Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set

by Grover Swank, Denise

  I cupped her cheek, swiping my thumb along her skin. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. About what happened. What he did.”

  “It’s all in the past now,” Josie said. “Truly. He’s not in my thoughts anymore.”

  “And his voice?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m back in control. And I wanted to bring you here for a reason. To build new memories over the old ones. To… listen again. To my instincts.”

  “What are they saying, Josie?” I asked because this whole day had been one long moment of my heart screaming she’s the one.

  Josie looked over the view for a moment like she was gathering something. “I don’t have a solution. Yet. To how we’d make a… a relationship work.”

  I swallowed roughly, heart slamming in my chest.

  “But I know two things. I want to be in a relationship with you. A real one. And I don’t want to do long distance. I want to be with you. Every day.”

  I pulled Josie in for the softest, sweetest kiss of my entire life, and when I pulled back, I caught a wayward tear sliding down her cheek.

  “Actually, I know three things,” she said, laughing into the L.A. sky. “The third is I’m so incredibly in love with you, it’s ridiculous.”

  Time stilled in a way that was ancient and beautiful. Because I was filled with the rightness of this moment and the winding path we’d taken here. Our week of passion. Our miserable separation. The delicate and deliberate way we’d found ourselves sitting on the hood of a car on Mulholland Drive.

  “Oh, Josie,” I said, cupping her face in my hands. “Can you say that one more time?”

  “I love you, you big sexy Viking,” she said, biting her lip and grinning. I placed her hand on my chest, right over my spinning heart.

  “I love you. Probably since the moment you called me hirsute.”

  She laughed again, wrapping her body around mine. There was no tension in her body, only a loose lightness. I could feel what this moment meant to her, so different from two years ago. The way our lives were opening together, like a night-blooming flower.

  “You know, my parents almost moved away from Big Sur, right after they graduated from college,” I finally said, brushing her hair from her shoulders.

  “The high school sweethearts?” she asked.

  “The very same. The whole town was swept up in their relationship. But when they first got together, though, they were in love with this idea of moving to Argentina.”

  “Argentina? Why?” Josie’s brow furrowed.

  “I have no idea. You know, both sides of my family are local to Big Sur, stretching back at least five generations. My dad’s family were homesteaders. You remember how The Bar used to be an old school, back in the day? My great-great-grandfather probably went to school there.”

  “There’s a kind of poetry to working and living in the same room where your past relatives sat in small desks and learned,” Josie said. “Now, people puke on the floor and sloppily make out with each other.”

  I laughed. “Smart-ass. The Bar is a beautiful, classy place, and the patrons never drink themselves to excess.”

  “That’s a bald-faced lie, and you know it.”

  I laughed into the stars, tugging on a strand of her hair.

  “Also, maybe your parents just wanted to do something different,” she said seriously.

  “I think that’s exactly it,” I agreed. “Two newlyweds in love with each other and the world around them. Maybe feeling trapped and claustrophobic by all that small-town intensity. The Big Sur Channel. The gossip. The fact that there is absolutely nothing to do. The fact that neither of them had ever stepped foot out of California.”

  “Did they ever end up going?”

  “No,” I said. “But they did take a pretty epic road trip in their car all across the country. Slept in the backseat and saw almost every state. It was their honeymoon.” I smiled at the memory, recalling the aged photos pinned haphazardly to the walls of my childhood home: my parents at the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park and pointing at alligators in Florida.

  “Then what happened?”

  “They made a choice. Saw the entire country and loved it. But realized there was nothing like their home town. Nothing like Big Sur. And they made an active decision to move back and commit themselves to that community. Not just because it had always been done. Which, when I was younger, I didn’t understand.”

  “And now?” Josie asked.

  “I’m starting to understand more. This,” I said, waving to the glittering skyline, “is like nothing I’ve ever done before. Nothing I’ve ever seen before. I understand their desire to take the entirety of the world in.”

  Josie’s eyes were filled with honesty. “I felt the same way on that drive in Big Sur. The grandiosity of the landscape. Even the fear of the rockslide—it all touched something inside of me that L.A. doesn’t. Or hasn’t in a while. I thought the same thing: what else in this world haven’t I seen?”

  An idea was forming in my mind, something new and exciting and just the right amount of scary.

  “Josie,” I said. “What if we did something completely different?”

  “Like what?” she laughed.

  It was an irresponsible idea. Not even a little bit well thought out. Josie was probably going to toss me over this cliff, then drive away as fast as she could.

  “How much vacation time do you have?”

  She bit her lip. “I control my schedule. I mean, I’m booked straight through for the next month. I can always cancel, find a colleague to take my clients, but—”

  “But what?”

  “They won’t be happy with me,” she grinned. “Although there are much worse things.”

  I was nodding, mentally doing some calculations. “I think I can get Paige and Austin to run The Bar for a bit. And my parents, too.”

  Slowly, Josie’s head tipped to the side. “What’s on your mind, hirsute hunk?”

  “Remember when we had an accidental coffee date at the Bakery in Big Sur? I told you I’d take you to my favorite waterfalls?”

  “I do,” she said. “And you never did. We didn’t go to any private beaches either. And I had plans for that, if you know what I mean.”

  Her fingers danced up my thigh, and I kissed her right beneath her ear. She shivered.

  “I know a waterfall. It’s famous. In fact, it’s one of the largest in the whole world.” A deep breath, and I kept going. “Let me take you there.”

  “In Big Sur?” she asked, brow furrowed. “How did I not know this?”

  I shook my head with a rumble of laughter. “Not Big Sur. In Argentina.”

  Josie watched me for a minute as recognition flashed across her features. Her eyes narrowed, and then the smile she gave me burned brighter than the city below. She took out her phone, fingers flying across the screen. A minute later she flipped it over, showing me plane tickets: two leaving from LAX to Buenos Aires. Placed her palm against my cheek.

  “What else in this world haven’t we seen, Gabriel?”

  * * *

  And that was how, not three hours later, Josie and I ended up squeezed into seats on an airplane. Breathless. Exhilarated. Together.

  Epilogue

  Josie

  Eighteen months later

  Gabe was trying to get me drunk on our wedding night. Or, rather, wedding dawn. We were sitting on the hood of his car overlooking Julia Pfeifer Beach in Big Sur, still in our wedding wear. The ocean swirled and danced in the early light, and you could just hear the faintest bird song.

  Behind us, the sun was slowly drifting past the horizon.

  It was a new day.

  “So,” Gabe said, pouring a generous amount of champagne into my glass. “Let’s discuss the highlights.”

  I swooned at the look of the gold band on his left hand. Gabriel Shaw was something to behold in a light gray suit.

  “Calvin was the most adorable officiant known to man,” I said, smiling into my g
lass.

  He’d laughed and stammered and blushed his way through our ceremony on the beach as Lucia (loudly) whispered encouragement from behind me. Lucia, and all four of my brothers, were in my wedding party. Gabe had Isabelle, Maya, Austin, and Paige.

  Lola, in a hot-pink dress that matched mine, carried the rings.

  “And Lucia gave the bawdiest maid-of-honor speech I’d ever heard,” Gabe laughed.

  “That’s why she’s the best,” I agreed, letting the bubbles slide down my throat. “Also, she was only warming up the crowd for the inevitable perversion of Gloria and Gladys.”

  “What they gave was not a speech,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “That was like… an erotic novella.”

  I spread my hands over my magenta dress, which Lucia and I had found at a thrift store one sunny Sunday morning in West Hollywood. It was the most me dress I’d ever seen, and it only made sense that I’d wear it on the day that I married my soulmate.

  I breathed in the scent of the ocean, the stillness of this flawless morning. Remembered the first morning we’d woken up, in Puerta Pirámides, Argentina. Still half-asleep and disoriented, Gabe and I had walked out onto the beach halfway across the world.

  And I saw a whale for the first time. Whales, actually, an entire migration.

  It was one of the most perfectly beautiful moments of my entire life.

  For a month, we hiked mountains in Patagonia. Took a boat from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica. Drank wine in Bariloche and crossed the border to Chile.

  And, just as Gabe promised, found Iguazu Falls, the largest waterfall in the world and watched as hundreds of brightly colored butterflies floated up and through the delicate spray.

  It was hard. Harder than we’d thought it would be—to live, for a month, away from our families and our communities. Especially for two people that had never really traveled.

  But once we’d pushed past the transition, Gabe and I fell in love with the idea of being nomads. And slowly, over four weeks, as Gabe and I laughed and hiked and fucked our way through Argentina, the solution to our living situation made itself clear.

  When we got back, I moved in with Gabe for six months in Big Sur, taking clients in Monterey and Carmel and serving drinks with Gabe at The Bar at night. We hiked every inch of the forest, and I grew into the quiet peace of Big Sur. Started to crave the wilderness.

  And then, at the end, Gabe ceded control of The Bar to a rotating blend of family members and friends, and he moved into my tiny house in East Los Angeles for six months. He escorted me to award ceremonies at night and diners at dawn and worked as a bartender at an assortment of trendy, L.A. spots, slowly growing into the frenetic energy of the city.

  We weren’t different in each location, but we were expansive. Allowing our lives to take on the shape of our surroundings.

  We’d been back in Big Sur for six months now, culminating in our sweet, glorious wedding, and it was almost time to head back to the city. A bittersweet feeling we were both learning to adjust to. We didn’t know how long we’d do the split, and maybe we’d even do it forever, but what we did know was that it worked for us.

  And that was all that mattered.

  But first: the honeymoon.

  “Gorgeous,” Gabe said, pulling me onto his lap. “You’ve been staring at that ocean and not celebrating with me for whole minutes now.” He kissed up my neck and nuzzled under my ear. My hands tightened around his tie, tugging slightly. “What are you thinking about?”

  I swung my legs around his lap, arching an eyebrow when it was obvious he was rock hard against his suit pants.

  “I think the question is, dear husband, what have you been thinking about?”

  With deft fingers, I freed his cock, sighing as I dragged my fingers up and down the length of him. Gabe groaned huskily, big palms cupping my breasts through the fabric of my wedding dress.

  “Honeymoon sex,” he whispered against my ear.

  I shivered. We were due on a plane in just a few hours, heading to Montana. The plan was two weeks in Glacier National Park because Gabe wanted fresh mountain air and crystal lakes. Then, two weeks in Paris because I wanted late-night dinners and famous art in a cultural mecca.

  Compromise. Gabe and I had turned it into a fucking art form.

  “What did you have in mind?” I teased my bearded Viking, sliding my panties to the side and lowering myself onto his hard cock. We rocked together, kissing and laughing as the sun rose, bathing us in light.

  “How much rope are you going to pack?” Gabe growled. He was dragging his thumbs over my nipples, and I was grinding my clit against him, and my orgasm was building just over the horizon.

  “So much, Gabriel,” I sighed, throwing my head back. His hands landed on my hips, and he lifted me, our rhythm blending together. “And don’t worry. I’ll have you on your knees and begging in no time.”

  “God, yes, Josie. Please,” he said, pulling me down for a feverish kiss.

  The kiss of two newlyweds, married for just eight hours. On the precipice of adventure—not a new life because we’d already created a beautiful one but a joyous continuation.

  I wrapped my arms around my husband and fucked the two of us into spine-tingling orgasms. Gabe squeezed me tight as he shuddered against me, whispering my name over and over. I laid my head against his chest, directly over his heart, and memorized the sound.

  “Just so you know, our newlywed sex is going to end up all over the Big Sur Channel.”

  I laughed softly. “They’ll be talking about it for weeks.”

  “Maybe even years.”

  We were quiet for a moment, and I let all the memories of the wedding flood in.

  “Tell me again what you said. During your speech,” I said, looking up into his dark eyes.

  He grinned, rubbing a hand down his jaw. “I never want to stop discovering new things with you. Never want to be content to do what’s easy when we could be doing something that’s thrilling. That I no longer view our life together as linear, a straight line down the same road. But rather a map of continents and stars, glorious and winding, ours to explore without limits. That you—” Gabe cleared his throat, and when his eyes filled with tears, I thought my heart was going to fly from my body. “You are my true soulmate, Josie. In all of this. Forever.”

  I kissed him for a long time after that.

  When I finally pulled back I could only say, “I love you,” over and over again.

  Because Gabe had been right. Love could be reckless and passionate and intense and good all at the same time.

  My inner compass hadn’t been broken but merely searching for its true north.

  Gabriel.

  My Viking.

  My home.

  Untitled

  Dear Readers: I hope you enjoyed Gabe and Josie! Are you curious about their wedding day? Click here to receive a special bonus epilogue!

  * * *

  If you’re wondering what happened between Calvin and Lucia, have no fear. They have their own book, called BOHEMIAN. Turn the page to read the first chapter!

  Sneak Peek: Bohemian by Kathryn Nolan

  Calvin

  “Allen Ginsberg once tried to levitate my grandfather,” I told the mourners, clearing my throat through the nervousness.

  “He didn’t succeed—obviously,” I said, and I saw a few smiles. “—but the evidence is captured in this grainy, black-and-white photograph that’s framed on a wall in the bookstore. In it, Ginsberg is laughing. Probably stoned.”

  My parents frowned, but I went on. “Next to him, my grandfather was a veritable lion: tall and broad-shouldered, his smile bright like the stars against a Big Sur sky.”

  I tugged on my tie, itchy in my suit. My grandfather hated suits.

  “Joy. My grandfather lived his life for joy. From the second grade until I was in high school, I spent my summers in Big Sur, at the bookstore with him. And those memories are filled with these… with these shocks of happiness,” I said, wondering how I was p
ossibly going to get through this eulogy without crying.

  My grandfather cried often—encouraged it, even—but I was already nervous as fuck. Hated speaking in front of people, hated being the center of attention—I was content as a wallflower.

  But this was for him.

  “Once we spent an entire night on his deck reading Shel Silverstein. Later, as I grew older, we delved into Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Adrienne Rich—and always, always, Jack Kerouac, whose words my grandfather held close to his heart. But, when I was a nine-year-old, he hid the Neruda and pulled out something more age-appropriate.” I grinned, and a few of the mourners chuckled softly.

  “‘Close your eyes,’ he’d said. ‘Let the words paint you a picture in your mind.’ He always said that, encouraging me to drink in the images an author was trying to convey. I remembered this one part from Where the Sidewalk Ends, about a ‘moon bird’ and ‘peppermint wind.’”

  I let the words linger for a second—recalling, as a kid, how much I’d loved the idea of a peppermint wind.

  “He’d ask me questions. ‘What do you think a moon-bird looks like?’ ‘What makes the wind peppermint?’ We’d spend hours like that until I was exhausted and falling asleep against his shoulder, the poem or book forgotten. We’d pull cots out onto the deck, mugs of hot chocolate at our feet, books everywhere. And in the morning, I’d wake up under the canopy of the redwood trees.”

  I paused to collect myself. “Filled with that… that feeling you have as a kid in the summertime. Unfettered freedom,” I said, knowing my grandfather would have appreciated the alliteration.

  “Like all of us,” I continued. “My life is no longer filled with too many books. Instead, it’s full of too many meetings.” I watched as the audience nodded their heads in agreement.