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Tender Kisses
Addison Moore
Contents
Introduction
Books by Addison Moore
1. The Bucket List
Nolan
2. Double Shot of Regret
Nolan
3. Tender is the Night
Nolan
4. Your Kiss is on My List
Nolan
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
Tender Kisses
(Hope Falls meets 3:AM Kisses Novella)
***Can be read as a standalone!***
Description:
Nolan Knight is the personification of a hot billionaire stud. Broad shoulders, bedroom eyes, a mouth that knows how to navigate its way around the female anatomy—Nolan Knight has all of the sexual bases covered. But he broke my heart years ago, and now we’re both back in Hope Falls at the scene of the crime.
I’m not looking for anything from Nolan—with the exception of him staying out of my way. But that’s one thing he doesn’t seem capable of.
It just takes one look, one touch, and I know I’m in trouble. The only steadfast rule I have is, do not let Nolan Knight anywhere near my heart.
That should be easy enough.
The problem is, Nolan never left that sacred place.
Now if I could only figure out a way to evict him…
Books by Addison Moore
Romance
3:AM Kisses (3:AM Kisses 1)
Winter Kisses (3:AM Kisses 2)
Sugar Kisses (3:AM Kisses 3)
Whiskey Kisses (3:AM Kisses 4)
Rock Candy Kisses (3:AM Kisses 5)
Velvet Kisses (3:AM Kisses 6)
Wild Kisses (3:AM Kisses 7)
Country Kisses (3:AM Kisses 8)
Forbidden Kisses (3:AM Kisses 9)
Dirty Kisses (3:AM Kisses 10)
Stolen Kisses (3:AM Kisses 11)
Lucky Kisses (3:AM Kisses 12)
Revenge Kisses (3:AM Kisses)
Burning Through Gravity (Burning Through Gravity 1)
A Thousand Starry Nights (Burning Through Gravity 2)
Fire in an Amber Sky (Burning Through Gravity 3)
Beautiful Oblivion (Beautiful Oblivion 1)
Beautiful Illusions (Beautiful Oblivion 2)
Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion 3)
The Solitude of Passion
Someone to Love (Someone to Love 1)
Someone Like You (Someone to Love 2)
Someone For Me (Someone to Love 3)
Young Adult Romance
Melt With You (A Totally ’80s Romance 1)
Tainted Love (A Totally ’80s Romance 2)
Hold Me Now (A Totally ’80s Romance 3)
Parnormal Romance
(Celestra Book World in Order)
Ethereal (Celestra Series Book 1)
Tremble (Celestra Series Book 2)
Burn (Celestra Series Book 3)
Wicked (Celestra Series Book 4)
Vex (Celestra Series Book 5)
Expel (Celestra Series Book 6)
Toxic Part One (Celestra Series Book 7)
Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 8)
Elysian (Celestra Series Book 9)
Perfect Love (A Celestra Novella)
Ethereal Knights (Celestra Knights)
Season of the Witch (A Celestra Companion)
Ephemeral (The Countenance Trilogy 1)
Evanescent (The Countenance Trilogy 2)
Entropy (The Countenance Trilogy 3)
Celestra Forever After (Celestra Forever After 1)
The Dragon and the Rose (Celestra Forever After 2)
The Serpentine Butterfly (Celestra Forever After 3)
Crown of Ashes (Celestra Forever After 4) Soon!
To the real Mattie Margene. Happy 90th Grandma!
One
The Bucket List
Misty
Nolan Knight is one of those men who has the ability to stop any and every woman cold in their kitten-heeled tracks no matter if they were in the produce aisle of the supermarket or sitting in a tiny bar in the middle of a snowstorm. I happen to be in the latter category, and yes, every female with working ovaries—and those whose ovaries have long since shriveled—have feasted their attention on that beast of a man.
Nolan isn’t really a beast, but more of a god. He’s attractive to a fault, and he knows it. And believe you me, there is nothing more obnoxious than a man who knows his ovary-popping worth. But right now, it’s not just my ovaries that are doing their best rendition of popcorn. It’s every blood vessel in my body. My adrenaline hits its zenith, and it’s fight-or-flight—only I’m frozen solid, paralyzed with fear as the past comes flooding back in the shape of green eyes to die for and dimples you could bury your head in.
There are some people who haunt your subconscious as if it were their job, and yet when you spot them out in the wild, it’s all you can do to breathe.
“Oh my word!” Mattie May jumps off her barstool so fast I’m half-afraid she’ll bust a hip. Mattie is about to turn ninety in just a couple of weeks. And yes, this ninety-year-old spitfire is the exact reason I’m sitting in JT’s Roadhouse on a snowy Friday night. In fact, I made the nearly five-hundred-mile trek from San Diego all the way to Hope Falls, tucked neatly in the northern California mountains, just to see my young at heart friend. “Well, look who the rat dragged in!”
She got that wrong. He is the rat.
Nolan swoops forward and pulls Mattie into a warm embrace as those lemongrass eyes of his look my way and pierce the deepest part of me. It’s as if that one glance has blown the dust off my sorry soul, and I can finally breathe again.
“Misty.” He straightens as Mattie continues to pull and pluck at him, shouting are you real? over and over.
“Nolan.” My lips twitch just this side of a smile. Not sure why I’m slow to give in and fall over him just the way Mattie is. Nolan and I were friends, once—and then something more than friends. That’s where things went horribly wrong. I can blame every horrific detail that followed in my life square on this Greek god’s shoulders, and I routinely do just that. It may not be right, but right seldom matters when your heart was crushed to dust and simply blown away as if it never really mattered.
“Oh goodness!” Mattie slaps her hand over her mouth, her pale eyes bugging out wide. Her crystal blue eyes shine just as bright as the day I met her, and with her silver hair, she’s still as stunning at near ninety as she was at any other point in her life. I can only attest this through pictures. I met Mattie four years ago, the summer Nolan and I happened to volunteer at the Mountain Meadow Bed and Breakfast. She worked there for Levi and Shelby at the time—they happen to own the B&B, right along with JT’s Roadhouse where we’re presently planted and gobsmacked by the inglorious god who has decided to grace us with his stunning presence. The B&B is initially what brought the three of us together in the first place, and finally what broke Nolan and me apart.
That sorrowful summer sears through my mind like a nuclear heat wave, and I try to shake it out of my head—far away from my raw and tender heart.
“You didn’t come all this way for me, did ya?” Mattie’s Tennessee twang comes out clear when she panics. M
attie has lived in Hope Falls for the last fifty years, but deep down inside, she’s still a country girl at heart.
“I sure did.” Nolan motions toward a nearby table, and the three of us take our seats. “I emailed you back and told you I was coming. Maybe it got lost in cyberspace.” He offers a sly wink my way, and my blood begins to boil. Who the heck does he think he is, ambling into my Friday night, winking and blinking at me with those devil-may-care deep emerald eyes? God, how those eyes have haunted me, and here they are, taking me in as if they’ve never seen me before. Typical Nolan.
“I’m so sorry!” Mattie cries. “I must have sent both of you an email. And for Pete’s sake, I don’t know how to open the darn things. I had Alora send them. Or maybe it was Trinity?” She gets lost in thought a moment. Alora and Trinity are Mattie May’s nieces. They’re both unmarried and in their sixties with enough felines between them to qualify as the resident cat ladies of Hope Falls and just about any other city in the great U.S. of A. “Anyhow, I’m glad to see you both.” Mattie shakes her head wistfully at the two of us. “Dear God Almighty, I hope a flood of people don’t come through that door. My mind is going. Come to think of it, I sent quite a few of those emails out. I should have known better than to send a cry for help to at least a half dozen people. You never know who’d be willing and able to take some time out of life to help a little old lady like me.” Her voice warbles as if she were suddenly fragile as glass, but both Nolan and I know better. Mattie May is as feisty and strong as they come at any age.
A horrible thought comes to me. Dear God, is this some kind of a setup? I glance to the entry just hoping another blast from the past comes strutting in. Because, really? What are the odds of just Nolan and me responding to that email? Thoughts of destiny, kismet, and serendipity sweep through my mind, and I sweep them right back out. No way, no how. I stopped believing in all things supernaturally ordained the day Nolan ripped my beating heart out of my chest and ate if for breakfast.
Nolan looks to Mattie and sheds one of his signature dimpled grins, and that roller coaster feeling in the pit of my stomach goes off. How I hate that he still has the power to make me feel anything, least of all a tiny bit of giddiness to have him around.
“So, what’s this bucket list you’re working on?” He adjusts his legs under the table, and his knee grazes over mine. Nolan glances my way and offers an obnoxious warm grin as if we had somehow turned back the clock four years and he was still mine and I was still his. Then, just as quick as that smile came, it melts right off. He mouths the word sorry, before moving out of my way.
He’s not sorry. There’s not a thing Nolan Knight is ever really sorry about. If he’s anything, he’s calculating. He probably choreographed that knee-grazing move before he ever walked into this bar.
“Bucket list, yes!” Mattie opens up her purse and pulls out a squiggly handwritten note that for the life of me I could never decipher. Mattie seems to have made up her own written language, and for the first time I’m actually a little afraid for the health of her seemingly fit mind. “That’s why I called you here. Again, I’m so sorry that you’ve both come all the way to Hope Falls. I only really needed just the one—but, oh heck, let’s make a party out of it!” She elbows me. “It never hurts to have a handsome young man hanging around two beautiful women.” She gives an exaggerated wink, and I’m right back to thinking Mattie May is terrible at playing Cupid. “What I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, or emails, or any of the other fancy electronic smoke signals you kids have these days is”—she offers a sober nod to both Nolan and me—“I’m dyin’.”
“What?” My hand flies to my chest. Mattie May has been closer to me than either of my grandmothers, my own mother, too. “What’s happening?”
“Hon, I don’t want to say. I don’t want to worry ya—either of ya. But I’ve made my mind up not to think of it, or the short amount of time I’ve got left. Which brings me to this.” She rattles the paper that’s worn to cloth in her hand, and I give another go at trying to decode the hieroglyphics, but it’s no use. “It’s important to me to try to check as much as I can off this list before my birthday.” She turns to Nolan and bats her eyes as if she were a smitten thirteen-year-old. “I’m a Valentine’s baby. I’ll be ninety years young on the fourteenth.”
I’m pretty certain Nolan is already aware of that. Both Alora and Trinity have contacted everyone under the sun about the big surprise birthday bash they’re hosting for her on that heart-shaped day. Deep down, I was mentally preparing myself to see Nolan that day, that heart-shaped day of all days, but here he is, doing what he does best, surprising the hell out of me and not necessarily in a good way.
“What’s on the list, Matt?” Nolan peers over, trying to decode it before shaking his head at the symbols and dashes.
“Having a drink at a bar for one thing.” She irons out the list over the table. “Can you believe I’ve been roaming around this planet for ninety long years and have never had a proper drink in a fine establishment such as this?”
Nolan and I share a quiet smile and our eyes lock, sending a searing heat throughout my chest. I’ve been angry with Nolan for a lot of reasons over the last four years, but he’s always had the power to drive my body to the sexual brink with or without my permission. It was true after our nasty split, it was true that short year I tried on marriage for size, it was true right after and, apparently, it’s still very much gospel.
Nolan calls the bartender over, and after much debate, Mattie decides on a single shot of whiskey, neat, just like her pappy used to take it.
Holy hell. I’m guessing Mattie here can’t hold an ounce of liquor, and it’s going to take both Nolan and me to get her back to the B&B in one piece.
Nolan orders a beer, and suddenly all eyes are feasted on me. I’ve never been much of a drinker. I certainly don’t know my way around a bar, but I can order a virgin piña colada with the best of them, and I do just that. My drinks almost always have their proverbial hymens intact with the exception of that one time Nolan got me to down hard liquor. I drank the orange juice first then chased it with vodka. I foolishly thought it was water and that the vodka was in the OJ where it belonged. We laughed for a week.
“We’re all out, hon,” the waitress says it bored as she blows a perfect pink bubble. She’s older, dried-out perm in her hair, tons of bright blue eye shadow, too much powder on her face that digs into the creases, aging her far more than it needs to. I don’t recognize this woman, Dell, as her nametag reads.
“Something fruity then—virgin.” I blush ten times deeper this time. The summer I met Nolan I was just that, a virgin—and by the end of that season, I was anything but. I was happy about it at the time, but when every horrible word was said and done, I hated him for stealing something so precious from me.
She rolls her eyes. “Hon, we’re only holding the hard stuff. How about you take what she’s having, and I’ll throw Mattie’s on the house?” She gives a friendly wink to my elderly friend, and just like that, I’m coerced into having my first official drink in a bar right along with Mattie.
“Sounds like a plan.” Not a good one, considering I can’t hold my liquor. Figures. Not much good comes out of it whenever Nolan is around.
The waitress disappears, and Nolan settles his elbows over the table with that I’m-going-to-devour-you look on his face.
“Speaking of plans.” He squints over at me, and my insides quiver. Damn biological response. My body may have forgotten the horror he put me through, but the rest of me hasn’t. “What’s on the agenda? Fun in the sun? Skinny-dipping at the falls?” His brows rise a notch because that happened to be our go-to activity that entire haunted summer. For a virgin, I wasn’t exactly a prude—at least not with Nolan. I thought we had something real. I thought I was a good judge of character and made solid decisions. But then Nolan proved me wrong, and then marrying a jackass in haste seemed to only solidify this point.
Skinny-dipping indeed. “You wish,�
� I huff under my breath. God as my witness, that man will never see me undressed again, and, if he does, I’m calling the cops for voyeurism because it isn’t happening voluntarily, honey.
“Oh, heaven’s no!” Mattie claps her hands as she lets out a riotous laugh. “Haven’t you bothered to look skyward lately? We’re in the middle of a blizzard that started in October and has lasted right through to the beginning of February.” She considers this a moment. “I was thinking, tomorrow afternoon the two of us”—she reaches over and picks up my hand with a sly wink—“I mean, the three of us could head to the top of Mountain Ridge and sled our way down. I’ve always wanted to race down that snowy hillside, and by God, nobody is putting me in a coffin until I do it.” She slams her hand over the table just as Dell sets down our drinks, and they all jump in turn.
“Cheers, ladies.” Nolan picks up his beer and sucks the foam right off.
“So, how do I do this?” Mattie pulls her drink forward and sniffs, and I do the same.
“Mmm, smells good,” I muse. There’s a hint of vanilla yet something stronger layered just underneath, and I take a quick sip, only to meet with something akin to what I imagine nail polish remover might taste like. “Wow.”
“Just knock it back, ladies.” Nolan winces over at Mattie because he knows he’s just doled out some piss-poor advice. “On second thought, feel free to use my beer as a chaser if you’d like.” He slides it over, and Mattie shudders with a look of pure excitement on her face.
“Wish me luck, guys!” Mattie jumps in her seat with the sheer exuberance of being seconds away from burning a trail right down her esophagus. “Here it goes! One, two—”
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