Beneath the Scars

Three young men meet in university and form a lifelong friendship. Their pasts dictate the men they are, but their present shapes their future. What happens when these men meet the one person they are destined to be with? Can they fight their feelings and walk away? Or will they each succumb and learn the sweet agony of love?  

Two neighbors - strangers - with one thing in common: they share a fence. But is that the only thing they share? Nathan Fraser lives a solitary life, never letting anyone get too close. It's safer that way. Kourtney Whyte hides from the world and behind her work, too afraid to really live her life to the fullest. Rejection is what she knows best. But one night, the sound of her soft voice and the tantalizing aroma of her evening meal prove too enticing for Nathan to ignore.

A tyrant by day, a playboy by night. That's the reputation that precedes Richard VanRyan. He lives life the way he wants, no concern for the opinion of others. He cares for no one, is completely unrepentant, and has no desire to change his ways. Katharine Elliott works under Richard as his PA. She despises him and his questionable ethics, but endures all the garbage he sends her way, because she needs the job.

She is a woman on the run. Pain, loneliness, and terror are what she is leaving. Where she is headed doesn't matter as long as it's away from the hell her life has become. Joshua Bennett is trapped in a prison of his own making by the memories of his past. Traumatized and isolated, he is a reclusive writer, living a quiet, lonely life, his only companion his dog, Bear. It is what he knows, what he has accepted to be his life. One dark night, one huge storm, and one ice patch brings them together.

Have sex with a stranger in a foreign country. It was on my list. It was something I'd never done before, and I wasn't sure if I could go through with it. But I did. That one night was the best night of my entire life. He was sexy, intense, and made me feel things I had never felt before. The next morning, the thrill was over, and he was gone before I woke up. What happened in London should have stayed in London, but it didn't. I was never supposed to see him again, but the universe had other plans.

I grew up wealthy and was given everything my parents wanted me to have. After years of being molded into the perfect daughter, I played a role. I was only what they wanted me to be. My parents controlled everything. My life, my friends, my career, and even the man I was supposed to marry. When I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself, the person looking back was a total stranger. Leaving my fiancé at the altar on my wedding day was the start of a journey I embarked on in search of the person that I truly was.

My name is Emily Wade and I was raised to believe that happily ever after didn't exist. That relationships were doomed before they even started, and that as long as the attraction to someone is purely physical, life is uncomplicated and good. I lived by that and was probably the only anti-relationship person in the world. I found myself in the midst of so much man drama that I decided to take a hiatus from the dating world. Until I met the brutally handsome CEO of Caine Property Development & Management, Jackson Caine.

Two lives, two losses, and one meeting that changed their lives forever. Learning to move on and to love again isn't always easy. The circle of life. It's something we all know about, but we are never truly prepared for the unexpected. The unexpected that comes out of nowhere. No warning, no heads-up, nothing. Just God giving us pure bliss and happiness and then taking it away in the blink of an eye.

They say young love isn’t real. It’s only our bodies full of raging hormones and our minds filled with lust that make us think we are in love. I can tell them that they’re wrong. Young love is real. It can and it does exist - at least in my 17-year-old life. My name is Claire Montgomery and I come from a family of snobs. Born into wealth, against my will, my family will do just about anything to uphold the perfect Montgomery name. I ruined that for them the day my car broke down on the side of the road and I met the love of my life, Sam Snow.

They called him Mack Daddy. No, seriously, his name was Mack. Short for Mackenzie. Thus, the nickname. Perfect, right? So was he: perfect. The perfect physical male specimen. At the private school where I taught, Mack Morrison was the only man around in a sea of women.