Also by Jewel E Ann
Standalone Novels
Idle Bloom
Undeniably You
Naked Love
Only Trick
Perfectly Adequate
Look The Part
When Life Happened
A Place Without You
Jersey Six
Scarlet Stone
Not What I Expected
Jack & Jill Series
End of Day
Middle of Knight
Dawn of Forever
One (standalone)
Out of Love (standalone)
Holding You Series
Holding You
Releasing Me
Transcend Series
Transcend
Epoch
Fortuity (standalone)
The Life Series
The Life That Mattered
The Life You Stole
About the Author
Jewel is a free-spirited romance junkie with a quirky sense of humor.
With 10 years of flossing lectures under her belt, she took early retirement from her dental hygiene career to stay home with her three awesome boys and manage the family business.
After her best friend of nearly 30 years suggested a few books from the Contemporary Romance genre, Jewel was hooked. Devouring two and three books a week but still craving more, she decided to practice sustainable reading, AKA writing.
When she’s not donning her cape and saving the planet one tree at a time, she enjoys yoga with friends, good food with family, rock climbing with her kids, watching How I Met Your Mother reruns, and of course…heart-wrenching, tear-jerking, panty-scorching novels.
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Hard Pressed
Kate Canterbary
Dear Jackson,
I'm leaving you this note because I know you're very busy and I don't want to waste the town sheriff's time. Lord knows I've already wasted enough of it.
Thank you for taking me home last night and...everything else. I made you a basket of wild blueberry muffins for your trouble. That seemed like the appropriate baked good for getting naked in your living room.
I wasn't myself last night. I didn't mean to kiss you or fondle your backside or ask all those intimate questions. Thank you for pretending to enjoy it.
It was very noble of you to sleep on the couch while I was starfished on your bed. I couldn't help but notice it's quite large. The bed, that is. I swear, I didn't notice anything else when I let myself out this morning.
As you know, Talbott's Cove is a ridiculously small town and there's no chance we can avoid each other. Not that I'd want to avoid you, of course, but I'm not sure I can look at you without thinking of the forty different ways I made a fool of myself.
Instead of avoidance, let's try to be friends. We'll forget all about last night…if that's what you want.
Please burn this note after you read it—
Annette
p.s. I whipped up some cinnamon buns, too. Please enjoy them. I'm not sure why, but I couldn't get buns out of my mind today.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Kate Canterbary
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner's trademark(s).
Editing provided by Julia Ganis of Julia Edits.
Proofreading provided by Marla Esposito of Proofing Style.
Cover design provided by Anna Crosswell of Cover Couture.
For best friends who scream obscenities in restaurants.
And Mary and Paul, and Mel and Sue.
On your marks, get set, bake!
Chapter 1
Jackson
Elasticity
n. Capable of recovering shape after stretching.
For five minutes every morning, my life was pure agony.
On most days, I went out of my way to avoid her. I scheduled myself for early patrols or wellness checks on some of my elderly residents. Anything to get out of the station. It was a necessity. I couldn't see to the public safety of this town with my dick harder than a nightstick.
I knew because I'd tried. The squad was too small for briefings from behind a podium. When it came to positioning a clipboard or the sheriff's standard-issue campaign hat over my crotch, I found I could only hold that pose for a few minutes.
Oh, I'd tried to hide it, but the only solution was staying away from the station and the sweetheart of Talbott's Cove, Annette Cortassi. The bookstore she owned on Main Street was no more than fifty yards from my desk and I had a front row seat for her morning rituals.
Annette walked down the street as if surrounded by moonbeams and unicorns, her smile radiant. I didn't know it for sure, but I'd put money on her being the homecoming queen back in high school and Miss Congeniality, too. I'd also put money on her making it her life's work to torture and torment me. She was a devil in angel's clothing, I knew that to be fact.
Since my first days in this sleepy fishing town, an outsider in every sense possible, it was the spunky brunette shopkeeper who'd stolen my attention. Annette knew how to wear the shit out of a summer dress. That woman's bare calves were a public safety hazard. And her ankles. Fuck. Since when were ankles sexy? They were bony joints, for Pete's sake. But all it took was the sight of her walking through the village in strappy sandals to turn me on.
As if the ankles weren't enough, her round hips swayed like a hypnotist's pocket watch. I couldn't avoid the sight of her sun-kissed skin or her waterfall of dark, wavy hair if I tried. More than once, I'd found myself gazing after her, hands clenched, jaw on the floor, and a puddle of drool beside it.
Annette was the brightest star in the Talbott's Cove sky. Every time I caught sight of her, I was powerless to look away. And that was why I couldn't look at all.
I was a newcomer here, still working my way into the good graces of the natives. They didn’t know me yet and they didn’t trust me either. Bedding the town sweetheart wasn't the way to those good graces, no matter how much she enjoyed it. And she'd enjoy it. I wouldn't have it any other way.
But that didn't matter. For the time being, I was sleeping alone. A temporary vow of chastity was the right thing to do. The town deserved my full attention, and my predecessor had made it clear I was to lead by example. No boozing, no gambling, no skirt-chasing. Not unless I wanted a one-way ticket back to Albany.
I wasn't much of a boozer, gambler, or skirt-chaser, but I heeded the previous sheriff's warnings nonetheless. Getting this job was a big step up for me. It was an even bigger step away.
In the span of a couple of months, I'd left my job and sold my home in upstate New York and headed for this town on Maine's rocky coast. It was a bold move, but a necessary one. I wanted to find a different pace of life, and somewhere I could do important work and make some small difference.
I didn't say it in job interviews or mention it in conversation, but I also wanted to belong somewhere. Maybe, eventually, belong to someone.
I shot the clock on my SUV's dashboard a bitter glare. I'd already looped the town twice this morning, fielded complaints about a pair of foxes lurking around the Lincolns' chicken coop, helped the innkeepers fix a section of their back fence that went down last night, and mediated a dispute between fishermen over some missing buoys. So far, a productive morning and yet I still
had fifteen minutes before Annette would be tucked inside her shop.
I'd only managed to speak to her a handful of times. It wasn't nerves that kept me away but a complete inability to look at her without wanting to step into her personal space and smell her hair. I didn't understand that reaction and a part of me resented Annette for surfacing it. Hair-smelling. What kind of witch was she?
Instead of doing or saying something I'd regret, I kept my distance. This small town didn't allow for any true distance but I didn't have to watch her scrawl the quote of the day on the shop's chalkboard sign or arrange and rearrange potted plants on the sidewalk.
Just the thought of her kneeling down to write in one of her gauzy sundresses drew a knot of want low in my belly. She was beautiful and alluring in the most simple, honest ways. Hell, she couldn't jot down a Dickinson quote without lighting a fire inside me from across the street.
But I couldn't get Annette messy and dirty. I couldn't make her scream my name. Not unless I was also ready to wife her up, and I wasn't sure about that. I couldn't casually date her with the entire town watching—and they would watch—and chances were good I couldn't casually fuck her either. She looked altogether too by-the-book for fuck buddies, and there was no room for a tomcat sheriff around here.
That left me killing time by patrolling the town's back roads and praying the lovely book mistress was on time today. My cock couldn't take any mix-ups this morning.
Chapter 2
Annette
Scald
v. To heat a mixture of liquid just below the boiling point.
Thursdays were good sales days, especially in the summer. It was close to payday and people liked to stock up for the weekend. Sometimes the direct deposit was already burning up their bank account, and getting their hands on a beach read made the weekend seem that much closer. It was a mind game, of course, and I was the queen of those. I'd spent the better part of a decade pursuing a man who'd never want me. Not because I wasn't fun or smart or interesting or beautiful but because I was rocking a vagina and he preferred penis.
Not exactly the sort of thing I could fix with the right dress.
Yeah, I was the queen of mind games. Years ago, somewhere in the doldrums of being in my early twenties and frustratingly single, I'd convinced myself Owen Bartlett could be mine if I worked hard enough.
Silly girl, silly games.
On any other Thursday in July, I would've stayed open late and enabled those weekend dreams. The town's inn was fully booked, as were several rental houses and cottages within walking distance of my bookstore. Summertime in the Cove brought tourists and tourists brought money.
But it was close enough to closing time and I was shutting this place down because I needed hard liquor and wallowing. It wasn't every day that a crush I'd harbored for years—years!—blew up in my face. It wasn't just a crush. It was a dream—an illusion—I'd cultivated so thoroughly that it was my reality. I'd never stopped to ask whether I was operating on bad assumptions or shoddy information. Or playing a damn mind game with myself.
Instead, I devoted years to slowly pursuing a man who would never want me. I'd known this, of course, in the dark part of my mind where I hid truths too true to speak. I knew and I chose to ignore it until faced with him cuddling his boyfriend in my shop.
I wasn't surprised to see Owen with his new deckhand Cole in the mystery section, but I blinked several times as I saw him wrap his arms around Cole's torso. My brain couldn't make sense of this image at first and cycled through all the non-romantic possibilities. Bro hugs, back cracking, Heimlich maneuver, spontaneous team yoga session. All valid options. But then his hand teased under the waistband of Cole's shorts and I couldn't look away. Not even when Owen kissed Cole's neck and everything inside me turned to quicksand.
I wanted to scream, "What are you doing to him? What the fuck is going on?" but instead I sent up a prayer for a swift and graceful end to this visit and called, "It's my favorite fishermen!"
I wasn't sure how I managed that. I desperately wanted to know what the hell was going on, even more so when Cole let out an impatient sigh and dropped his head back to Owen's chest. That was the only acknowledgement of my presence. They carried on a whispered conversation as I rounded the counter and approached them.
I wasn't sure how I walked without stumbling. I wasn't one for theatrics but when Owen kissed Cole, my knees had the strength of jelly and a ten-ton boulder landed in my gut. I stood there, too stunned to speak, to look away as they shared this moment. There was no mistaking the intimacy they shared. It was true and deep, and it was a side of Owen I'd never known until now. Seeing him share it with someone else ripped me right in half. I grabbed the newest political tell-all off the shelf and pressed it to my chest just to keep myself intact.
"Hey, Annette," Owen said.
It took me a minute to find my words. In that time, Owen didn't loosen his hold on Cole. It was as though he wanted me to see this, in all its crush-killing glory. He wanted to make his intentions clear.
"Good to see you, Owen," I said, forcing a smile I didn't feel. "You too, Cole."
"You have a great shop," Cole replied. "Awesome selection, fantastic layout."
I'm gonna have to talk now. I'm gonna have to play nice. And I'm gonna need a big bucket of vodka when this is done.
"Yeah, I try," I said, looking away as I rolled my eyes. I wanted to believe he was sincere but I was too busy hating this entire conversation. Hating everything, my bad judgment most of all. "Is there anything I can help you find?"
For the love of pinwheels and popsicles, please say no.
"I think we're good," Cole replied.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
A second later, Owen said, "Cole wants a few mystery novels. Can you recommend some?"
Would it be wrong to say no?
"Oh. Oh, sure." I took a step forward, prepared to rattle off my standard mystery recommendations, but something snapped inside me. There was an actual snap, like a rubber band stretched past its limits, and everything it once restrained tumbled loose. The force of that snap propelled me forward and I whirled around the shop, plucking paperbacks as I went. "Let me pick out some books for your new boyfriend, Owen. That's what I do, make everyone else happy. Sure! Mysteries. Fantastic! Everyone else gets their happy and I get to pick out books. Fabulous!"
Cole and Owen went on cuddling and whispering like they were cozied up on a picnic blanket, and they missed all the impatient glares I shot in their direction. A girl could only take so many hits in one day before trotting out some first-class sass.
"Mysteries. I love a mystery," I said, the edge in my voice sharp enough to cut stones. "Sometimes I think I live in a mystery. You know, the what is happening in my life? mystery. Because I sure as hell don't know." My arms were overloaded with books and I needed to get rid of these guys. I dropped my haul of recommendations on the counter. "Can I get you anything else?"
Please, please, please say no.
"No, this is plenty," Cole replied.
Of course, Owen asked, "Did that special order come in?"
Arggggh.
The damn special order. My deus ex machina. For years, we'd played the special order game. It'd served me well. Owen came in looking for a book, something old, obscure, or odd. Often, it was all three. And I got it for him, every time. He'd come in to pick up his newest read and we'd get to talking about books and history and everything else. To him, it must've been casual conversation with the book lady. For me, it was proof that we had something, even a little something.
Now, that special order was killing our little something with fire.
I sighed, and the effort pulled my shoulders down. I couldn't find a smile to save my life. "Yeah, Owen, it did," I said, annoyed with him, myself, everything. "I'll need a minute, okay?"
I didn't wait for a response, turning toward the storeroom and power-walking my ass behind closed doors. When I was alone and separate from the catastrophe on the other
side of the wall, I brought my hands to my eyes as I choked out a sob. It was a gasp followed by tears that poured down while I gulped for air.
It was ugly, and it was gross. My makeup was melting off my face and my nose was running like a faucet, and I didn't even know why I was crying.
Yeah, I was hurt, but hurt for a hundred different, ridiculous, contradictory reasons. I couldn't even land on one reason and hold it up as proof that I was allowed to feel this way. Instead, I had a collection of missteps and mistakes, assumptions and inferences. It added up to a tiny disaster but it was coming down around me like a monsoon.
I could hear Owen and Cole talking on the other side of the door. Their happy little love fest was going on its merry way while I snot-sputter-laughed at the idea of sneaking out the back door. I'd do it, too. I could leave them there while I found that bucket of vodka to fade the warts and hairy moles of my life.
But I'd known Owen Bartlett my whole life and his mother was my high school guidance counselor. Small town manners—and a long-standing fear of Mrs. Bartlett—had me snatching his special order off the shelf, wiping away the tears, and pulling myself together. I'd get through this sale and then I'd drown myself in vodka.
When I emerged, I found Cole and Owen with their heads bent together, whispering to each other in a way that squeezed my heart. I wanted to share that kind of intimacy with someone who adored me the way Cole adored Owen.
Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set Page 67
