Once Upon a Valentine
Read Once Upon a Valentine Online
Authors: Stephanie Bond
Tags: #Anthology, #Blazing Bedtime Stories
ONCE UPON A SEXY TIME…
She had long, gorgeous hair
Summer Tomlinson always had a thing for Andrew Macmillan. Now that they’re business partners—as well as bed partners!—Summer wonders if letting her hair down will catch him for good....
He sought a sleeping beauty
Historian Ashlynn Scott is seeking the fabled castle of Sleeping Beauty. But with just one kiss, she finds herself tangled up—and tangled in the sheets!—with a rogue adventurer. She might never want to wake up!
She was being chased by every man
Ginger Redman wanted to be irresistible, so she made a wish on a magic cookie. And the baked treat delivers—sending her sexy best friend, Stephen Fox, right into her bed!
Look what people are saying
about these talented authors...
Stephanie Bond
“Sex and humor blend perfectly…this fairy tale of a story has the perfect magic ending.”
—
RT Book Reviews,
4 stars, on
No Peeking…
“Red hot, deliciously wicked, fantastically entertaining.”
—
Joyfully Reviewed
on
Watch and Learn
Leslie Kelly
“A hip contemporary romance packed with great one-liners!”
—
RT Book Reviews,
4.5 stars, on
Terms of Surrender
“Another wonderful happy ever after.”
—
Fresh Fiction
on
More Blazing Bedtime Stories
Michelle Rowen
“A sexy, flirty romance with a supernatural flair…Ms. Rowen certainly knows how to charm her readers with a delicious story.”
—
Fresh Fiction
on
Touch and Go
“Michelle Rowen makes her Blaze debut with this fun tale of ghosts, curses and sizzling sex. Readers who like a hot paranormal tale should look for this tasty treat!”
—
Affair de Coeur
on
Hot Spell
Stephanie Bond
has been reading Harlequin romance novels since she was a preteen, never dreaming she’d grow up to write them! Today, with more than sixty romance and mystery novels to her name, Stephanie still believes in happy endings. For more about her books, visit her website, www.stephaniebond.com.
Leslie Kelly
has written dozens of novels for Harlequin Blaze, Temptation and HQN Books. Known for her sparkling dialogue and humor, Leslie has been honored with numerous awards, including the National Readers’ Choice Award. In 2010, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Series Romance from
RT Book Reviews.
Leslie lives in Maryland with her husband and their three daughters. Visit her online at www.lesliekelly.com.
National bestselling author
Michelle Rowen
was the winner of the 2007 Holt Medallion for Best First Book and the 2009
RT Book Reviews
Reviewers’ Choice award for Best Vampire Romance. Michelle’s hobbies include writing, writing and...well, that’s about it (unless you count Twitter and Facebook as hobbies). She lives in Southern Ontario, but has never been a big fan of snow. Please visit her website, www.michellerowen.com.
STEPHANIE BOND
LESLIE KELLY
MICHELLE ROWAN
Once Upon a Valentine
Stephanie Bond
All Tangled Up
This story is dedicated to
all the romantic insomniacs out there.
Contents
1
THE SIGN READ Welcome to Tiny, Tennessee, Population 1345.
Andrew MacMillan sighed and pulled his hand over his mouth—make that 1344. His father, retired veterinarian and widower, Barber MacMillan, had passed away sitting in a rocker on his front porch with a smile on his face. That was according to Red Tucker, his father’s neighbor, accountant and best friend of seventy years who had found him the day before yesterday. Leave it to his father, Andrew thought wryly, to die as he’d lived—on his own terms.
Since Andrew’s trip would be open-ended, to arrange the funeral and settle his father’s affairs, he’d decided to drive from Manhattan to Tiny to have use of his car…and to think. He and his father hadn’t been estranged, exactly, just cut from a different cloth. The fact that Andrew’s mother had died when he was a teenager hadn’t helped matters. She’d had a knack for mediating father-son squabbles with sugary words and buttered biscuits. Without her loving lubrication, the men had clashed.
But when Andrew had decided to attend college in Ohio, his father hadn’t held him back. Then again, he hadn’t made the trip to attend graduation. And although he’d congratulated Andrew on landing a plum job with a big advertising firm in Manhattan, he’d never once visited in thirteen years.
On the other hand, Andrew hadn’t been the best at visiting, either. He’d tried to make it back to the MacMillan farm for a few days every year around the holidays, but last year things had been too busy at the firm and he simply couldn’t get away.
Regret ballooned in his chest, but he couldn’t pretend a trip home over Christmas would’ve made a difference in their relationship. In fact, it might’ve made things worse, since Andrew’s suggestions that his father sell the fifty-acre farm and move to a place he could better maintain were always met with cross remarks. By the end of a stay, their tolerance for each other seemed to wear thin.
“Visitors are like fish,” his father had been fond of saying. “After a couple of days, things start to smell.”
Andrew tried not to take offense at the fact that his father considered him a “visitor” in the house he’d grown up in. It was just his father’s way.
He slowed as he drove into the downtown area of Tiny, which consisted of three entire blocks of the most diverse and unusual shops one could imagine: Bitty’s Bakery, Tiny Hardware, Harlowe’s Musical Instruments, Tiny Town Grocery, West Drug Dispensary, City Hall, Dr. Berg, M.D., Flood Dentistry, Dolls & More, Shoes & More, Flowers & More, Watches & More, Biscuits & More, Books & More and…more. As customary, the shops’ marquees featured personal messages to members of the community: “Congratulations, Wendy!” “Happy Anniversary, Maggie and John!” “Welcome, Baby Jenkins!” The windows touted Valentine’s Day Sales.
Hadley’s Funeral Parlor sat slightly off the beaten retail path, located in a freestanding former fast food building. No one seemed to notice or mind the drive-through window. Their marquee offered condolences to the Barber MacMillan family and the Sadie Case family.
Sadness tugged at him. Sweet-voiced Mrs. Case had been his third-grade teacher and had been around his father’s age, he recalled. A generation of Tiny-ites was fading away as fast as the younger generation was moving away.
He wondered vaguely how long it would take to sell his father’s farm, jokingly dubbed the Mane Squeeze Ranch by his dear mother, and preserved by his father for her sake. Years before, the adjacent state park had expressed interest in the MacMillan land because of the limestone cave spring on the property, but things changed.
Andrew pulled his black BMW into the nearly vacant parking lot, his stomach tied in knots. He couldn’t imagine anything more painful than for a child to arrange a parent’s funeral, but conceded it was the circle of life, the last thing he could do for his father to perhaps make up for all the little things he hadn’t known to do when Barber was alive.
He climbed out of the car and squinted into the warm winter sun. The weather in Southern Tennessee was always unpredictable, so it wasn’t altogether surprising to find temperatures in the high seventies in February. He would enjoy it today. Tomorrow it could be snowing.
In the short walk to the double doors of the funeral home, he listened to the call of songbirds lulled out by the warmth. Hardwood trees were still bare, but the cedar, hemlock and white-pine trees offered plenty of cover—and color—in the otherwise gray landscape.
When he opened the door, a chime sounded somewhere in the distance to announce his arrival. The decor hadn’t changed in the decade or so since he’d last been there—tributes to the local high-school sports teams and Tennessee trophy trout mounted on wood plaques. Hadley’s Funeral Home was a social hotspot. This afternoon it was, um,
dead,
but if a viewing was scheduled this evening, it would be hopping with regulars who would sign the guest register, ooh and aah over the casket, and peek at the cards on the flowers to see who had sent roses and who had sent carnations.
Geary Hadley appeared, tall and gaunt in his black suit, but his droopy features lifted in recognition. “Andrew, how nice to see you. Well, not under these circumstances, of course, but you know what I mean. Your father was a good man.”
Andrew shook the veined hand the man extended to him, wondering how many hands the man had shaken in his lifetime. “Thank you, Mr. Hadley. It’s nice to see you, too.”
“Let’s go to my office,” the man offered in a low, comforting voice.
Andrew’s stomach churned as they wove past various rooms in the hushed building. By the time they reached the small, cramped office, he was ready to get the meeting over with. “Regarding my father’s wishes—”