soothing. But now I realized the downpour muted any outside sounds that might have given me a clue about what had flitted past the car. The storm had rendered me deaf and blind, and my skin crawled. Was someone out there? I looked around, my senses on full alert, but could see nothing.
Suddenly my back window exploded in a cascade of finely-beaded glass. Something heavy hit the back seat. I screamed as glass fragments and blowing rain struck the back of my head and neck with moisture and stinging pain.
For a moment I was stunned. My car keys slipped from my slack grasp and fell into shadows, landing somewhere on the floorboards. Someone had thrown something through my window. The oddness of the eerie, sneaky figure added to my confusion.
My hand went to the back of my neck and came away red with blood. I twisted around left and right to see if whoever had broken my window was still out there, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. When I reached down to try to find my car keys, my skin crawled with the feeling I was being watched.
My self-control slipped and I had to get into the house as quickly as possible.
I looked around one more time, but couldn’t find anything unusual. To hell with it. I needed to call for help. I reached for my phone and swore under my breath. It was dead.
The rap on my window jolted me. I jerked my head around and saw the unmistakable outline of a broad- shouldered man standing outside the door. He was shouting something at me, but my nerves and the pounding rain drowned out what he was saying. When his fist hit the window again, I dropped my phone and redoubled my efforts to find my car keys, my movements jerky with fear, my breathing quick and uneven. His fist hit the window again. I knew he could easily come through the back window, and then I would be trapped just like the last day of my summer vacation on Wild Magnolia Road. The door handle jiggled.
My heart stopped, and then finally self-control made room for the rational part of my brain.
I wasn’t safe here.
But I wasn’t safe outside, either, and without my keys…I couldn’t get in the house.
The sound of the handle scared me. At least I had a chance to hide myself in the bayou.
I flashed back to that night, his hot breath, his groping hands. I bolted across the seat with a cry, pushed the passenger side door open and stumbled from the car. Immediately the deluge soaked me to the bone. I ran. My heart beat frantically, as if it would pound right out of my chest.
Warning: This book is for mature audiences only!
New Adult Contemporary Romance.
A Perfect Mess is part of the Perfect Secret series and is a Hope Parish novel. It can be read as a stand- alone novel or in any order with the series.
The publishing order of the series is as follows:
A Perfect Mess
A Perfect Mistake (coming soon)
A Perfect Dilemma (coming soon)
Other books by this Author-Going to the Dogs series
Leashed
Groomed for Murder
Hounded
Collared (coming soon)
And now a sneak peek at For Real (Rules of Love, Book One) coming November 14 from New York Times Bestselling author, Chelsea M. Cameron!
Two people. One fake relationship. What could go wrong?
When virgin Shannon Travers gets fed up with her friends demanding that she find a boyfriend, she enlists the help of tattooed, mohawk-rocking graphic design student Jett. He’s more than happy to play along with their Fake Relationship, including the Ten Rules of Fake Dating that control-freak Shannon comes up with. Even if he likes to violate them. Repeatedly.
But what happens when Fake Dating starts to feel… not fake anymore? Will Shannon be willing to let go and embrace the first thing in her life that’s ever felt REAL?
“I’m sorry to bother you, but can you watch my computer?”
“What?” I pulled by earbuds out and looked up to meet a pair of astonishingly golden-brown eyes set in a chiseled face under a head of black hair that was shaved short on the sides and left long on top and gelled to one side like a wave. From the top of his shirt peeked several tattoos and his arms were covered, but I didn’t have a chance to see what they were, as my eyes were draw back to his eyes and I was left momentarily without words.
I fished for some in my brain and came up with two.
“Yeah, sure.”
He flashed me a quick smile and got out his cell phone and dashed out of the cafe. I’d been so immersed in working on my paper that I hadn’t even seen him come in, but a quick scan around showed me that he was sitting at a table right behind me.
A quick glance toward the front door showed me that he was strolling up and down the sidewalk in front of the cafe, still talking on his phone. I turned in my chair and glanced at his laptop, which was open to Facebook. I was too far away to see anything, but I knew the page layout well enough. He also had a stack of books and a notebook open with some scribbles in it. A cup of what looked like black coffee steamed next to the computer. I turned back around quickly so he wouldn’t catch me being a total creeper. Plus, I needed to get back to work. I couldn’t get distracted now.
I was just starting the second semester of my junior year, and I could almost taste my degree. It tasted like victory and thick paper. In less than two years I would have a bachelor’s of science degree in business and be well on my way to an MBA. It made me shiver inside just thinking about having my own office at the top of a glassy skyscraper, sitting at my mahogany desk and crossing my nylon-clad legs as I signed a corporate merger with a pen that probably cost more than the car I currently drove.
Shut it down, Shannon. Shut it down and focus. I breathed three times, in and out, closing my eyes and emptying my mind. Everything drained out and I locked my eyes back on the document. My paper wasn’t due until next week, but I had never waited until the last minute to do a paper like everyone else. You never got anywhere by procrastinating, as had been proven by both my parents and my older brother, Cole by the dizzying array of semi-failed jobs and careers they’d had. Sometimes I was convinced I was adopted because even though I looked like the rest of my family, with brown hair and blue eyes, I didn’t act like a single one of them. I’d heard my parents wonder more than once if I was possessed. They were joking, of course, but it still stung when they pointed out what I was already painfully aware of. That I didn’t fit in.
“Thanks.” The laptop guy was back. He put his hands on my table and leaned down so his face was close to mine. Dude, invade my personal bubble much? “I don’t normally trust strangers with my stuff, but you look…” his eyes skimmed their way up and down my body, and I shifted under his scrutiny. “Trustworthy,” he finally said.
Well, I probably did. I had to go to work in the operations department of a local bank later, so I had a black pencil skirt with a white blouse tucked into it and my cute-but-comfortable tan pumps on. In contrast, his shirt had some sort of video game robot or something splashed across the front and his jeans were skinny, but not to the
