Matched, page 30
Ah, Kimmie. That’d been fun, watching her fall in love. Came with one of Lindsey’s finest moments, in Will’s opinion.
He smiled while Lindsey’s laughter grew stronger, Nat and Dahlia joining in, and Kimmie added her own unique giggle-snort.
“Hush,” Nat said to Kimmie. “You’re gonna make me have to pee.”
“Get in line,” Dahlia said.
“There’s enough stalls for all of us,” Kimmie said, “but first we’d have to stand up again.”
More laughter rolled through the room. Lindsey caught sight of him, and her smile went wider, her eyes softer, all of her prettier. He blew her a kiss, and dang if the pretty lady didn’t go pink in the cheeks.
Got him right in the heart. She always had. Always would.
“We’ve gotta go now,” Will said to the guys, “or they’ll be taking turns going to the bathroom from now until this shindig’s over. Ready, Mikey?”
Mikey swiped a hand over the sweat on his bald head. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
“CJ?” Will said.
CJ lifted his instrument. “Got my cowbell. Would have my kazoo too, but Noah hid it.”
Will grabbed Yvette. The old Yamaha would never be Vera, but Lindsey had insisted the guitar needed a name. And she’d been right.
Just like she’d been right that all of Bliss would turn out for a quadruple baby shower, with all the gifts being donated to local women’s shelters. That lady was something else. Hadn’t taken her but two months to figure out the best way to organize a nonprofit legal assistance fund for families in crisis, and barely another two weeks to put her plans in motion.
Will had offered the capital to get it going, but Lindsey insisted all she wanted was a little of his time and connections. He’d played a benefit concert for her in Chicago with some of his best and biggest buddies in the country music industry, and she’d even gotten onstage to thank everyone for coming out without tossing her cookies.
Already, her organization had funded legal fees to help two women secure divorces from abusive husbands, and helped a paycheck-to-paycheck family adopt an orphaned nephew who’d been on the verge of going into foster care.
That one had hit home. Could’ve been Will when he was a kid.
Lindsey had always been special, and now the world was getting a glimpse of everything that she was capable of. Without the fear, she was learning what she was capable of. She’d nudged four couples together in the last month without their hardly realizing what was going on too. But the best part, in Will’s opinion, was that she was happy.
And he’d never been happier himself.
“Gentlemen,” Will said, “let’s go crash a baby shower.”
And that’s exactly what they did.
- THE END -
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The Misfit Brides Series
Blissed (CJ & Natalie)
Matched (Will & Lindsey)
Smittened (Mikey & Dahlia)
Sugared (Kimmie & Josh, release date to be announced)
The Officers’ Ex-Wives Club Series
Southern Fried Blues (Jackson & Anna Grace)
Moonshine & Magnolias (Zack & Shelby)
~ ~ ~
Mikey and Dahlia’s story is available now!
From Smittened (Misfit Brides #3)…
DAHLIA MALLARD had lost her ever-loving mind. But desperate times, desperate measures, blah blah, all that. She’d already sold plasma twice this week, and while she had gotten a bid on the eBay auction for Great Aunt Agnes’s vintage Christmas Story Leg Lamp, she was running out of things to sell.
Selling herself might very well be next, and by the looks of him, Mikey would be willing to pay.
He looked much more harmless in Billy’s weekly BillyVision YouTube videos than he did in person. Less wolfish. More all-talk, less follow-through.
She twisted her doorknob and suppressed a shudder. This would’ve been easier if Billy were here too. Aside from the part where he’d struck her mute when she’d run into him and Mikey earlier simply by being Billy Brenton, he was so approachable. Plus, he sort of had connections here in Bliss, indirectly, and Dahlia had heard he was “good people.”
And since she’d totally choked during her chance to ask Billy for one teensy little favor when she met him, Mikey needing a place to stay tonight truly was serendipitous.
Serendipitous.
Right.
Sheesh.
Mikey wasn’t serendipitous. He was a giant vibrating mass of pheromones, oozing masculine power and control as though he converted oxygen into testosterone instead of carbon dioxide.
And he accomplished all that simply by breathing. Ducks only knew where her clothes would end up if he spent much time brandishing that deep Southern drawl for anything beyond asking where she kept the toilet paper.
…Excerpt from SMITTENED by Jamie Farrell ©2015
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~ ~ ~
Like Southern gentlemen and military heroes? Meet Jackson Davis, hero of SOUTHERN FRIED BLUES (Officers’ Ex-Wives Club #1)…
Anna braced herself, scooted into the car, and cranked the engine. Steam flowed out of the air vents. She tilted them away while the AC system caught up. After buckling in, she gave her rearview mirrors a quick check. The gearshift seared her palm, but she gritted her teeth and put the car in reverse anyway.
Something tickled her finger. She absently scratched it and gave the car a little gas. Something else tickled the back of her hand.
She frowned.
Sweat didn’t usually tickle. Not like that.
She moved to shift the car into drive and something dark scurried over her windshield. “What the—”
A line of fire ants marched across her steering wheel.
Anna shrieked. She threw the car into park and tumbled out of it. “Get off! Get off!” She raked her hands over her arms and hopped on her clogs to shake the little buggers off. The prickles moved to her back, up her neck, into her hair. She knew the ants couldn’t be up there, there’d only been one or two, but she scrubbed at her scalp anyway.
“Ma’am? You okay?” A guy leaned out the side of a red car behind her. She was blocking one of the exits.
“Oh, yeah, sure, you betcha.” She wiggled her itching toes. “Sorry. It’ll just take me a minute to get out of your way.”
Her car’s engine whined. Heat radiated off the hood and wrinkled the air. The backs of her knees tingled as if a hundred ants had gathered there for an impromptu Riverdance.
A car door shut behind her. “Need a hand?” he drawled in a local-boy kind of way.
“Everything’s fine. Thanks.” Because she carried insect-killer in her car all the time in case her car came down with a case of the ants.
It took some effort to not reach for her phone. This was the kind of thing Neil would’ve taken care of for her. And it pissed her off that she wanted to let the man approaching solve her problem.
She was an independent woman, dammit. She’d fix this herself. She squared her shoulders, marched to the edge of her door, and hit her trunk release. She scooted around the car to survey the potential ant weapons in her trunk. She had to have something useful. Maybe she could club them one by one with her jumper cables. Shoot her emergency flares at them. Drop the box of Neil’s junk on them. Label them to death with the label maker.
It’d worked on her marriage.
And there was that stingy feeling behind her eyeballs again.
Long runner’s legs ending in flip-flop–clad feet entered her blurred vision. “You got some friends there.”
If Neil had to leave her, he should’ve done it somewhere else. Somewhere without fire ants, somewhere more hospitable to her Norwegian coloring, somewhere with halfway intelligent locals. She shot her audience a look she should’ve tried on the ants. “Where I come from, they’re called a nuisance.”
Instead of shriveling up and dying, he flashed her a goofy grin. His dark-lashed eyes creased in the corners.
Those lashes and the mass of just-long-enough-to-be-curly hair on his head were proof positive a man could have brains or looks, but not both.
And that tingly sensation along her breastbone was proof positive she had no business being single. First she agreed to a date with Rodney, now she was getting hot over a redneck.
She was supposed to be worrying about the ants. Class. Her life.
He scratched his curly hair and surveyed her neatly organized trunk.
As if he could wield her jumper cables better than she could against an army of fire ants.
Instead, he swung her Windex out of the trunk like a gunslinger preparing for a showdown, then tucked her paper towels under his arm.
“My car is very—” she started, but then it hit her.
He wasn’t going to clean it.
Carbon-based ants, meet ammonia.
Forgetting simple chemistry principles was not a good omen for her degree.
Wanting to watch her unexpected helper go to battle against the ants wasn’t a good omen for her sanity.
Her skin flushed as if she were standing inside Hell’s boiler room. She reached for the Windex, but something stopped her before she could get close enough to grab it.
Something that tasted suspiciously like fear.
Not of him.
Of herself.
“I’ll do it,” she bit out. She flicked her fingers up, gesturing for him to hand over the Windex.
“Ain’t no trouble.” His gaze wandered down her body, and she felt a whomp in her chest beneath the tingles spreading to her rib cage.
“Be a shame to mess up them pretty clothes,” he said.
“I can handle this,” she said firmly. She gestured to his car. “There’s another exit two rows down. I’ve taken enough of your time.”
His eyes were big and blue as her wounded heart, but when he squinted at her like that, they went a shade darker to cobalt. “Now I’m sure it don’t matter none to you, but my momma’d have my hide if she heard I abandoned a lady with critters in her car.”
Anna stifled a whimper of frustration. She swiped at her forehead. She’d probably drown in her own sweat before she managed to wrestle the Windex out of his hands.
If she could get brave enough to get within touching distance of him. “I don’t know your momma, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”
He scratched his hair again, and she felt an intense desire to claw out that part of her that wanted to know how it would feel between her fingers.
Rebound, her brain yelled.
Something more primitive was still clamoring about his hair.
…Excerpt from SOUTHERN FRIED BLUES by Jamie Farrell ©2013
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Kelley Schmidt for naming Will’s assistant, Cassidy. Also thanks to Shari Bartholomew for letting me borrow Wrigley’s name, and to Sacha Coutu for letting me turn her into a psychic for the purposes of this book. To Rebecca Whaley for naming Will’s old dog, Bandit, and to Dee Vandermolen and Corie Glenn for inspiring the names of Mari Belle’s dogs, Chicken and Biscuits. And speaking of Mari Belle, thanks to Debbie Oxier for suggesting Marigold and to Summer Hagy for suggesting Belle when I was struggling with finding just the right name for Will’s sister. Y’all outdid yourselves.
A big shout-out to Rachel Harris for letting me mention Cherish, Louisiana, and Tyler Blue and his song, “Rain Dance.” (And if y’all haven’t read Accidentally Married on Purpose, you should!)
An amazing, overwhelmed thanks to my Feisty Belles Fan Group. You ladies make my day, every day. Love you, Belles!
A special thank you to Luke Bryan (whom I don’t know, sadly enough) for his weekly LBTV episodes, which I watched religiously in the name of research for this book. And on a related note, thank you to my hubby (whom I do know, happily enough) for only snorting a little when I made that declaration about watching LBTV solely for research purposes.
To Kelsey Browning and Maria Geraci, y’all are my rocks in this business. Hugs!!
And finally, to my family. I love you!
About the Author
Jamie Farrell is a bestselling author of feel-good contemporary romances. She believes love, laughter, and bacon are the most powerful forces in the universe. Her debut novel, Southern Fried Blues, was a finalist in the 2013 National Readers’ Choice Awards and the 2014 National Excellence in Romance Fiction Awards. Blissed, the first book in her Misfit Brides series, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly Magazine.
A native Midwesterner, Jamie has lived in the South the majority of her adult life. When she’s not writing, she and her military hero husband are busy raising three hilariously unpredictable children.
For news and updates on Jamie’s books, and for a glimpse into her sometimes zany personal life:
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Copyright © 2015 by Jamie Farrell
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover photos Copyright © kirill_grekov via DepositPhotos.com
Cover Design by Sweet ‘n Spicy Designs
Editing by
Penny’s Copy Sense
ISBN-13: 978-1-940517-10-0
http://www.JamieFarrellBooks.com
Jamie Farrell, Matched
