Love Storm
Authors: Jennifer McNare
| Love Storm | |
| Jennifer McNare | |
| Jennifer McNare (2013) | |
| Rating: | **** |
Taking a week off from her internship at the Denver Art Museum, twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn Foster is headed up to her family’s private cabin near Vail, Colorado for a little rest and relaxation. Unfortunately, she isn’t aware that her brother-in-law, an all-pro defensive lineman, has already offered the use of the cabin to his friend and former teammate, Ryan Landry, the drop-dead gorgeous NFL superstar she’s had a not-so-secret crush on since she was a teenager. As luck would have it, he is also the same man who rebuffed her youthful advances four years earlier, after she ineptly attempted to seduce him in one of the most humiliating moments of her life, and much to her dismay, the same man who can still start her heart racing with only a smile.
Temporarily sidelined from his position as one of the most-celebrated wide receivers in the NFL due to a mild concussion, Ryan Landry eagerly accepted his close friend Wade Calloway’s offer to rest and recuperate at his cabin in the Rocky Mountains, unaware that he wouldn’t be the only one making use of the luxurious retreat. But when Wade’s sister-in-law, the lovely Brooklyn Foster arrives unexpectedly, he can’t deny that spending the next week with the tempting young beauty holds a great deal more appeal than it should. And all too soon, and despite the warning bells ringing in his head, Ryan realizes that keeping his hands off of his temporary roommate isn’t going to be easy, for it is glaringly apparent that Brooklyn in no longer the off-limits, precocious teenager she once was.
Locked away from the outside world by a fierce winter blizzard, their passion for one another can no longer be denied and soon eclipses even the furious storm raging outside, leaving them both wondering what the future holds once they leave their perfect mountain hideaway.
Please note: This is a novella and considerably shorter than a standard-length novel.
Love Storm
By Jennifer McNare
________
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, organizations and
incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and
are not to be construed as factual.
Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, businesses, or persons is completely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2013
Jennifer McNare
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents:
Books
by Jennifer McNare
Until You (Historical Romance Novel)
The Hellion and
The
Heartbreaker (Historical Romance Novel)
Love Storm (Contemporary Romance
Novella)
It was coming down harder now, and the sweeping wiper blades
were struggling with increasing difficulty to keep the heavy crystal flakes
from staking a permanent hold on the icy windshield.
Darn
,
if she’d just been able to leave an hour earlier as she’d planned, she might
have gotten ahead of the early November snowstorm, but such was life.
It wasn’t as though her best friend Julia had
intentionally broken up with her boyfriend, for the third time no less, right
before Brooklyn was about to leave for her sister’s mountain cabin near
Vail.
The unanticipated detour to Julia’s apartment and the
ensuing hour long tête-à-tête, had been the cause of the delay, but at least
she’d managed to calm Julia down by the time she’d left Denver.
Nonetheless, she’d give her a call once she reached
the cabin,
if she ever reached the cabin
,
to make sure she hadn’t reverted back to her prior histrionics.
Julia had always had a penchant for the
melodramatic, but Brooklyn didn’t really mind.
In fact, she couldn’t have asked for a better friend.
She and Julia’s personalities had always
complimented each other perfectly, and since meeting twelve years earlier in
Mrs. Decker’s fifth grade class, they had been nearly inseparable.
Reaching toward the console between the driver and passenger
seats, she grabbed her cell phone and checked to see if she had service.
Nope,
still nothing.
From past travels up
the winding mountain road, she knew that she likely wouldn’t have service again
for several more miles.
If she got
stranded now, she could be in trouble.
Unfortunately, since she’d turned off onto a lesser traveled section of
the roadway a few miles back, there wasn’t nearly as much traffic and help
could be a long time coming.
Although
she had plenty of food, water, blankets and a nearly full tank of gas, she
didn’t relish the idea of spending her weeklong vacation stuck in her SUV on
the side of the road waiting for someone to pass by.
She briefly considered turning back, but after thinking it
through, decided against it.
She
probably had a better chance of making it to the cabin than she did of making
it back down the mountain.
Visibility
was getting worse by the minute and the trip back down the zigzagging, narrow
two-lane road would take at least an hour and a half at her current pace, and
according to the GPS mounted in the dash she was less than twelve miles from
the cabin.
So, keeping her eyes glued to
the small stretch of pavement that she could see through the thickly swirling
flakes, she gripped the steering wheel with both hands and continued the
painstakingly slow drive.
When she finally reached the turnoff to the cabin some
thirty minutes later, Brooklyn’s nerves were frayed.
It had been getting harder and harder to see
the road for the last several miles and if not for the SUV’s navigational
system, she doubted she would have been able to find the turn onto the cabin’s
private drive.
Having grown up in
Colorado, she was accustomed to driving in bad weather as well as on snowy, icy
roads, but that didn’t mean she liked it.
She breathed a huge sigh of relief when at last she pulled to a stop in
front of the lavish, two-story cabin that belonged to her sister and
brother-in-law.
Snatching up her phone,
she was relieved to see that she once again had cell service.
Checking her messages she saw that she had
three missed calls within the past hour, all from her sister Katelyn, and one
new voice message.
She immediately
dialed her voicemail and hit the speaker button.
Hey Brook, it’s
Kate.
Sorry sweetie but I’ve got some
bad news.
I sure hope you get this
message before you leave, because I just mentioned to Wade that you were going
up to the cabin today and he told me that he’d already offered to let one of
his old teammates from Denver stay there for a few weeks.
You remember Ryan Landry right?
Well, he got a mild concussion in last week’s
game against the Jets, so he’s currently on the disabled list.
I guess he’s having some work done on his
house or something and since he won’t be playing or traveling for the next few
weeks Wade told him he should just stay up at the cabin and take it easy for a
while.
Wade said he mentioned it to me
the other day, but I swear I don’t remember it if he did.
I think this pregnancy is seriously screwing
with my memory, as well as my hormones.
Anyway, call me when you get this.
I’m really sorry about the mix up.
Love you.
Bye.
As the message ended Brooklyn leaned her head back against
the headrest and groaned aloud.
This
cannot be happening she thought, shaking her head from side to side in
horrified disbelief.
Ryan Landry
, the name hit her like a
slap in the face.
The last time she’d
seen him, just over four years ago, had been the most humiliating moment of her
entire life.
It had been the night of
Wade’s twenty-fifth birthday party at his and Kate’s house on the outskirts of
Denver, just two years before Wade, an all-pro defensive lineman, had been
traded to the NFL’s newest expansion team the Virginia Vipers, and a mere three
weeks before she’d started her freshman year of college at the University of
Colorado.
Ryan Landry
, the first guy she’d ever loved, or at least thought
she’d loved at the time, the guy that she had been desperately trying to get to
notice her since she’d first been introduced to him months earlier.
Oh how she wished she could forget that miserable night, but
regrettably, it seemed destined to haunt her for the rest of her life.
It was the night she had imprudently skipped
dinner and recklessly downed one too many glasses of champagne on an empty
stomach, cautiously evading her elder sister’s watchful gaze throughout the
evening.
And then, in the wee hours of
the morning and still more than a little tipsy, she had made one last desperate
attempt to gain Ryan’s attention as he’d slept in one of the guest bedrooms of
her sister’s home.
Sneaking into his
room long after everyone else had gone to bed, she’d summoned her courage and
offered herself up to the devastatingly handsome football player like a silly,
pathetic teenager with a crush.
Unfortunately however, and much to her extreme mortification, he’d swiftly
hustled her out of his room, his actions letting her know once and for all, and
in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t interested.
Setting the phone down, her hand moved automatically to the
gear shift as an overwhelming desire to throw the four-wheel drive into reverse
and back out of the driveway hit her full force.
The only thing that stopped her was the
knowledge that it would be dark in less than an hour, and with the snow
continuing to fall like it was, she knew she’d never make it safely back down the
mountain.
Staring through the
snow-speckled windshield, she fought the urge to weep.
Finally, with a sigh of resignation she reached for the key
and turned off the ignition.
She would
have pulled into the garage, but she’d forgotten to write down the keypad code,
so she would have to open the door once she got inside the house.
Glancing at the oversized four-car garage,
she couldn’t help wondering if Ryan’s vehicle was parked inside at that very
moment.
Kate’s message hadn’t said if
Ryan was already at the cabin, but knowing her luck it was probably too much to
hope for that he wasn’t.
Stepping from the warm interior of the SUV and out into the
cold, her boots immediately sank into the freshly fallen snow as she scanned
the drive for any sign of tracks, but all she could see was a fresh layer of
powder covering the ground.
Please don’t be here, please don’t be here
,
she silently begged as she shut the door and then made her way carefully to the
cabin’s wraparound front porch and large set of double doors.
A moment later, standing at the door, key in
hand, she was about to insert it into the lock, but then she hesitated.
Wait, should she knock first?
Yeah probably, just in case she thought.
Reaching for the large iron doorknocker, she
bit down on her lower lip as she thumped it loudly against the back plate three
times and then waited in a state of nervous trepidation.
She mentally counted to thirty, and then gave the knocker
another couple of thumps.
When another
thirty seconds had passed and still nothing happened, she felt an almost giddy
sense of relief.
He isn’t here yet, she
realized.
It seemed almost too good to
be true.
Then again, perhaps luck was
with her, maybe he wasn’t coming at all.
Maybe he’d changed his mind, or perhaps the storm had kept him
away.
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
she thought silently. Whatever the
reason she didn’t care, she was just inordinately grateful for the reprieve
regardless of the cause.