UNDER THE ROSE
To infiltrate a secret society, private detective Freya Evandale and FBI agent Sam Byrne must go undercover as a pair of thieves in a dangerous world of shifting alliances. But can these lifelong rivals close the case…without falling in love?
IN THE CLEAR
While chasing a famous book thief in London, two private detectives work together while dodging danger at every turn. But can aloof, serious Abe and charming, mysterious Sloane resist their instant attraction to one another? Or will passionate temptation risk this case – and their careers?
WILD OPEN HEARTS
Luna’s cheerful, hippie reputation is ruined when her billion-dollar company is caught in a scandal. And only a burly, dog-rescuing biker can help her. As these opposites give in to their electrifying attraction – will their differences keep them apart? Or will they learn to trust their wild hearts?
Otterly Irresistible
Erin Nicholas
Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild Book One: a grumpy boss, small-town rom com
What happens when a smoking hot, but grouchy vet meets a sunny and sassy optimist? An opposites attract, grumpy boss, small town romance that's otterly irresistible.
Broody wildlife veterinarian Griffin Foster is done. Done trying to save the world. Done getting attached. He's been fired twice for standing his ground and now he's going to be content--by God--in small-town Louisiana, in a small veterinary practice, where there will only be small problems.
Quiet and boring, though? Um, no. He's been adopted by a loud, crazy Cajun family with a tiny petting zoo for him to care for. Hey, it's not endangered tigers at a nationally renowned zoo, but a family of otters--and all the gumbo he can eat--isn't a bad deal.
Until she shows up. Again.
The sunny, gorgeous optimist who stole his heart--and his favorite shirt--two months ago. Who clearly hasn't heard the word "no" enough in her life. And who is the first woman to put even a tiny crack in his don't-get-attached wall.
Charlotte "Charlie" Landry is the new marketing consultant for the family swamp-boat tour company and petting zoo. It might not have been her plan, but she is all in, ready to grow the business. Whether the hot, grumpy vet likes it or not.
He doesn't.
Worse, sparring with his unforgettable one-night stand is more fun than he's had in a long time.
But watching wears-designer-dresses Charlie find her dream job amongst a bunch of goats, alpacas, and otters is a surprise.
And her helping him find his passion again is...well, irresistible.
Chapter 1
“Sugar, I adore you too. But you can’t follow me everywhere. It’s inappropriate for you to be here right now.”
Charlotte Landry paused and tipped her head at the sound of the deep male voice coming from the west side of her grandmother’s bar.
The guy didn’t have a Louisiana accent. If he had, it would have been obvious on the Sugar. That was one of the best-drawled words down here—especially when combined with a playful smile.
There was no reply from “Sugar,” but this sounded juicy. Why was it inappropriate for her—or Charlie supposed Sugar could be a guy—to be here? Was she—or he—an ex? Was Sugar a secret fling, and no one could see them together?
Charlie knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but it wasn’t as if she’d snuck up on this conversation. She’d been across the street at her grandmother’s house, using the bathroom since the bar bathroom had a line seven deep, and was on her way back to the party.
She reached up and felt the fake eyelash she’d needed to reattach to her right eyelid. She really hated the things. She had yet to master their application. However, they did make her eyes look incredible. A girl had to do what a girl had to do sometimes.
She pressed her lips together. She’d also reapplied the lipstick, even though she knew the tube she was using cost more than the dress her grandmother had bought for the weddings. Charlie wasn’t trying to show off. She was a walking, talking billboard for the makeup and lashes she was wearing tonight. Working in marketing for a makeup company required her to wear the products—even to a casual wedding reception at her grandmother’s bar in a tiny bayou town in Louisiana.
Okay, she wouldn’t have had to wear them here. She just sometimes forgot how laid back and casual things really were in Autre, Lousiana. Even weddings.
“We simply can’t be together every minute of every day. We’ve talked about this.” The man’s deep voice was low and calming even as he delivered the news that Sugar wasn’t welcome here.
Charlie felt her eyebrows lift. Ooh, Sugar was a little needy it seemed. She—or he—felt they needed to be together constantly? Charlie took a few steps closer to the corner of the building. She probably shouldn’t listen in, but as much fun as the wedding reception was inside, the moonshine, wedding cake, music, and Cajun tall-tales weren’t going anywhere. There was always more food, booze, and bullshit with that group inside. She could spare a few minutes.
“You also can’t bring your friends with you when you’re stalking me,” the man said.
Charlie looked around. Had his stalker brought an entourage? Was it for a flash mob? Or for a kidnapping? Really, neither would’ve surprised her here in Autre. Which was one of the things she loved about this town. The definition of crazy was different here than anywhere else she’d ever been. And not exactly frowned upon.
She also wasn’t afraid to admit she was willing to stick around for a flash mob. Or a kidnapping. She would, of course, call for other people to come out if it turned out to be a kidnapping. Okay, or a flash mob. So it wasn’t as if the guy was actually going to end up stuffed in a trunk of a car. She was just waiting to see which of those scenarios she was dealing with.
“Don’t you think it’s time to go home?” the guy said to his stalker. “Come on. I’ll take you.”
Oh, good, he was a nice guy. Even if Sugar was harassing him, he was still willing to be sure she—or he—got home safely.
Dammit, did this mean Charlie needed to follow them? In case the kidnapping happened away from the bar? Or what if Sugar had a hatchet and duct tape waiting for the guy back at her place?
Or, maybe worse, what if Sugar waited to sing and dance for him in her living room? Charlie would miss the whole performance.
Now she was invested. She was going to have to follow them. Crap. She really wasn’t dressed for traipsing around in the dark. Or the light. Her Valentino Garavani Rockstud ankle-strap pumps were perfection. And not at all comfortable for any kind of distance walking.
But she really didn’t want to miss the flash mob.
Surely it was going to be a flash mob, right?
Or a striptease. At least.
Charlie decided if she were going to do a flash mob for a guy she stalked to a wedding, she’d choose Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”. Obviously.
She was in town for her cousins’ weddings. Yes, plural. Three of her cousins had gotten married today, and she was now attending the reception held at her grandmother’s bar. Considering the guy was confronting Sugar just outside the back door of the bar, Charlie assumed he was a wedding guest as well.
The Landry family never did anything small, and that, apparently, included weddings. Of course, growing up in Shreveport, Charlie sometimes forgot the easy-going, laid-back ways of the bayou, and now that she had been working in Atlanta, that was even truer. Hence why she’d worn a pale pink strapless cocktail dress that hugged her breasts and waist and had an uneven hemline that nearly touched the ground in back to a wedding where the grooms wore blue jeans, and some of the guests were alligators. Literally. For one of the couples’ vows, they’d taken a pontoon out into the bayou to a little cove, and there had been alligators floating in the water listening in.
She also had on Valentino heels, fake eyelashes, fake nails, and hair extensions.
Yeah, she might have overdone it.
And yes, some of her cousins had already given her shit about the fake fingernails.<
br />
But she did love this dress, these heels were her favorite thing in her closet right now, and her highlights had turned out amazing.
Still, as much fun as the food, dancing, laughing, and one-upmanship was inside, she wasn’t above enjoying a little romantic drama outside on her way back from the bathroom.
“Come on, Sugar,” the man said. “Let’s get you home.”
Charlie literally had her fingers crossed for the first strains of Taylor Swift when she heard the stalker reply for the first time.
“Behhhh!”
Charlie jumped, then frowned. Okay, she hadn’t been expecting that.
She peered around the corner of the building. There was a man sitting on the back step of her grandmother’s bar.
And he was surrounded by goats.
He was holding one goat’s face in his hands and was talking to it directly. The other goats seemed content to munch on the grass and weeds that grew along the edge of the gravel drive that led to the back of the bar. But this goat was, as far as Charlie could tell from six feet away in the dimming light of the evening, gazing at the man adoringly. There were also two ducks and a potbellied pig. Most of them seemed unconcerned with what was going on, except for the one duck who was standing like a bodyguard next to the goat having the intense conversation with the man.
Surprisingly, none of that was the most startling thing about the scene in front of her.
No, that was the fact that the man on the step was the extremely good-looking man who Charlie had previously asked to dance at the wedding reception. And who had turned her down.
It wasn’t just that he’d turned her down, though without getting too full of herself, Charlie could admit she wasn’t all that used to men telling her no. It was also that she knew they had chemistry. She’d caught him watching her across the bar earlier in the evening, and when she had slid in next to him to order another drink, he hadn’t given her much space. Nor had he seemed annoyed with her taking up any of his space.
Still, he’d turned her down when she asked him to dance. Without an explanation. He hadn’t claimed a sprained ankle or being a terrible dancer or having a girlfriend. He didn’t have a ring on his left hand.
So yes, even before she saw him sitting on the back step with a goat—correction, nine goats, two ducks, and a potbellied pig—she had been wondering what the hell his deal was.
It was probably the not-being-used-to-being-told-no thing, but something made her walk around the corner of the building and say, “So, does she think that’s a carrot in your pocket? Because it sounds like you’re not that happy to see her.”
The man’s head came up quickly and, if she wasn’t mistaken, he gave a little sigh when he saw who she was.
But surely, she was mistaken. People didn’t often tell her no, and they very rarely sighed when they saw her. Or if they did, it was certainly in relief. Charlie was a very well-liked person. She was an optimist, she was a hard worker, and she always tried to make the best of every situation. She was a damned delight. And if this guy had taken ten minutes to dance with her, he would have known that.
“I can’t believe I lost out to a goat,” she said.
The man continued to pet the goat’s head as Charlie approached.
“I mean, I assume that’s why you turned down my offer for a dance.” Charlie stopped in front of him. “Because for the life of me, I can’t think of any other reason.”
“Not wanting to dance with you couldn’t possibly have been the reason?” His voice was a low rumble, and his tone was dry.
Charlie lifted a shoulder. “Nope.” Charlie scanned the menagerie around him. “This is your fan club, huh? I might actually be hoping for Taylor Swift even more now.”
The guy was looking at her as if she was the weird one. But he was the one with the goat standing between his knees looking at him as if he was a salt lick, and it was majorly sodium deficient. And despite his Old McDonald role-playing, Charlie had to admit she and the goat might have something in common.
She looked at him for a long moment, then asked, “You’re not going to ask me about the Taylor Swift comment?”
“I’ve found that when you ask people questions, it keeps conversations going.”
Ah, he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Got it.
Charlie smiled what she knew had to look like a sly grin. There was nothing more fun than drawing someone into a reluctant conversation and charming them with her wit and charisma.
This guy was pushing a lot of her buttons. He was good-looking, he was clearly a friend of her family’s since he was at these weddings, and, most of all, he was trying to resist her.
She didn’t flirt her way through life, exactly, but she’d rarely met another human she couldn’t win over if she wanted to.
“Well, I overheard you telling your friend that it was inappropriate for her to be here and that she couldn’t stalk you with her friends, and I have to admit I was hoping for a flash mob to break out.”
“And you thought Taylor Swift would be a part of that?”
Charlie grinned. Score one for her. He’d just responded to her despite clearly not wanting to. Even better, he was talking to her about Taylor Swift. She had no idea how she knew, but she was certain that this man did not say the name “Taylor Swift” on any kind of a regular basis.
“I was just going through the songs that I would use if I were arranging a flash mob for the guy I was stalking.”
“You’re stalking a guy?”
He was still talking to her. Charlie’s smile grew wider. “I was thinking about stalking the guy who turned me down for a dance at a recent wedding reception, but it seems like I’ll have to get in line.”
The man stretched to his feet. The goat backed up, but only a couple of steps. The duck did as well to avoid being stepped on. The potbellied pig lifted her head to see what was happening. Everyone else continued grazing.
Well, not everyone else. Charlie took the opportunity to sweep her gaze over the man from head to toe. Twice.
He was tall, at least six foot three inches. He had dark hair, but she hadn’t been close enough in good lighting to decide if it was dark brown or black. It was a little shaggy, curling sexily against the collar of his shirt. He had at least a day or two’s worth of stubble on his jaw, his skin an I-work-outside-in-the-sun-a-lot tan. All she could tell from earlier in the bar was that his eyes were dark. She would very much like to be close enough to tell what exact color they were. He’d smelled really good in the bar.
He was dressed, as all the men at the wedding reception were, in dark jeans and a button-down dress shirt. His shirt was now untucked, the top two buttons unbuttoned, and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
He started walking away from the bar toward the dirt road that ran in front of her grandmother’s establishment, without another word.
Charlie watched him go for a few steps, the adoring goat trotting beside him and one of the ducks waddling along behind them. The rest of the animals seemed oblivious to being left behind.
He turned and looked back at the animals. “Come on, everybody.”
A couple of the goats lifted their heads, and the potbellied pig glanced over, but no one seemed inclined to move. Charlie crossed her arms, fighting a grin.
He sighed and started back.
“Seriously, it’s time to go home.” He got behind a couple of the goats and nudged one of them with his knee. The goat bleated at him and gave him what Charlie could only describe as a glare.
“Let’s go, Dopey.” The man nudged the goat with his knee again.
“Is insulting them the best way to get them to do what you want?”
He gave Charlie an irritated look. “Dopey is his name.”
“You named him Dopey?”
“I didn’t name him anything. I didn’t name any of them anything.”
“So they’re not your goats?”
“They are most definitely not my goats.”
Charlie was defini
tely fighting laughter now. “So she fell in love with you, and she’s not even yours? You don’t feed her or anything?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
Charlie snorted. “I’m feeling a little better about us not dancing together.”
“Worried about my animal magnetism?”
Actually, she was starting to worry about his charm. It was there, even if it took a little bit of digging to get to it, and it was surprisingly potent. “I’m not sure that I want to be in the same fan club as Lulubelle here.” She gave the goat a mock appraising look. “I would never wear that collar with her hair color.” The goat had a pretty green collar on that looked completely fine with her mostly brown coat.
Now the guy stopped and turned to face Charlie fully. His gaze tracked over her from her hair to the toes of her Valentinos and back again. “Yeah, you seem pretty… put together.”
He bent and put both hands on Dopey’s rump and pushed, leaving Charlie to wonder if being “put together” was a compliment from this guy or not.
She was going to go with not.
“By the way, her name is Sugar,” he said.
Charlie laughed. “So that was not just a term of endearment?”
“It most definitely wasn’t.”
“But how can you resist someone who obviously loves you so much that she would follow you all the way down here to this wedding?” Charlie looked around. “Come to think of it, where did she come from, Mac?”
He frowned. “Mac?”
“As in Old McDonald had a farm?”
“Cute.” His tone made it clear he didn’t find it cute at all.
“Right, they’re not your goats,” Charlie said.
He was still talking to her. Kind of. She couldn’t explain why, but she really liked that. She often wanted to keep people talking. Talking was one of her favorite things to do. She was very good at it even when the people she talked to didn’t think they wanted to talk or listen to her. In fact, that was when she did some of her best work. Marketing and PR had been an obvious choice when it had come to deciding her college major. Her father had laughed, shaken his head, and said simply, “The world isn’t going to know what hit it.”
Fall in Love Book Bundle: Small Town Romance Box Set Page 224
