Showing results by narrator "Jo Raylan" in All Categories

Never make the same mistake twice is my motto. After being left in the dust of an old pickup truck, I promised that I would take care of myself and never trust another man with a sexy smirk and cowboy boots. Then he showed up, and he’s everywhere I turn, making me want something I shouldn’t.

Coming back home was supposed to be normal - not that my life had ever been normal, but it was getting there. Then I opened the door and found a man, broken, bloodied, and fighting for his life. I don’t know why, but I said I would take care of him. I had to - needed to. He was a mystery, showing up from out of nowhere. But he might have already stolen my heart.

I never forgot her. Not for one minute. Not from the last time I saw her, at 17, to today. I measured all women against her, and all women came up short. But being with her was unfeasible in high school, and it's taboo now. I see her sometimes, but I've never spoken to her. She runs, or I run. We're in the same town, on the same block, in the same building, and the gulf between us has been just too wide to cross. Until tonight.

Samantha...I had the perfect life; a husband who loved me and two kids who were my world. But then someone else answered his phone, and my perfect life shattered. When he died, I was left with answers he couldn't give me and a box full of lies. He left me broken. Blake...I fell in love when I was 15, knowing she was the one. For five years, she was my everything - my every breath, every heartbeat, every thought. She made me promise to move on and love again, but I broke those promises because I can't move on.

When Jackson finds himself in a situation with an old college fling and his new fiancé, complicated feelings arise. Can he handle being with two people?

Summer Bright is just a name on a tombstone. A whispered mystery on the long-forgotten Woodbury Lane. Her ghost teases me with fear and perfection. She knows I'm not strong enough to do what I should've done years ago. The Bullets are united once more, bonded by their demand for blood. There's a vulnerability in their friendship though. Gavriel craves control. Blaise fears losing me. Ryker fights his guilt. Callum's moral compass will get us killed. Chesterbrook may be where the old me died, but it's also where I learned that hell isn't a place.

One: We’re alive, for now. Two: Gavriel’s totally lost control. Three: Santobello is hunting us. Four: Someone will die.

Sunshine. It's a nickname I haven't heard since I lived on Woodbury Lane, where the houses were pretty, but the secrets? Deadly. It was a pet name known only to the Bullets. Rough, violent, and ruthless, they laid claim to the town - and my heart. I wasn't supposed to fall for a boy from the wrong side of the tracks‚ especially not four of them. But they were the only ones who understood that sometimes hell hides in plain sight.

Jasper-Anne Cleary’s guide to salvaging your life when you find yourself publicly humiliated, out of work, and unemployable at 35 - not to mention newly single: 1. Run away. Seriously, there’s no shame in disappearing. Go to that rustic old cottage your aunt left you. Look out for the colony of bats and the leaky roof. Oh, and the barrel-chested neighbor with shoulders like the broad side of a barn. Definitely look out for him....

Her life is like a prison cell. A self-made, to-hell-with-the-free-world existence that locks from the inside. Stop judging. Her agoraphobia doesn’t define her. It simply keeps her safe.

Death. It's something that Ada Palomino has always known so well, having grown up in a house of horrors, surrounded by a family plagued by ghosts and demons and things that go bump in the night. But after the sudden and tragic death of her mother two years ago, death has never felt so personal. Or so close. Now 18, Ada is trying to move on with her life, and the last month of summer holds nothing but sunshine and promises, with her first year at a Portland design school just around the bend.

Jake Collins—former Navy SEAL turned FBI agent—lives to see justice served, even if it means bending the rules. When Jake goes undercover to catch a brutal kingpin, he must decide if he can use the man’s daughter against him, despite the fact that she might be the woman of his dreams.

When mortal Hanna agreed to marry Tuoni, the God of Death, in exchange for her father's life, the last thing she expected was to fall for the morally grey anti-hero. But it's not only her heart that's in danger now. As she navigates her new role as the Goddess of Death in the spooky and macabre underworld of Tuonela, Hanna discovers that Death has many enemies in his kingdom, none more powerful than his half-demon ex-wife, Louhi.

My name is Ada Palomino. By day, I'm studying my ass off at design school in Portland, Oregon. By night, I'm slaying demons and ghosts who have dared to slip through the Veil. Or at least, that's what I should be doing. The problem is Jay, who also happened to be my immortal guardian and now ex-boyfriend, was banished from being with me. And now my new trainer is a previously dead friend of mine that I helped bring back to life. With both of us nursing broken hearts, we embark on a road trip to New Orleans to help him win back his long-lost love.

Navy SEAL Camden Bains knew when he saved the little girl from a hostage situation and placed her in the arms of her beautiful mother that he’d surrendered his heart to them, too. As much as he fought his growing attraction to a woman he’d never see again after his mission, Elena’s kindness and strength, and her daughter’s sweetness, gave Camden back what a senseless tragedy robbed him of years ago. If only for a little while.

His past made him notoriously reckless and, as a New York City fireman, that could prove fatal. After barely escaping a burning building with a victim, Autumn's beautiful face was the last thing he expected to see, and their instant connection intrigued but terrified him. Around her, he felt alive for the first time in over a decade. If he wanted to learn how to love again though, he'd have to let go of his past, and that was much easier said than done.

In the forgotten town of Red Fox, a Navajo couple is tortured by things unseen and by motives unknown. Wild animals slink through their house in the dark, a barrage of stones pound their roof nightly, and mutilated sheep carcasses are turning up on their property. Armed with a camera and just enough to go on, Perry and Dex travel to the desolate locale, hoping to film the supernatural occurrences and add credibility to their flailing webcast.

Monica does not abdicate. She will not resign herself to a man's will…even a man as strong as Jonathan. She's not weak or fragile, nor does she break at the first sign of trouble. Until she realizes she's falling in love with him, and that she’ll never be the same if she allows it. She breaks into a million sharp pieces and damages him in the process. But what can she do? Stay with him and untangle the mess of his life? Commit to his rules, his secrets, his troubles? No. She'll commit to a man, not a lie. She'll strip away everything between them, even if it ends them.

I was four when I met Allie Dupree. Ten when I stopped thinking she had cooties. Fourteen when I realized I was in love with her. And eighteen when I finally told her. Then I never saw her again. I also never forgot her. And my heart never let her go. Sixteen years after she'd disappeared without a word, she's back and there's no way in hell I'm letting her get away again. Especially because there are still burning embers of what we had. And, at the very least, I think I deserve some answers.

Monica believes Jonathan despite her better judgment. Forgives him despite her doubts. She loves him…just because. Her heart isn't sensible or guarded enough. Not by a sight. She’s a walking raw nerve ending of emotion, as if the celibate years she'd spent before him made her more emotional, more vulnerable, more foolish. And she agreed to all of it yesterday and today.