Tom Ames. His wife runs a first-class coffee place next door.”
Her lips edged up into a faint smile. “That is a change. The old Faro wouldn’t have had any coffee on the premises.”
“Want to go there for dinner Sunday night?”
She licked her lips, still not looking at him. “Would that cause any…problems in the kitchen? I mean, I don’t want Darcy…or anybody…to think…” Her voice died away. He had a feeling if they’d been in daylight her face would have been bright pink.
Joe knew he shouldn’t grin, but he couldn’t help it. “Darlin’, nobody in the kitchen will care. Hell, nobody in the kitchen will even know, unless you tell them. I’m sure as hell not going to bring it up. And I’ve never seen any of them in the Faro.” Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen any of them in town period. He found himself wondering just where Leo and Jorge were doing their drinking these days.
She raised an eyebrow, turning toward him for the first time. “Because it’s not supposed to be mentioned?”
“Because I don’t talk about my private life in the kitchen. I’m not one of those chefs who takes everybody out drinking after we finish service so he can talk about his exploits.”
Once upon a time, of course, he’d done just that. Once upon a time he’d actually been famous for doing just that. But then the drinking had morphed into other things, cocaine chiefly. And it had started screwing with his life in major ways. And then it had started screwing with his cooking.
And then he’d been out of a job and scrambling.
Now he gave MG his most earnest look. Look at me. Believe me. It’ll be okay.
“So we go to the Faro and drink?”
He grinned again—at least he’d gotten her to move this far. “No, we go to the Faro and eat. And maybe dance, if they’ve got a band. I don’t know what they’ve got going right now, but sometimes they have a group.”
He couldn’t exactly define the expression that drifted across her face just then. Anticipation maybe. Or anxiety. Or maybe both. “Or we could go someplace like Brenner’s,” he said quickly. “They’re good. We’re better, but they’re good.”
She shook he head. “No, the Faro sounds fine. Sounds like my kind of place, in fact.”
“Well, then, sounds like it’s settled to me.”
“It’s not—I mean I still haven’t…” she subsided into confusion again.
He leaned over quickly, placing his index finger under her chin, lifting her face so that she was looking at him. “Say, ‘Thanks, Joe, I’d love to go to dinner with you at the Faro on Sunday’.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then the corners of her mouth edged up again. “Thanks, Joe, I’d love to go to dinner with you at the Faro on Sunday.”
“There you go.” He leaned forward, almost without thinking about it and pressed his lips against hers.
He felt her stiffen against him and started to pull back, but then her lips softened. She tilted her head slightly, changing the angle of the kiss so that he slid deeper. He brought one hand up, cupping the back of her head lightly. Her lips opened wider beneath his, teeth against teeth, his tongue rasping against the sudden warmth of her mouth.
Heat spread through his body—he hardened almost instantly. His other hand dropped to her waist, to the slight indentation of her hip bone. He slid his fingers beneath the soft fabric of her shirt, feeling the warmth of the smooth skin underneath. Heat raced through him again, and he growled deep in his throat.
What the hell? MG Carmody was a nice-looking woman, sure enough, but he hadn’t expected anything to happen between them this quickly. Time to tone it down a notch.
He started to pull back, amazed at the reluctance he felt. Somewhere at the back of his mind alarm bells were sounding. Danger, danger, Will Robinson!
MG moved away almost as slowly as he had, her fingers pressed against her lips, her eyes wide in the shadows.
He waited for her to say something, even if that something was Get the hell off my front steps. After a moment longer, he managed a half smile of his own. “You know, I’ve kissed a lot of women in my time. Some of them let me know they liked it. Some of them let me know they didn’t. A couple of them even socked me. But you’re the first one who’s ever had absolutely nothing to say about it one way or the other.”
It’s either true love…or the biggest mistake they’ve ever made.
Going for Four
© 2014 Erin Nicholas
Counting on Love, Book 4
Hot firefighter Cody Madsen has stayed away from Olivia Dixon for almost two years—technically. Even though he talks to her every day and sees her every weekend. But there’s no kissing, touching, or telling her how he really feels. Because they’re just friends. Anything more than that would mean crossing the line that Olivia’s older brother has firmly drawn between them.
Olivia wants what her three sisters have—true love. She could almost believe she’s found it with Cody, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s her older brother’s best friend and her brother won’t have it. And he’s never steered her wrong before. Her head is telling her to trust her brother, but her heart won’t let go of Cody.
Her solution? A dating site where she and Cody can each find their “Perfect Pick” once and for all.
But when the site yields some unexpected results, their real feelings come front and center. And they have to decide if it’s worth the risk to cross the line from friendship to love after all.
Warning: Contains a starry-eyed romantic, a wannabe knight in shining armor, and chocolate chip cookies. A lot of chocolate chip cookies.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Going for Four:
Cody Madsen had never seen Olivia Dixon naked. Until today.
And there was a very good reason for that.
Two, in fact.
She was his best friend. And her brother would kill him.
But damn, the sight was breathtaking.
Breathtaking enough that his entire system short-circuited and all he could think was Every day for the rest of my life.
“Cody! Oh my god! What are you doing here?”
She’d obviously just stepped from the bathroom. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, the scent of her favorite shower gel and lotion were strong in the air and, most significantly, she was as naked as the day she was born.
Which had to be why his brain and mouth would not connect.
Olivia crossed an arm over her breasts—her glorious, perky, perfect breasts—and put a hand over her even-more-private part—the mouthwatering, holy crap, light blond hair that was trimmed into a perfect V pointing the way home—
and said louder, “What are you doing?”
But it wasn’t until another voice hit his ears that Cody was able to pull himself out of the Olivia-is-even-hotter-than-I-thought daze.
“Cody! I’m heading to the fuse box!”
Olivia’s eyebrows arched. “Is that Conner?”
It was. And Cody’s first spoken word on the matter was, “Crap.”
He grabbed her upper arms, backed her into the bathroom and kicked the door shut.
That proved to be the biggest mistake of all. Her skin was silky and warm and he should never have touched her.
“What’s Conner doing here?”
Cody was an idiot. When he’d first seen that she was naked, he should have turned around and gotten the hell out of here. Instead, what had he done? He’d touched her. Then he’d put himself in a closed room with her.
A tiny closed room.
“There’s a good reason we instituted the conservative-clothing-at-all-times rule,” he said gruffly.
She still had her arm and hand covering the most important parts, but that didn’t matter one iota. He was never going to be able to forget what he’d seen.
“That rule is for when we’re together,” she said.
“We’re together now.” Wow, were they. Her scent was imprinted on his brain. Now, standing submerged in a cloud of it between her and the bottles on the shelf behind her, he found himself taking deeper and deeper breaths—and growing harder and harder.
The naked-breasts-and-other-parts thing wasn’t helping.
“I didn’t know we were going to be together now,” she returned. “What are you—and Conner—doing here?”
“Fixing the outlet in the kitchen that’s not working.” He breathed deeply and concentrated on keeping his eyes on hers. “I texted you.”
