Read Mixed up in March (Spring River Valley Book 3) Online
Authors: Clarice Wynter
“Don’t give up on us, baby,” Jared echoed the words of the song when the refrain ended. “Let me tell you why I’m the man for you.”
Emmy stifled a sound that was half laugh, half sob as Jared appeared in a series of comically sweet, silly scenes, offering her flowers, opening car doors, lighting candles at a romantic table set for two, holding a toy cat that looked like Pauly, and finally, pulling his
pick-up
into her driveway. She squinted at the screen. He had to have set a video camera up on her porch to get the shot.
On the screen, he got out of his car with a white rose in hand and faced the camera. “Come outside and ride off into the sunset with me. Your satisfaction is guaranteed.”
She ran for the front door and flung it open to find her driveway empty.
Disappointment swept through her and would have claimed her completely except Jared’s
truck
turned on to the block just then, and in less than a minute he was recreating the scene from the video.
She flew down the front steps to meet him. “Almost perfect timing,” she said.
He handed her the rose. “I dropped off the disc, and I had to jog around the block to get my
truck
so you wouldn’t see it. It took a little longer than when I rehearsed it.”
Emmy laughed and sniffed the rose. “Ride off into the sunset with you?”
“Your satisfaction guaranteed, just like the ad said.”
“But it’s barely one o’clock now.”
Jared scooped her up in his arms and kissed her. “So it’ll be a very long ride.”
* * * *
They never made it into the car, and by sunset, they were tangled up in Emerson’s sheets listening to soft music from her iPod and watching the shadows grow long around her bedroom. She let her fingers dance over Jared’s naked chest and kissed his jaw. “This still isn’t going to be easy, you know, working together.”
“I have it all worked out. We’ll take very long ‘working lunches,’ and we’ll meet in the supply closet every afternoon at three for a quickie.”
She smacked his shoulder. “Seriously. People are going to make remarks. Are you ready to deal with that?”
Jared shifted her in his arms and rose on one elbow to look down at her. “If you can deal with it, I can. The way I see it, what goes on here under the sheets is no one’s business but yours and mine. If someone has anything to say about it, then let’s make a rule that we’ll tell them to let it fly, say whatever they want. Our work will speak for itself.”
Emerson liked the idea, but what sounded good in theory might be a little more difficult in practice. She focused her sleepy gaze on his mouth, not quite ready to look into his eyes for her next question. “And what if they want to know if we’re a couple…officially?”
“Are we?”
She hadn’t expected him to turn the question back on her. “I don’t know. Are we?”
“My ad campaign was designed to do more than just get you into bed. In fact, that was a very pleasant, unanticipated side effect. Right about now we were supposed to be riding off into the sunset.”
Emmy pushed Jared off of her and sat up. “So what was your campaign designed to do?”
“It was supposed to sell you on the whole ‘you and me as a couple’ concept. You know, take a chance on me, fly me, I’m Jared.” He feigned indignation. “Didn’t you get that?”
She raised a brow. “I thought you were going for the ‘let me drive you around town all night’ angle. I really wasn’t—”
He fell on her and kissed her, growling low in his throat as he did so. “I can see we’re going to have a lot of creative differences on this project, and we’re going to have to work them out right now.”
She stretched beneath him, loving the feel of his body weighing hers down. “So I was supposed to buy into the couple thing because of the video?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm…I think you should have gone more techno pop for that concept. Maybe a dance sequence and a much catchier jingle.”
He dove under the covers and demonstrated a few moves that might have been considered a dance sequence
that
left her squealing in delight. “All right, all right.” She gasped the words out when he resurfaced. “I’ll invest in the couple thing. You and me, officially together. I can work with that.”
Jared wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. “It’s a match made in heaven, don’t you think?”
Emmy settled against him and let her eyes drift closed. “I think it was more of a mix-up made in heaven, but it works for me.”
THE END
And in
April
2013
Lifestyle reporter Evie Prentice decides the wisest move is to protect her heart when, while on assignment, she lands in the arms of sexy self-defense instructor Tanner Croft, a man with a reputation for charming all the ladies in town.
Tanner relishes the challenge of convincing the prickly journalist to take a chance on him, but when a public scandal gives Evie the opportunity to grab a front page headline, the connection they forged is threatened.
Will a question of trust cool their love affair just when things start to heat up in Spring River Valley?
AN AFFIAR IN APRIL
Chapter One
“Would you mind if I put my arms around you?”
The handsome stranger’s question took Evie by surprise. Her pen fell out of her hand and rolled across the scuffed linoleum floor. She looked up from her notes, momentarily tongue-tied. She’d been watching him from the moment he entered the recreation department classroom where this evening’s self-defense class was being held. Secretly she’d hoped the tall, muscular man in the Property of the Spring River Valley Athletic Department T-shirt would turn out to be the class instructor.
“Um…sure,” she replied instinctively before her muddled brain kicked into gear. “I mean no. I wouldn’t mind.”
He bent to retrieve her pen, his long, slender fingers brushing hers as he handed it back to her. “You don’t look old enough to be here.”
She laughed. At twenty-five, it had been a while since anyone had questioned her age. The flattery felt good. “You’re sweet. I am legal, I assure you.”
The mischievous sparkle in his warm brown eyes made her breath hitch. She clutched her pen tightly, afraid of dropping it again. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed watching him move to get it back for her.
“I just meant, this is the
Senior
Self-Defense Class.” He nodded toward the classroom entrance where half a dozen older women, most clearly over sixty-five, were arriving. The ladies each stopped to stare at Tall-Dark-and-Charming and began giggling like teenagers. So much for the dignity of maturity, but Evie certainly couldn’t blame them.
“I’m…covering the class.” She stuck out her hand, sans pen. “Evie Prentice. I write for the Lifestyle section of the
Herald
. I’m doing a piece on health and fitness, so I’m auditing classes at the rec this week.”
His smile widened as he shook her hand, his grip firm and confident. Her heart fluttered. “I’m Tanner Croft. That’s with a C, and I wasn’t being forward before. I just need a volunteer, and I usually ask the first student to arrive.”
Evie’s cheeks heated. She had to get a hold of herself. This was work, no time to fall for a pair of broad shoulders, soulful eyes, and a high voltage smile. “Oh, I…well, since technically I’m just an observer—”
“You’ll do fine.” He slipped her notebook off her lap, set it and her pen on the chair next to her, and tugged her to her feet as the rest of the students took their seats. With a glance at their growing audience, Evie followed him to the center of the room where several thick mats lay on the floor. “Don’t worry. You won’t get hurt. In fact, the object tonight is for
you
to hurt
me
.”
“Oh…” She envisioned taking a bite out of one of his bulging biceps. “Okay.”
He slid one hand along her shoulder and down to her wrist where she was certain he’d be able to feel her racing pulse. Why had no one warned her the instructor was drop dead gorgeous? Maybe that was why the class was so popular. Janet, her editor at the paper, had told her students were repeating the class
two
and
three
times, and there was a waiting list. A class that good certainly deserved a write-up in the paper, Evie had thought. Now she realized, it probably deserved a front-page headline and full-size photo as well.
While her thoughts spun, Tanner greeted the class and introduced himself. He gave a brief overview of the evening’s lesson to his rapt audience and then positioned himself behind Evie for the first demonstration. The nape of her neck tingled when his breath caressed her skin. “Just relax,” he said into her ear. “We’re going to show everyone what to do if someone comes up and grabs you from behind. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
So ready.
She had a number of ideas about what she would do if he grabbed her, and none of them involved flipping him over her shoulder and slamming him into the floor, but that seemed to be the effect he wanted to teach tonight. Her thoughts blurred when his arm snaked around her waist, and a couple of her classmates sighed. She tried to keep her eyes from fluttering closed as the warmth of his skin seeped through her T-shirt. Firm as steel, his chest connected with her back, and she had to force herself not to lean into him and smile. How long had it been since a man had put his arms around her?
“Now, I want you to pivot forward and use your hip to try to knock me off balance.”
The only one off balance at the moment was Evie, but determined not to show it, she grinned and did as he commanded. A second later, she was on the floor looking up at him.
“What happened?”
He held out his hand to her, his sexy whisper morphing into a no-nonsense instructional tone. “We just demonstrated the wrong way to stop a mugger.” Strong arms pulled her up from the mat. “Now, we’re going to demonstrate the right way.”
*
An hour later, Evie knelt over Tanner’s prone body, her knees digging into the soft mat on either side of his hips.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked, worried she’d knocked the wind out of him with the elbow-to-the-solar-plexus move he’d just asked her to demonstrate. Apparently she’d done it perfectly.
“I’m…uf…fine.” Contracting his steel cable abs, he sat up, the move bringing his face to within inches of hers. He rubbed the center of his chest with one hand. “I knew you were a heartbreaker the moment I saw you. I just didn’t think it would be literally.” He winked, and once again, her face flamed.
Her classmates glared at her, and she had the impression they hadn’t really come here tonight to learn now to execute the perfect roundhouse kick, or to watch him flirt with her.
Tanner offered his hand. “Help me up.”
She obeyed, glad for the momentary distraction. Every time they locked eyes, her heart threatened to climb out of her chest. She leaned back to give him some leverage, but rather than regain his feet, he used her precarious balance against her and, in a heartbeat, they’d switched positions.
“You’re the kind of girl who should be swept off her feet,” he said with a jaunty wink. “Now, let’s go over weight and balance and how to use someone’s own strength against them.”
“Can I be next?” someone asked, and Tanner laughed.
“As soon as I’m done with Evie, someone else will get a chance to pin me.”
An appreciative murmur circled the classroom. Her eyes locked on his for a second, and Evie shivered when he leaned close and whispered, “But I’m far from done with Evie at the moment.”
Considering herself the third of two voices, Clarice Wynter is the contemporary romance alter ego of a multi-published paranormal and science fiction romance author. She lives in the Tri-State area with her husband and her children and a trio of cats.
To learn more about
Clarice and her books visit her website and blog
:
Look for the rest of the Spring River Valley Series-
to be released
throughout 2013
Jilted in January
Fixed up in February
Mixed up in March
An Affair in April
Matched up in May
Jaded in June
Jealous in July