Sweet Somethings

By Eve Summers

Love can be found anywhere: at a school reunion, on a yacht, in the library, even in your own marriage. Filled with gentle humor, champagne and an occasional dachshund puppy, these 11 love stories will make you smile and remember what Romance with a capital R is all about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Splice Publishing
• Release date: Nov 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9780993953798

Book preview

Sweet Somethings

By Eve Summers

Copyright © 2014 Eve Summers

Published by Splice Publishing

All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

Insert Name Here

If You Like Piña Coladas

Speed Dating in the Cold

A Small Price to Pay

Mr. Right Online

Cruise Liner Adventure - Christmas Hope

Love, Recycled

Not Complicated

The Cat Who Stole Christmas

PhotoShopped

African Bliss

Insert Name Here

This is my To–Do–Before–I–Turn–30 list:

Eat an ostrich egg. Check.

Play with a cheetah cub. Check.

Swim with a dolphin. Check.

Scuba dive in a foreign country. Double check for doing it at night.

Skydive. Check, bonus points because I wasn’t scared.

Dare to love again. Nah, cross it out. So not going to happen. I’ve learned my lesson.

Make love on a yacht.

...With a stranger for extra points.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not into one–night stands. The idea of getting close and intimate with someone I’m not emotionally involved with gives me the creeps. I only included it in my to–do list because I was hurt and devastated and not thinking straight.

Getting dumped wasn’t on my to–do list.

Neither was an impromptu trip to Africa.

When my now–ex–boyfriend broke up with me, I simply sold my engagement ring and booked the first holiday package I found. My Before–I–Turn–30 list was born on the long flight towards the Dark Continent.

And now I’m in Africa. The sun is hot. The air is hot. My energy levels are up there with over–boiling. In just two short weeks, I managed to put a big fat checkmark next to five items on my bucket list.

Beats choosing the wedding cake, that’s for damned sure.

The yacht is sailing along the tropical coastline, bringing a briny breeze and the steamy scent of the jungle. I feel reckless. Not reckless enough to make love on the yacht with a stranger, though, an Insert–Name–Here to check another point off my bucket list. Honestly, I’d better replace that item with something saner, something more me, like lion–taming or snake–charming.

Cass, I hear behind me.

My body recognizes the voice before I do. Recognizes it with every inch of my acutely aware skin, with the rushed rhythm of my reckless heartbeat. I hate myself for this primitive reaction, for the heat that floods my body. I’ve known him only five days.

Ansley. I try for nonchalant. It comes across scorching.

Picture the man you’d love to have as your deepest and darkest secret, a guy whose middle name should be Trouble, a guy you’d never introduce to your mother. That’s Ansley. Hot. Dangerously so. Going through life getting his way and getting any woman he cares to crook his beckoning finger at.

I will so not be another notch on his yacht’s dashboard.

Just the girl I wanted, he says and my heart does a mad dance. What do you say to a shark dive after lunch?

With Ansley as the shark and the bed as the ocean? Yum! Ansley’s sun–darkened arms around me. Ansley’s abs under my thirsty tongue. I shoo away the images. Yeah, maybe, I say out loud. It’s not on my bucket list, though.

I long to tell him making love on a yacht is very much on the list. His eyes make me forget my upbringing and all my social inhibitions. They make me forget my resolve not to be one of his conquests. Let’s do it in the cockpit, I want to say. I clamp my teeth together, forcing the words back.

Cass, Cass, Cass. When a man like Ansley grins, you wonder what it’s like to kiss him. "Ever do anything not on your list?"

Not since I’ve written it.

He shakes his head. Wow. In his mouth, it’s a verbal caress. ‘K then. What do you have planned for today?

I give him my flirty smile, half mysterious and half inviting. Nothing really.

Nothing. The word washes over me with the reality of too much free time, empty and meaningless. The numbing shock of having my life’s whole chart derailed by the cancelled wedding is finally wearing off. I’m beginning to feel. Pain comes first, searing into my gut, followed by an icy punch of panic in my throat.

What am I going to do with my life?

I’m addicted to action points, schedules, goals. The holiday’s been great. The spontaneity rocked. The heat was exactly what I needed to thaw out my soul. Now it’s time to go back to being – me. Trouble is, I’ve been part of a couple for so long, I’ve forgotten what flavor yogurt I like to have in the fridge and what music I listen to. No, the music will be easy, it’s whatever the ex didn’t remove from our apartment. But the rest?

So. A shark dive it is? Ansley places his hand on mine, and the question in his eyes is not only about the dive.

His palm, calloused from sailing ropes and softened by hours under water, feels electric on my skin. The heat radiates straight into my very core. So hard to resist. But I’ll be damned if I let another male plan my life – ruin my life – for me.

I try to withdraw my hand. Can’t. It’s stuck to Ansley’s like a magnet. My voice feels alien in my mouth. I think I’ll pass. Thanks just the same.

Sure. Ansley has no difficulty peeling his hand off mine and the disappointment is a tsunami in my chest. See you at lunch.

When he disappears into the stateroom, the sun shines a little less intensely, the ocean is not as blue, the heat can’t penetrate the icy shell I’ve constructed around me. I wonder what the hell’s wrong with me.

Ansley is unlike any boyfriend I’ve had. Don’t know how I know this after just a hundred hours with him, but I’m sure he’s not the type to call off the wedding once the invitations have been mailed. Perhaps it’s in the way he scuba dives, his meticulous attention to the safety of those in his group. Perhaps it’s the sure–handed yet vigilant way he steers the boat through the rough and the rocks. Perhaps it’s in his eyes.

He may be a man who enjoys his sport, his drink, and his women, but he’s also a man who can be trusted. Every day, I trust him with my life as we descend together into the blueness of