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“Who said I’m letting you? Security! This guy is stealing my bag!” She raised her voice slightly, and I twisted to look around in a panic before turning back to her.
“Hah. You’re hilarious, Girl Scout.”
“I try to be.” She shrugged. “C’mon, let’s find somewhere more private, and I’ll fill you in on the shit show that is my career at the moment.”
“I don’t love the sounds of that. Who do I have to fire?”
She glanced at me, her eyes glittering with love. “It’s fine. I’ll figure something out.” Her eyes drifted away from me, lifting to the departure screens. At some point during this conversation, they’d announced our flight was boarding, and it was time to go.
“No more delays. Going to Chicago means meeting my family. Are you up for that?”
I cracked a huge grin. “I promised you I’d follow you anywhere, and I will. Though, I have to warn you. My PA recently told me I don’t vibe well with older women, so I might need your help making a good impression with your mom.”
“Oh, my mom adores you. It’s my dad and brother you’ll have to worry about.”
Meet the Parents and enjoy Christmas Morning with the new couple here.
Kylie Marcus Books and Bio
Kylie Marcus still believes in magic, instalove and happily ever afters. While cultivating the magic inside of her, she uses her words to bring love to life on the pages of her stories in hopes of convincing her readers of instalove and HEA too.
Check out all of my books here!
Ryder and Charity
VIOLET RAE
Copyright © 2022 by Violet Rae
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
One
RYDER
What could be worse than Christmas?Having to work on a damn Christmas movie a week before the “big day.”
The only consolation is that Charity is also working on this movie. Unlike me, all this festive shit lights her up brighter than a fiber-optic Christmas tree. Luke, her brother, was the same. I push down the pang of grief that thinking about him always brings.
Luke and I met when we were eighteen, and his parents more or less adopted me. My father ran off when I was a kid, leaving my mother to raise me alone. She later remarried and moved to Washington with her new husband, but I stayed in Virginia. I was always included in the Pine family festivities at Christmas—the holiday season was a big deal in their household.
Luke and I enlisted together. The Navy gave us our basic training, but the SEALs made men of us. I came home from a mission five years ago . . . but Luke didn’t.
Charity was only eight when I first met Luke—a skinny kid with a freckled nose and pigtails. She was seventeen when Lukedied. I’ll never forget the devastation on her face when I came home, and Luke didn’t. She threw herself into my arms like I was her only lifeline, sobbing her loss into my shoulder. Charity and her parents didn’t blame me for what happened to Luke—I blamed myself enough for everyone. Hard not to when Luke took the bullet meant for me. Passed straight through him and into me. I survived, and he didn’t.
Despite years of therapy, the memory is burned into my psyche, along with the promise I made to Luke as he died in my arms. I vowed to protect his baby sister for the rest of my life. I owed him that much.
His death cut deep. Drowning in guilt, I made some shitty choices, not least of which was asking the wrong woman to marry me. It’s taken years to accept that loneliness was a driving force behind many of my decisions and weaknesses.
I was a Navy SEAL. Deployed most of the year, risking my life while she was seeing someone behind my back. Nothing like finding your fiancée in bed with another man—on Christmas Eve, no less—to drive a cold and thorny spike into your heart and take the jingle out of your bells.Since that fateful Christmas Eve, I haven’t been with a woman.
So, yeah, me and Christmas? Not a good combination.
CHARITY
What could be better than Christmas?
