* * *
“Holy hell, that girl can bake.”
Jax bit into his second muffin and chewed slowly. He hadn’t realized how hungry he’d been until he’d taken that first bite, and then he’d promptly inhaled the first muffin. This one he intended to savor. He let the warm richness of the bread rest on his tongue for a moment before he swallowed and took a swig of his steaming coffee.
It was amazing how much better he felt with food in his stomach, or maybe he just felt better because he’d seen Grace. He always felt better when he saw Grace. She made everything so much brighter, so much more. Like swallowing a warm liquid that settled in his stomach before it shot out to this fingers and toes and made him feel like he could take on anything.
The power of caffeine had nothing on Grace King.
She was loud and vibrant, and it was almost impossible to escape her enthusiasm. She’d always had the ability to draw whoever was around into her atmosphere and keep them there. She’d drawn Jax in when she was a baby, and he’d been hooked ever since.
Though how he was hooked had changed in recent years. It hadn’t been a slow gradual change, either. It had been about as subtle as Grace. Jax remembered the day vividly. She’d been eighteen years old; he’d been twenty-three.
He’d stopped by the Kings’ house for dinner one night and Grace was out in the yard, washing her vintage yellow Bug. She had the radio blasting music so she hadn’t heard him pull up on the street. She was wearing short cutoff blue jeans and a bright blue bikini top, the strings tied around the middle of her back and around her neck. Her light blond hair had been up in a ponytail, but a few strands had escaped and were sticking to the side of her neck. It was then, as Jax studied the slope of her neck, that he felt it. He’d wanted to come up behind her and put his mouth to that neck, taste her warm skin against his tongue.
He remembered stopping so suddenly at the thought that he’d almost tripped and landed on his face.
Grace was Brendan’s little sister. Jax had watched her grow up, been there when they’d brought her home from the hospital, heard her first laugh as a baby, watched as she’d taken her first steps, sang happy birthday to her as she blew out candles on every single birthday. This was Grace, the girl he’d always thought of as his little sister. But damn if every single one of those brotherly feelings was gone.
Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
And then he’d watched, paralyzed from the revelation, as she turned to dunk the sponge in her hand in a bucket of soapy water, and he got a glimpse of her side.
“What the hell is that?”
Somehow he’d found his tongue and his voice had carried over the beat of the music.
Grace looked up and turned to him, her usual grin spreading across her face. But he’d only had a moment to register her smile because his eyes darted back down to her side where a blue swallow about the size of his hand was tattooed on her upper ribs. It was diving down; one of its wings spanned her side, the other wrapped around to cup under her right breast.
Jax had never thought much of Grace’s breasts. They were small, not even a handful. But now? Now he wanted to know what those felt like, too. His fingers were itching to untie those straps.
What the hell was wrong with him?
“Why, Jaxson Anderson,” Grace drawled, “are you staring at my chest?”
Jax looked up, and he could feel the flush coming to his cheeks. But he was determined to play this off, because he would go to the grave before he admitted to wanting one of his best friends’ baby sister.
“No, I’m looking at that tattoo on your side,” he said, letting his anger boil over into his voice. “What the hell did you do? Does Brendan know about this?” he almost screamed at her.
Why the hell was he so pissed off?
Because that tattoo was sexy as hell and he didn’t want anyone looking at it. Or God, touching it. Touching her.
Her smile disappeared in an instant and her blue eyes turned icy. “He was there when I got it a month ago,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him.
“He let you?” Jax asked, incredulous.
“Brendan doesn’t let me do anything,” Grace said, crossing her arms under her chest. It made her small breasts more prominent.
How had he not noticed how amazing they were before that moment?
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a child anymore, Jax.”
And that had been precisely the problem, because he had finally noticed. And it had tortured him every single day for the last six years.
Jax sighed before he took another bite of his muffin, because boy did Grace ever like to torture him.
Grace’s friendliness tended to come off as flirting, and nothing got under Jax’s skin more than when he saw Grace flirting with some little schmuck. He’d had to watch as guy after guy paraded through her life. Okay, so there hadn’t been that many guys who’d gotten past the flirting stage. But none of them had been good enough for her, not a single one.
Jax wasn’t good enough, either, so he’d resigned himself to doing what he was good enough for, watching out for her. And man was watching hard.
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Things Paige Morrison will never understand about Mirabelle, Florida:
Why wearing red shoes makes a girl a harlot
Why a shop would ever sell something called “buck urine”
Why everywhere she goes, she runs into sexy—and infuriating—Brendan King
After losing her job, her apartment, and her boyfriend, Paige has no choice but to leave Philadelphia and move in with her retired parents. For an artsy outsider like Paige, finding her place in the tightly knit town isn’t easy—until she meets Brendan, the hot mechanic who’s interested in much more than Paige’s car. In no time at all, Brendan helps Paige find a new job, new friends, and a happiness she wasn’t sure she’d ever feel again. With Brendan by her side, Paige finally feels like she can call Mirabelle home. But when a new bombshell drops, will the couple survive, or will their love come undone?
THEIR LOVE WAS UNDENIABLE
Grace King knows two things for certain: she loves working at her grandmother’s café, and she loves the hunky town sheriff. She always has. As she bakes him sweet treats, Grace fantasizes about helping him work up an appetite all night long. But whenever she thinks she’s finally getting somewhere, he whips out some excuse to escape. Growing up, he never looked twice at her. Now Grace won’t rest until she has Jax’s undivided attention.
Jaxson Anderson can’t deny that his best friend’s kid sister is the sexiest woman in Mirabelle, Florida. Unwilling to burden Grace with his painful past, Jax keeps the sassy blonde at arm’s length. Yet one heated kiss crumbles all of his carefully built defenses. But when a town secret surfaces, threatening to destroy everything they have believed in, can the man who defended Grace from bullies as a child protect her now?
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Since his father was put in prison for murder, leaving his mother suicidal, Maddox Cross has always put his sister, Laney, first. Now living in Brenton, Virginia, Maddox has no idea what to do with his life, especially since Laney no longer needs him. One thing he does know is for the first time since losing football, he’s found something else that’s just for him—tattooing. When he meets a feisty young woman in the club where he works security, he has no idea that she has the ability to change his life forever.
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Calm in the Storm
Chapter One: The Scruffy Man and the Curly-Haired Girl
Chapter Two: Just Friends
Chapter Three: A Date? Or Not a Date? That Is the Question
Chapter Four: The Terrifying Reality of Teddy Bears
Chapter Five: The Healing Powers of Friends…and Wine, Lots of Wine
Chapter Six: Up to Bat
Chapter Seven: An Infuriating Man and an Infuriated Woman
Chapter Eight: No More Playing Games
Chapter Nine: The Many Talents of Bennett Hart
Chapter Ten: Brave and Beautiful
Chapter Eleven: Fall Into Me
Chapter Twelve: The Perils of Wild Sex
Chapter Thirteen: Dinner with the Family
Chapter Fourteen: Baseball Lessons
Chapter Fifteen: Way More Complicated Than a Teddy Bear
Chapter Sixteen: Distance
Chapter Seventeen: Pillow Talk
Chapter Eighteen: Bleeding Out
Chapter Nineteen: Can’t Stop
Chapter Twenty: Something I Need
Epilogue: If We Only Live Once, I Want to Live with You
About the Author
Also by Shannon Richard
An Excerpt of Undone
An Except of Undeniable
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Shannon Richard
Excerpt from Undone copyright © 2013 by Shannon Richard
Excerpt from Undeniable copyright © 2013 by Shannon Richard
Cover design by Oceana Gottlieb
Cover photo ©Cultura Matelly/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-4473-8 (ebook edition)
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Unstoppable (A Country Roads Novel) Page 34
