 From USA Today best-selling author Marni Mann comes Even If It Hurts, an emotionally charged contemporary romance. When you have a perfect marriage, only an impossible reconnection could make you risk it all.
OLIVER When I met her, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. We were so young and so passionate. We studied business in the day and each other’s bodies at night. We always knew it would end with the semester, so we loved hard with no regrets. LANCE When I met her, I couldn’t get her off my mind. We were fresh out of college and ready to take on the world. We fit each other like missing puzzle pieces. And just when I thought my life was perfect, it got better. She became my wife. CHLOE I met my first love while studying abroad in London. When I moved home, I didn’t think I’d ever fall in love again. Until I met him. The man who became my husband. The one I promised a lifetime to. Then, my first love came back into my life … And I realized that love was bigger than any one man.
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 Billy Harrington
A young girl walks into a bar… I’d like to say this is the start of a bad joke, but it isn’t really. It’s my life. Can you be called a baby-daddy if the secret baby shows up as a teenager? I don’t know anything about raising a teen. And the one person who could help me the most is my nemesis. Roxanne McAllister I should hate him for being her father. Only I don’t fault him for sleeping with my sister. This is the story of my life. I’ve always been runner-up to my older sibling. Then tragedy strikes—again—and I’m left with a dilemma. Can I count on the person I despise the most in Blue Ridge? Find out when a Harrington strikes again. This sexy silver fox is the biggest player, but he’s about to been dealt a hand he never expected—a much needed ally in his feisty vixen enemy.  Kane O’Callaghan knows what it is to have his work shown all over the world. His pieces are on display in palaces and museums, including the O’Callaghan Museum of Glass just outside of his beloved hometown of Seattle. Kane is a bit of a recluse, spending time on his farm alone and committed to his art. His life is full.
Until the day he meets her. Wandering through museums is Anastasia Montgomery’s favorite way to spend her time. Not only does art feed her soul, but it inspires her own art of designing wedding cakes. When her muse seems to be gone, she finds her again among the beauty in the museums of Seattle, and the O’Callaghan Museum of Glass is her favorite. She’s never met the artist, but he must be absolutely brilliant, if he can make such beautiful things out of glass. Bumping into a grumpy stranger at the museum wasn’t in Anastasia’s plan. And then discovering it was Kane himself was absolutely humiliating. But when she sees him again at a charity fundraiser, and ends up spending an incredible, unforgettable night with the mysterious glass smith, Anastasia finds herself thinking of Kane and little else, even her precious work. Will this relationship bloom into the romance of a lifetime, or will their dreams of success get in the way of true love?  Genevieve Daylee didn’t expect to be standing in front of a judge on her twenty-seventh birthday. But ever since her life became entangled with a former motorcycle gang, she’s learned not to expect anything but trouble.
Her mother, a woman she once admired and adored, is gone, leaving behind a trail of secrets and lies. She’s living in a tiny apartment above a garage owned by her brother, a man who loathes her very existence. And the father she met beside her mother’s grave is as much of a stranger as Isaiah Reynolds, the broken man with soulless eyes standing beside her in front of the judge. Isaiah is her protector from the murderer at large in Clifton Forge. Though he’s more like a riven knight in dented armor than a prince on a white stallion. She knows next to nothing about him, other than he works as a mechanic. As of tonight, he’ll be sharing her bathroom. And, according to the judge, Isaiah is now her husband.  We are the Rossetti’s.
The exiled “sixth family” of the New York mafia. We’re the good guys. People don’t fear us…much. They respect us. The five of us? We’re the Brooklyn Brothers. And we protect what’s ours. Jasmine Kingston should run from me. I mean, she should literally pick up her dress, toss away her heels, and haul ass in the complete opposite direction. Because for the last few months that she’s been in New York and taking the fashion world by storm, I’ve been watching her. From my ivory tower, from the shadows. Wherever she’s been, I’ve been only feet away, and she hasn’t even realized it. Until now. I can’t stay away and watch one more man take his shot with her. She needs to know what she’s doing to me. Especially since things are heating up with my family’s enemies. I just pray those enemies don’t discover my only weakness. Maybe it was the wrong way to go. Maybe I should never have touched her. Never treated myself to her addictive taste. But I can’t alleviate this obsession I have with her any more than I can put a bullet between my own eyes. She’s mine to protect now. I’ll burn my entire fortune to the ground and take ten of those bullets before I let anything happen to her. I just hope she doesn’t find out what I’ve done.
 He was my uncle’s friend, and I was too young for him.
But in the heat of the moment, against the wall in a darkened hallway of an illicit club, none of those things mattered. It was just one night of giving in to what we both wanted. I never expected to see him two years later, sitting across me during a family dinner, encouraging me to do my internship for his business. On day one we both agree that repeating that night would be a mistake. But it’s a mistake we can’t help but make again and again. The rules are simple. We can’t tell my uncle. We have to be content with our hotel rendezvous. And we won’t fall in love. But we both know we’re liars.  If you've ever seen your teenage crush ten years later, and he turns out to be a complete jerk, then you know how Molly Ward feels.
The last time she saw Noah Griffin was the regrettable day that she decided to climb into his bedroom window and turn her unrequited crush into something more. That day was bad enough, but things are about to get worse. Noah has become one of the best football players in the country, and he’s just landed on Molly’s front step. As a new addition to the Washington Wolves roster, Noah's presence is the key to Molly’s promotion in the front office. The problem is, Noah wants nothing to do with Molly, and his surly attitude is making her job very difficult. But he's got another thing coming if he thinks Molly will be intimidated by one grumpy football player, no matter how much he hates being around her. Once these two go head to head, their mutual dislike explodes into undeniable chemistry. But with what they have at stake, they just might detonate everything else along with it.  Growing up, Ramsey Stewart branded my soul in ways time could never heal.
At twelve, he asked me to be his girlfriend. At thirteen, he gave me my first kiss. By sixteen, we’d fallen in love, planned a future together, and had our eyes set on the horizon. Love never fails, right? But for Ramsey, it did. Love failed him. I failed him. The entire world failed him. At seventeen, Ramsey was convicted of killing the boy who assaulted me. Move on,he wrote in his first and only letter from prison. Start a new life, he urged. I don’t love you anymore, he lied. There was no such thing as giving up on Ramsey. Love may have been our curse, but he was mine—then, now, and forever. So here I am, twelve long years later, waiting for a man I don't even know to emerge from between the chain link gates. |
