The
Trouble with Love
Sex, Love and Stiletto #4
Sex, Love and Stiletto #4
By: Lauren Layne
Released March 3, 2015
Loveswept
BUY LINKS
As Lauren Layne’s salacious
Sex, Love & Stiletto series returns, a jaded columnist discovers a steamy
way to get over an old flame: falling for him all over again.
As
Stiletto magazine’s authority on all things breakup-and-heartache, Emma
Sinclair writes from personal experience. Five years ago, Emma was Charlotte,
North Carolina’s darling debutante and a blushing bride-to-be. Now she’s the
ice queen of the Manhattan dating scene. Emma left her sultry Southern drawl
behind, but not even her closest friends know that with it she left her heart.
Now Emma’s latest article forces her to face her demons—namely, the devilishly
sexy guy who ditched her at the altar.
After
giving up everything for a pro-soccer career, Alex Cassidy watches his dreams
crumble as a knee injury sidelines him for good. Now he’s hanging up his cleats
and giving journalism a shot. It’s just a coincidence that he happens to pick a
job in the same field, and the same city, as his former fiancée . . . right?
But when Emma moves in next door, it’s no accident. It’s research. And Alex
can’t help wondering what might have been. Unlike the innocent girl he
remembers, this Emma is chic, sophisticated, and assertive—and she wants
absolutely nothing to do with him. The trouble is, Alex has never wanted her
more.
“Explain?” Julie said.
Emma sighed. “The apartment above me had some
sort of water disaster. My entire apartment looks like the set of Titanic, minus
the nubile Leo.”
Julie eyed Emma’s wet hair. “So, is your hair
wet from, like, dirty pipe water?”
“No,” Emma said, taking a last sip of Julie’s
coffee and handing the cup back as she located her badge. “Fortunately, I’d
showered before
the pipe burst and I managed to dodge the worst of the spray. Unfortunately,
drying my hair wasn’t an option.”
“Right. That whole electrocution thing,”
Julie said as they swiped their badges and headed to the elevators.
“Um, yeah, I couldn’t have gotten
electrocuted even if I wanted to,” Emma said, punching the Up button.
“The power went out.”
Julie’s brown eyes bugged out. “Seriously?
Flooded and
you have no power? Is everything ruined?”
“Of course not. I still have this lovely
dress,” Emma said, pulling the hem of her dress out to the side, curtsy style.
She pretended not to notice the way the two girls who had been gossiping
happily as they crossed the elevator lobby immediately quieted when they
spotted her.
The dress would have been a distraction all
by itself. The drippy wet bun was also atypical for a swanky office building in
which sophisticated
and polished was the unofficial dress code for women.
But a lack of makeup made everything worse.
Much worse.
Not that Emma was really a glam type of girl,
but she had a distinct disadvantage of having very fair eyelashes, despite her
medium brown hair. And her eyes’ shape made it worse. They were both large and
tilted upward in a semi-distinctive manner. Bambi eyes, her mother had always
called them.
But without eyeliner and mascara, she was
more Lord of
the Rings’ Gollum than adorable baby deer.
“You know, it’s a good dress, if a bit out of
place for work,” Julie mused, as they followed the two gossiping girls and a
middle-aged man yapping into his phone onto the elevator. “Sexy. A little
slutty even. Go you!”
“That’s great, Jules. Slutty was just
what I was going for on a random Wednesday morning at the office.”
“Well then, you should have called me. We’re
the same size–ish. I could have lent you something.”
“I’ll be taking you up on that tomorrow,”
Emma said as Julie hit the button for the twelfth floor. “Everything I have
will need to be dry-cleaned at best, burned at worst. But this morning, I
couldn’t make it from Upper East over to Upper West in the middle of traffic
and still make it to the office in time.”
The elevator doors had just started to close
when a male hand stuck between them, activating their sensors so that the doors
reopened.
Great.
Really freaking fantastic.
A lesser woman would have groaned in dismay
at the sight of the man in front of her.
Emma merely straightened her shoulders,
ignoring Julie’s softly uttered “Oh, dear.”
It was him.
Lauren
Layne is the USA Today Bestselling author of contemporary romance.
Prior to becoming an author, Lauren worked in e-commerce and web-marketing. In
2011, she and her husband moved from Seattle to New York City, where Lauren
decided to pursue a full-time writing career. It took six months to get her
first book deal (despite ardent assurances to her husband that it would only
take three). Since then, Lauren's gone on to publish ten books, including the
bestselling Stiletto series, with several more on the way in 2015.
Lauren currently lives in Chicago with her husband and spoiled Pomeranian. When
not writing, you'll find her at happy hour, running at a doggedly slow pace, or
trying to straighten her naturally curly hair.
AUTHOR LINKS
No comments :
Post a Comment