Showing results by author "J.L. Seegars" in All Categories

Sloane: Dominic Alexander is my late husband's best friend and the last man that I should want. For the last ten years, he's taken a sick pleasure in making me feel paper thin, like my existence is of no consequence to him at all. But now, things are different. After a drunken night, and a surprisingly sexy act of heroism, he's started to be . . . nice. Treating me like something other than the embodiment of his annoyance, which would be nice if it didn't make me feel things I swore to never feel for another man after my husband died.

The first time I kissed Christopher Johnson, I knew he would be my biggest mistake. It was supposed to be a simple business arrangement, a few months of playing a role that came far too easily to the both of us, but it wasn't long before it became more. Love. Devotion. Heartbreak in its truest form. Some people say life is for the living, but I say life is for the prepared. To avoid unfortunate complications like having your heart broken by a man past experiences taught you, you never should have trusted in the first place.

Hope is a dangerous thing. It holds you close like a lover, whispering promises it never intends to keep, and just as soon as you relax into its arms, it lets you go. Sending you spinning into an abyss of nothingness. When I sent him away four years ago, he promised he would come back to me, and even as I asked him not to, I hoped that he would.

The day Christopher Johnson decided to kill me, I already knew what it was like to die. I had already experienced it once. Having the life leeched from my body, blood stolen from my veins, oxygen pulled from my lungs. When he decided to walk back into my life, I was in the middle of my third resurrection, healing from the loss of my brother when I was still raw from losing him.

Loving someone with demons is hard but leaving them is harder. That's a lesson I learned roughly a decade ago when I left the love of my life. Choosing the child we made but weren't ready for over any hope for what could be. Trading in potential for reality, my dreams for motherhood and the warmth of his embrace for a lonely world. Despite how tragic it sounds, everything turned out okay. I made peace with my decisions . . . until now. Now, I'm back in New Haven and nothing is the way it should be. The man I left behind is not the one I keep running into around town.

I expect nothing. From life, from God, from men. I don't hope or want or pray. Those are luxuries I can't afford when I'm doing the desperate math of survival while walking the tight rope of life on the run in a strange city. New Haven wasn't supposed to be a fresh start. That would be asking too much from a life that took my parents from me and left me vulnerable to monsters. To be used but not loved. To be kept but not cherished. I'd accepted my fate, but then he walked into my life and released me from the prison of my past, leaving me free to hope, to want, to love.

Jaxon Daniels was supposed to be my forever. I've loved him since I was thirteen years old, and like a foolish little girl, I believed that our love would carry us through everything. Every challenge. Every obstacle. Every heartbreak. But that was before I knew anything about pain and the challenge of overcoming crushing disappointment. Before I knew that loving someone doesn't always mean you get to have them, sometimes it means you have to let them go. Now, thanks to my sister marrying his brother at a romantic resort in Mexico, he's back in my orbit.

Something awful and illuminating happens when a marriage ends. All illusions fade away. Light spills into the darkest corners of the union, forcing you to face the cracks. The moments bereft of love. The nights without affection. The days spent learning to be quiet and still, expecting nothing because that's all you've ever been given.