Book Description | Book Excerpt

Publisher: KC Press
Release Date: March 22, 2017
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: Assignment: Caribbean Nights, book 7

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Description

Navy SEAL Jaxon Hyland can fix anything—except the inconvenient attraction he’s always had for his gorgeous best friend. It was easy to maintain a hands-off policy when he was deployed half a world away but when Thora pops up on Duchess Island, the Caribbean paradise Jack calls home, everything changes. Emotionally bruised by a bad breakup, Thora needs Jack now more than ever. Jack has never been able to tell her no, not even when she asks him to marry her. It’s supposed to be temporary. 100% fake. Platonic. But how long can that really last when she’s the only woman he’s ever wanted?

Excerpt

Marry me. The words pinged around in Jack’s brain as if Thora had spoken a foreign language he had no clue of understanding. Klingon he might have worked out after deploying with a Star Trek nerd who used downtime as an excuse to bore the platoon with a rundown of every episode of The Next Generation.

But the phrase was English. And Thora was dead serious.

“You want me to do what?” he croaked.

More beer needed, stat. He drained his glass and used the empty plastic in his hand as a much needed eye-contact break. Scouting around for the trash can, he spied the one closest to the dock about a hundred yards away.

But he wasn’t quick enough. Thora speared him with her melty brown eyes and repeated the phrase.

“Marry me. Not for real, of course. Fake. One hundred percent fake. I mean, except for the part where we really have to get married, with a marriage license and a minister. It has to be legal. Oh, and I guess we have to live together. Your friends can’t know it’s fake—”

“Whoa.” His hands flew up almost automatically as if he could block the flow of crazy with nothing more than an empty Solo cup and his palm. “Stop talking. We can’t get married.”

A small line appeared between Thora’s eyebrows. “Why not? It’s perfect.”

“Because it’s…” Crazy. Ridiculous. Permanent. Way too intimate.

A dozen scenes inspired by the term marriage—or more precisely honeymoon—slammed through his mind, and he couldn’t spool them all back fast enough. Thora wearing a few sheer bits of lace, Thora in a steamy, sudsy bath with room for two, Thora on her knees…

Holy crap. He had not just gone there. Rapidly, he blinked, but the image stayed put, advancing a few frames until he was so hard he couldn’t breathe.

“Jack, I need you.” Clearly she had no concept of exactly what was going through his head at that moment or she’d never have leaned into the space between them and put her hands flat on his chest. “Did you not hear what I said? This is the pinnacle of what I’ve been working for since college. It’s my own talk show. They’ve already tapped Angela Reynolds. I have a shot at a TV show with Angela Reynolds. This might never happen again in my lifetime.”

“But… but.” He swallowed. “We can’t fake being married. We’ve never even kissed each other.”

“So kiss me.” She shook her head with a scowl. “That’s not a big deal.”

God, he was the one who needed to stop talking. He couldn’t kiss Thora like it wasn’t something he’d fantasized about for fifteen years. They never talked about stuff like this. For a reason. “It is a big deal. We… we’re not like that. We’ve never been like that.”

Because he’d kept his hands off her, like a good boy. Before he ruined everything they had, his safety net, his very definition of home. Of course, to ensure he wouldn’t put his hands on her, he’d fled to the Navy to go through the most brutal military training known to man in order to wipe his brain of her laugh and her hair. Then when becoming a SEAL hadn’t worked to stop his unholy attraction to her, he’d deployed to the other side of the world.

Yet here he was, in her orbit once again. Still not able to breach that wall between friendship and all his dirty fantasies

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