Can't Hold Back (20 page)

For Robin, Jess, Lindsay, and Janette, my healers. Thank you.

Some books require a little—or a lot—more TLC than others, and this was one of them. Which means the people who saved my sanity get extra lovin’ this time around. Huge thank-yous to:

All my beloved Bells, but especially Avery, who told me before I wrote the rough draft that I had the heroine wrong. Bird, next time I’ll listen the first time!

Sarah and Jesse Rieth, my patient and wonderful consultants on army matters. Any and all errors, as well as imaginative flights of fancy and deliberate deviations from reality, are mine and mine alone.

Readers Amber Belldene, Lauren Layne, and Audra North, for figuring out how to translate my “I know something isn’t quite working but I’m not sure what it is…” into great revision advice.

Cheryl Cain, for the breakthrough conversation, in which, among other things, she reassured me that the parts really did fit together.

Susan Grimshaw, my wonderful Loveswept editor, for letting me run and reigning me in, in perfect proportions; and the terrific Loveswept team, visible and invisible, especially Lynn Andreozzi, for the amazing cover.

Samantha Hunter, one of my most steadfast and loving critique partners, who had the wisdom to see the story hiding under the story and the honesty to tell me it wasn’t on the page yet.

Darya Swingle, for the problem-solving walk and for jollying me out of my book-induced moodiness.

Emily Sylvan Kim, my agent at Prospect Agency, who somehow always has time for brainstorming, and who saw what was best in the book; and the rest of the Prospect team.

Charli Teglia, for bearing with me every step of the way. And I do mean every step. If you see her, give her chocolate and take her on a nice walk.

After Midnight
(novella)

Yours to Keep

Hold on Tight

Turn Up the Heat

Can’t Hold Back

To Have and to Hold
(coming soon)

PHOTO: © SUSAN YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHY

USA Today
bestselling author S
ERENA
B
ELL
writes richly emotional stories about big-hearted heroes with real troubles and the heroines who are strong and generous enough to love them.

Serena spent many years as a journalist, where she shadowed and wrote about a cast of fascinating real-life characters. But she always secretly wished to give everyone a happily-ever-after, so now she invents her own characters and dreams up joyful endings. The research skills from journalism still come in handy.

Serena loves to embrace new hobbies and has at various times enjoyed bird watching, backpacking, violin, Ultimate Frisbee, skiing, tennis, ice skating, dance, needlepoint, kayaking, paddleboarding, meditating, and swimming laps—to name just a few.

Her supportive husband lovingly accepts each new hobby and all the equipment it requires, and her two school-aged children provide opportunities to explore new activities, like coaching basketball and remembering just how much math she’s forgotten.

serenabell.com

Facebook.com/serenabellbooks

@serenabellbooks

Sign up for my newsletter at

serenabell.com/newsletter/

Happy Holidays from our hearth to yours! This month we’re sending you some hot Loveswept romances to keep the fire burning:

USA Today
bestselling author Bronwen Evans’s new Disgraced Lords novel is about a marriage of convenience and its delightful pleasures—and mortal danger in
A Whisper of Desire.
K. J. Charles turns up the heat in her new Society of Gentlemen novel,
A Seditious Affair,
as two lovers face off in a sensual duel that challenges their deepest beliefs
.
Samantha Kane’s Birmingham Rebels series proves that three’s never a crowd…at least not for the hard-bodied football all-stars who give teamwork a sexy twist in
Calling the Play
.
Welcome to Forever,
new from author Annie Rains, introduces a small coastal town where America’s best and brightest risk everything for love. Jackie Ashenden ups the ante in the seductive Deacons of Bourbon Street series, co-written with Megan Crane, Rachael Johns, and Maisey Yates, with
Hold Me Down,
a story about what happens when the biker who broke Alice’s heart rides into town, and she must choose between passion and duty. Another story for MC fans is Violetta Rand’s irresistible novel about a sexy-as-sin biker who tempts a good girl to go bad,
Persuasion.

In
USA Today
bestselling author Tina Wainscott’s gritty, emotional small-town romance
Falling Hard,
passions run high as a reformed bad boy reconnects with an old enemy…and gets her engine revving. In Laura Marie Altom’s tale of forbidden love,
Stepping Over the Line,
meet two tortured souls with an unbreakable bond. Then comes a tender military romance from Serena Bell,
USA Today
bestselling author of
Hold on Tight,
in which a war-shattered veteran gets a second chance at love with the one that got away in
Can’t Hold Back
.

Writing duo MJ Fields and Chelsea Camaron release another sizzling-hot Caldwell Brothers story—
Morrison,
which hits the Vegas strip as a bad-boy gambler from Detroit Rock City shows a single mom what it means to play for keeps. Then it’s off to Los Angeles where Hollywood’s hottest young actor hits the road to chase his big break—and discovers a leading lady where he least expects in Cassie Mae’s
No Interest in Love.

I can’t believe 2016 is upon us, can you? Thank you for spending your reading time with Loveswept, and we hope to entertain you all over again in the new year.

Happy Romance!

Gina Wachtel

Associate Publisher

by Serena Bell

Available from Loveswept

O
NE
Y
EAR
A
GO

Hunter Cross made Trina Levine laugh at the most inopportune moment, and her orgasm, which had been building for what felt like hours, broke up and drifted apart the way the colors of the clouds do once the sun has dipped below the horizon. But she didn’t care, because it was so good to laugh with him, so good to be with him, lying on a blanket on a soft bed of pine needles in the woods.

“I’ve never done it outside before,” she confessed, her cheek secure in the dip between the cap of his shoulder and the hard curve of his pec, a space just for her. Both of them were breathing hard, and his face, when she snuck a look at it, was as relaxed as she’d ever seen it, a soft, secret smile tugging up the corners of his mouth.

His arms tightened around her. “Me neither.”

She could have said so many other things.
I’ve never laughed like this before. I’ve never come like this before. I’ve never felt like this before.
But she held back the words—even though she hadn’t held back, not even a little, during their lovemaking. Because it was the night before he was going to leave and because she didn’t know for sure yet if he felt the same way, and because it seemed like a lot to put on an evening that was already so full.

It had been the best kind of comedy of errors. They had each wanted to surprise the other, so both—without consulting—had hired babysitters, bought flowers, made dinner reservations.

Booked a hotel room.

And in the end, two sets of hotel reservations had gone unused because a hotel room didn’t feel big enough to contain what they were feeling, so they’d hiked to a spot he knew, a secret spot, and here they were.

“Trina.”

Her heart, which was still pounding from the sustained intensity of their lovemaking, from the shock and power of her orgasm, from laughter, sped up. He sounded so—serious.

“I’ve fallen in love with you.”

A wave of warmth and happiness swept over her. She’d been thinking it for days, the words wanting to burst out at all kinds of crazy moments. Making dinner together in his kitchen, shopping for the girls’ back-to-school clothes. At the Woodland Park Zoo as they’d stood back and watched the girls try to get a hippo’s attention. He’d reached for her hand and she’d felt the purest kind of contentment.
Family,
she’d thought. And then been a little afraid, because she wanted it so much. But happy, too, because no matter what happened next, this was a perfect moment.

“I’ve fallen in love with you, too.”

The best things happened so fast. Eight weeks ago, they’d been friends. Not even particularly close friends. Just adults thrown together by circumstance, in this case, the bond between their daughters. Their daughters had been best friends since third grade, but even after Hunter’s wife had been killed in action three years ago, Clara had been primarily in her grandmother’s care, and Hunter had been just a dad who sometimes dropped off and picked up his daughter with a smile and a hug.

And then—

“I’ve never felt this way before.”

Hunter’s words. The words she’d wanted to say, the words she’d been thinking, coming from his mouth, getting under her skin, soaking into the pulse of her blood. Her heart felt like it was going to break free from the cage of her chest.

“Not even—” He’d been married to Clara’s mother for eight years before her death.

“No. This is different.”

“Me neither.” Her voice couldn’t muster more than a whisper.

He sat up, pulled her upright, took both her hands. “After I come back—”

More words she hadn’t let herself hope she’d hear. She’d been willing to wait, to let the way she felt, the way she knew he felt, stand on its own. To have faith on the strength of what had passed between them, without outright declarations. But here he was, promises in his dark brown eyes.

“You’re going to be living in my house anyway—”

She’d offered to watch Clara for him during this deployment. His mother had met the man of her dreams, a Honda Gold Wing–style wanderer, and gone off to see the country she’d never seen. For Trina to take Clara and raise her for a year alongside Phoebe wasn’t much trouble—the girls were easier together than solo—and a grateful Hunter had asked her if she’d liked to house-sit. He’d politely not said anything to indicate he’d noticed the shabbiness or crampedness of her and Phoebe’s digs. She’d jumped at the house-sitting offer. Only an idiot would have turned down the opportunity to live in Hunter’s big house in the Grant Hills woods instead of in her one-bedroom rental, especially with two girls on the brink of adolescence.

Hunter squeezed her hands, his gaze holding hers. “So, I wanted to know: Can we make it official? Will you move in with me? Like, for real?”

“Yes!”

He laughed. She hadn’t hesitated or played coy, and maybe if she’d had a second more reflection she would have managed to at least pretend to think about it, but the truth was, she was no good at pretense, and had never seen the point of it with Hunter. He just made her want to be
Trina,
exactly who she was when she woke up in the morning, without ornamentation or decoration. And that was—she knew without a doubt—who he’d fallen in love with.

It was the most amazing feeling, to be loved like this.

The way he was looking at her—

“I’d been thinking, anyway, even before”—he touched her cheek tenderly—“even before
you
happened to me, that this might be my last deployment. Because of Clara, partly. Even before my mom took off with Ray, I already felt like it was wrong, leaving her, without—”

His voice tightened, with the grief that was only partly his own and so much about his daughter’s pain. Before Clara’s mom had died, they’d staggered their deployments so Clara always had a parent with her.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and it never gets any easier. Leaving Clara. Seeing what I’ve seen—”

Sitting by the outdoor fire pit one night after the girls had gone to bed, side by side in their sleeping bags on Clara’s floor, he’d told her this last deployment had been the hardest yet. He’d said that he’d seen so much, he’d thought it would get easier eventually, but it never got easier. Men lost. Mistakes made. They were the most human, humble mistakes, but the consequences were so enormous. Civilians killed. Families and cities broken. Hearts, too. That was the thing, he said. If you stayed in long enough, you would almost certainly come home broken, if not in body, then in spirit.

“I’ve more than met my active-duty obligation. I could do the individual ready reserve and…and be here with Clara. And you and Phoebe. We could be together.”

She didn’t think she could stand it, how full she felt, and maybe he saw that in her eyes, because he reached for her then, leaned forward and took her face in both his hands and kissed her tenderly, gentle for that first contact, but then hot again, right away, his fingers moving to grasp her hair, her neck, her shoulders, his breath hard and fast already, mingling with hers, and before a minute had passed, the kiss almost brutal, his tongue invading, one thumb and finger urging her nipple to standing, and his voice low in her ear, “Fuck. I didn’t think I could want you again this bad that fast.”

After the second time, they lay for a long time, silent, and then he told her what he’d been thinking, that he’d do the reserves and maybe pick up the finish-carpentry work that he’d done summers in high school and between deployments. He built a fire, and she watched from the blanket, loving the Boy Scout/soldier/
man
ness of it, and they made a plan together. She’d sleep in the guest room when he was away and for a little while after he came home, because the girls still didn’t know anything about what was going on between their parents, because there was nothing new love needed less than the scrutiny of two eleven-year-old preadolescent girls. But then after he’d been home a bit and everything had settled down, they’d tell the girls.

“It’ll give them time to get used to all of us being together.”

All of us. Being together.

She loved it. It was something she’d never had even the hint of with Phoebe’s father, and for the first time, she let herself believe it could happen with Hunter, her joy tinged with just the faintest fear, because they were, after all, talking about a whole year in the future. “And it’ll give you time to make sure your feelings haven’t changed,” she said tentatively. But her imaginary fingers were crossed in hopes he’d tell her not to be ridiculous.

He rolled over and braced himself up on his elbows and looked down into her eyes, a long, significant look, full of everything he’d already said to her, all the words she’d been not letting herself want to hear, words she’d have to save up over the next year because she’d miss him, miss this, so bad—

He brushed a strand of hair off her forehead, swept his thumb over her bottom lip. “I’ve known you a long time. Maybe we’ve only been like
this
a little while, but I’ve known you a long time. I know you as a person, and I know you as a mother, and I know my feelings, and they’re not going to change.”

Those words, they were like having everything that had happened already that night, the whole vast, beautiful gift of it, tied up with a bow.