Maximum Risk (21 page)
I am so grateful to everyone who was part of the process of creating
Maximum Risk
.
Thank you to:
Nicole Sanders at Trevino Creative Graphic Design for my cover. You are amazing!
My very patient beta readers. You know who you are. Thank you for kicking my butt when I need it.
My editors: Karen Lawson, Janet Hitchcock, and Marla Garfield
Melanie Hanna and her amazing husband, for helping me organize the business side of publishing.
My Roadies for both their friendship and their feedback.
Thank you to my husband, Tony. Couldn't do this without you.
To my niece, Danielle Stewart, and my sister, Jeannette Winters, for joining me in self-publishing and brainstorming with me along the way.
Always better together.
Read on for an excerpt from
Twelve Days of Temptation (A Hot Holiday Novella)
The Legacy Collection:
*
Also available in audiobook format
Book 1: Maid for the Billionaire
(available at all major eBook stores for FREE!)
Book 3: Bedding the Billionaire
Book 5: Rise of the Billionaire
Book 6: Breaching the Billionaire: Alethea’s Redemption
Recipe For Love, An Andrade Christmas Novella
The Andrades
*
Also available in audiobook format
Book 1: Come Away With Me
(available at all major eBook stores for FREE!)
Book 3: Maximum Risk
Book 4: Somewhere Along the Way (Available 05/26/15)
The Temptations
Book 1: Twelve Days of Temptation
Book 2: Be My Temptation
Read on for an excerpt from
Twelve Days of Temptation (A Hot Holiday Novella)
Ruth Cardello was born the youngest of 11 children in a small city in northern Rhode Island. She spent her young adult years moving as far away as she could from her large extended family. She lived in Boston, Paris, Orlando, New York—then came full circle and moved back to Rhode Island. She now happily lives one town over from the one she was born in. For her, family trumped the warmer weather and international scene.
She was an educator for 20 years, the last 11 as a kindergarten teacher. When her school district began cutting jobs, Ruth turned a serious eye toward her second love– writing and has never been happier. When she’s not writing, you can find her chasing her children around her small farm, riding her horses, or connecting with her readers online.
Contact Ruth:
Website:
RuthCardello.com
Email:
[email protected]
FaceBook:
Author Ruth Cardello
Twitter:
@RuthieCardello
Read on for an excerpt from
Twelve Days of Temptation (A Hot Holiday Novella)
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Read on for an excerpt from
Twelve Days of Temptation (A Hot Holiday Novella)
Try my holiday series. Love and laughter are never out of season.
Twelve Days of Temptation (A Hot Holiday Novella)
Book 1: Brock & Kate
How far would you go if you were offered a chance to fulfill your secret fantasies?
What would you ask someone to do, if you knew they’d do anything?
After the death of her mother and the abrupt end of her marriage, Kate is desperately unhappy to be spending the upcoming holiday season alone. She vents her frustration in a letter to the one man her mother raised her to believe in—Santa Claus. This year she is rebelliously requesting something guaranteed to raise his eyebrows.
Brock Foster has wanted Kate since they were in high school. When he finds her letter, her Christmas wish becomes his obsession. Winning her will require skill and deception. Brock initiates a game that will bring them together and tear them apart.
Join Kate and Brock as they discover what happens when Santa puts you on The Naughty List.
Chapter One
“Hey, you dropped something,” Brock Foster called to the tall blonde who’d just walked past, after giving him the same polite smile she’d been flashing him since their teens. A moment earlier, she’d stopped near a mailbox, paused as if debating whether or not to mail a letter, then fumbled with her purse and kept walking. Brock had noticed that, instead of ending up back in her purse, the letter had fallen beside the mailbox. He’d picked it up and was about to chase after her when he saw the letter was addressed to Santa Claus.
It wasn’t surprising Kate hadn’t heard him when he’d called out to her. Even though Brock was a well-known businessman in Misty Falls, having expanded his father’s home construction company into a much more lucrative mill renovation business, he was, as he always had been, invisible to Kate.
Well, perhaps not always. About twenty years earlier, back when there’d been talk of Boston’s commuter rail expanding down into Rhode Island, Kate’s mother had purchased a large Victorian home in the north end of Misty Falls. That section of town had always been one of Brock’s favorites. Hundred-year-old elms lined streets where wealthy factory owners had once built elaborate turn-of-the-century homes. Kate’s mother had purchased one of those houses and had hired his father to bring it back to its old glory.
The first time Brock met Kate he’d been ten and she’d been eight. His father had dragged him to work sites whenever Brock was home from school, and Kate’s mother had commuted to Boston and left her under the supervision of an inattentive teenage babysitter. They had been two children with nothing to do but get to know each other while his father worked on her mother’s house.
She’d asked him why he always looked dirty. Didn’t he bathe?
He’d asked her why she always wore a dress. Where was the fun in that?
For her, he’d started brushing his hair.
For him, she’d worn jeans.
The two of them had spent that one summer climbing every tree in the neighborhood and getting thrown out of almost everyone’s yard. They’d had a picnic in Old Man Mabry’s shed that he’d built to look like a log cabin. They’d made themselves sick eating too many half-ripened cherries out of Mrs. Landry’s cherry tree. They had even visited with old Miss Jacobs—a woman so lonely she opened her door every morning and invited in all of the loose neighborhood dogs for tea and biscuits. They’d dared each other to stroll in as if they’d belonged there and to sit right down beside canines of all sizes and breeds. Although neither had been brave enough to sample the treats, they’d enjoyed themselves enough to return two more times that summer.
Summer had ended and so had his father’s work on the Hale home—bringing a swift end to his and Kate’s friendship. Kate went on to attend exclusive private schools. Brock attended public schools and worked for his father in his spare time. Their paths had crossed now and then, but over time her smiles had become less warm until he began to doubt she saw him, even when she voiced a polite greeting. As she grew from a shy child into a beautiful woman, it became more and more obvious that Kate didn’t belong in that town.
She was tall and graceful, like a ballerina, with classically delicate features, dark blue eyes, and long blonde hair that was always neatly styled. Even back in high school, she’d dressed with casual sophistication. He heard she’d taken figure skating, music, and language lessons. No one knew her very well. Her mother had kept her separate from the local children, as if none of them were good enough to play with her little girl.
After high school, Kate had gone off to study music in Boston, then married a wealthy attorney there. No one had expected to see her again. When her mother had died four months ago, Brock had been one of the few who had attended the wake. He doubted Kate remembered seeing him there, but he’d thought about her almost every day since. She’d stood beside her mother’s casket, still strikingly beautiful, but alone. He hadn’t been surprised to hear she’d left her husband soon after that.
He turned the envelope over in his hand, studying it. Kate didn’t have a child. As far as he knew, she lived alone in her mother’s old Victorian.
Why would a woman like Untouchable Kate write to a mythical childhood character?
The answer was none of his business. He told himself to post it, then remembered how she’d wavered and changed her mind. What could she have written in that letter that would give her second thoughts about sending it?
He knew he should return it to her unopened and explain he’d seen her drop it. That would be the right thing to do. Instead, he placed the envelope in the inside breast pocket of his suit and walked inside Molly’s Cafe. His father was seated in his usual booth in the far corner of the restaurant, already sipping a coffee. Brock slid into the seat across from him.
“You’ll have a wait, Brock. The waitresses are still huddled over there twittering on their phones about that Hale woman being back in town.”
“Tweeting, Dad. It’s called tweeting.”
“Call it whatever you want, they apparently consider it more important than refilling my cup. I don’t understand their fascination with someone who doesn’t give one whit about this town. She was just in here, and do you know who she spoke to? No one. Probably thinks she’s too good to lower herself to our level. No wonder her husband left her. I can’t imagine spending much time with a woman that cold.”
Brock glanced out the window, half hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman he knew was long gone. “You don’t know her, Dad.”
“Oh?” His father’s eyebrows shot up. “And you do?”
“No,” Brock said, and raised a hand to flag one of the waitresses over. “But you raised me to look beyond the surface of buildings and people. We don’t know what brought her back here.”
His seventy-three-year-old father rolled his eyes. “Maybe you don’t, but the rest of the town does. It’s all anyone talks about.”
“Since when do you care what anyone says about anything?”
The waitress came over and took Brock’s order, momentarily delaying his father’s response. Once they were alone again, his father took another swig of coffee and said, “You did this to me. You told me to retire, and now I’m sitting here gossiping with the town cronies. I should come back to work part-time.”
“Dad, the doctor said you need to take it easy on your heart.”
“What’s easy about fighting with everyone about local politics? Do you know what they want to do with the monument near the park? They want to replace it with a red light. Men gave their lives in battle for our freedom, but a few fender benders, because your generation can’t drive, and they call the monument a hazard. I’ll tell you what’s a hazard—forgetting what people sacrificed for this country. All you young people can do is text on your smarty-pants phones and crash into each other. I almost got myself arrested yesterday when some young asshole politician came in here and claimed he was moving the city forward. I asked him what he thought of the monument, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. Moving us forward, my ass. How can he do that if he doesn’t know what’s happening in the city he wants to run? I told him that, too.”
Brock sighed. “Okay, Dad, you can come to the office a couple mornings each week. You can help Sue input the billing information.”
“I don’t want to work inside. I spent my life outside. So did you, until you started working on those mill projects. Now look at you, going to the gym. In my day, we earned our muscles the old-fashioned way—by lifting things, not prancing around in gym shorts and running on machines that take you nowhere.”
“I work hard, Dad. Foster Developments has to turn down projects, we’re in such high demand.”
His father grunted in disapproval. “Foster Developments. What was wrong with Foster and Son?”
“It sounded too local. Too small. I explained that to you.”
“I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, Son. Everything you need is right here in this town. Trying to be more than you are just leads to trouble. Your little friend Kate learned that the hard way.”
Their food arrived. For a few minutes Brock and his father ate in comfortable silence. “Is Aunt Stella still coming for Christmas?”
His father laid his fork beside his plate and made a pained sound. “Yes. She comes in tomorrow. I’ll give you your inheritance early if you tell your mother you need me in the office every day.”
Brock hid a smile behind his coffee mug. “That bad?”
“Don’t laugh. One day you’ll be me, Brock. What would you want your son to do for you?”
“I don’t see children in my future, Dad. I’m too busy right now. I don’t have time for anything serious.”
“It’ll happen, Brock. When you least expect it. And you’ll be happier for it.”
“Like you?”
“I didn’t say I’m not happy. I love your mother more than I love life itself. But that doesn’t mean I can spend the next two weeks in a house with her and her sister as they reminisce about their childhood and play Christmas music until I get homicidal. Save me so I don’t kill the woman I love.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell Mom you’re essential to the success of a project I’m working on. Maybe you can give the outside of the building a face-lift or something.”
Brock paid for breakfast and left his father there, sipping on what he said was decaf coffee, arguing with the man in the next booth about which day of the week was best for trash pickup. Brock stopped beside his truck and took out the letter Kate had dropped.
She might have been delivering it for a child. Didn’t many letters to Santa end up in the hands of organizations who answered them? He vaguely remembered once reading an article on that. He decided to open it. Hell, if the child had provided an address and asked for something simple, he might even buy the requested gift and have it delivered.
It was, after all, almost Christmas.
He hopped into his truck, started the engine, and studied the still-sealed envelope. His breath was visible in the cold morning air. It could be from Kate. Would a grown woman write a letter to Santa? And, if so, what would she ask for?
He considered himself an honest man with high moral standards.
But the letter—it was sheer temptation.
As was the woman who had dropped it.
In the privacy of his truck, he opened the envelope, careful not to tear it. Once he’d started reading what was written inside, he couldn’t stop.
When he reached the end, he shifted in his seat to accommodate his hard-on, then read the letter again.
Dear Santa,
I hate you.
I know
hate
is a harsh word and that a lady never uses it, but my days of being proper are over.
I’m sure you recognize my handwriting. There can’t be many twenty-eight-year-old women who still write to you.
You can thank my mother for that. When I stopped believing in you as an actual person, she held out that you were the spirit of hope and dreams. Each time I doubted you, she would retell the story of the year her family had nothing and you brought them food, clothing that fit, and shoes for each child.
Between you and me, your involvement in that was a crock of shit. We both know it was probably someone from her church who felt bad for her family.
When I think of all the time I wasted crafting the perfect letters to you just because it made my mother smile, I want to hunt you down and kick your red-velvet-covered ass. You never gave me what I asked for. You only sent a mockery of it.
Remember in high school when I asked for a boyfriend who would hold my hand and listen to me? What I got was a borderline stalker with hands so sweaty they felt like sponges. Sure, he wanted to hold my hand. He also wore the underwear he stole out of my gym bag. He said it was his way of staying close to me. Then he followed me all over town trying to explain why that was normal. I told him not to touch me so much that I gained the nickname Untouchable Kate.
I didn’t out him because ladies are above vindictiveness.
I guess I’m not a lady anymore, either, because I want to find him and beat his sorry ass, too.
I wrote to you in college. I don’t know why. I guess it made me feel closer to my mother, and I missed her. I was in such a hurry to grow up back then. My friends were all getting married. I asked you for a husband—and you sent Wayne Price.
Just like you, he was all show. He came from a good family, made the right amount of money, looked like one of the Kennedys, and said he loved me. I thought you had finally listened to me. When he asked me to marry him, I had no idea what a twisted sense of humor you have, Santa.
If you were going to send me a man who would sleep with every last one of my friends, couldn’t you have at least made him good in bed? Is an orgasm here or there too much to ask for?