Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil
A Spanish Awakening When Madrid’s most infamous bachelor, Emilio Rios, meets Megan Armstrong during an airport strike, he can’t believe his luck! He walked away from her once… now, he has twenty-four hours to show her how much he’s regretted it…The Italian Next Door… Pia Renfern is on holiday, and relaxation and recuperation are the only things on her to-do list! But when she meets her neighbour, dangerously delicious Italian Valentino Silvestri, all thoughts of some solo R&R fly straight out of Pia’s mind…Interview with the Daredevil Journalist Ava finally has her first scoop: an interview with extreme sports legend Roman Gianakis. But it seems Roman likes to live dangerously in and out of the spotlight… and he’s determined to take Ava along for the ride!
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Hot Summer Flings
A Spanish Awakening
Kim Lawrence
The Italian Next Door…
Anna Cleary
Interview with the Daredevil
Nicola Marsh
Table of Contents
Kim Lawrence
KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in rural Anglesey. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons, and the various stray animals which have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!
EMILIO swallowed his coffee, grimacing at the taste. It had gone cold. Knotting his silk tie with one hand, he finished up the coffee and headed out of the door. A quick glance at his watch confirmed that with luck and good traffic he could make it to the airport to meet Rosanna’s flight and still be at his desk by ten—a very late start for him, but being the boss did have certain privileges.
There were people who considered his life was one long privilege.
Some went further, like the actress he had been meant to escort to a premiere the previous night. She had called him selfish—quite loudly.
Emilio had received the insult with a philosophical smile. Her good opinion meant nothing to him. They had not even slept together yet and he doubted now they would, even though she had rung back later, clearly regretting her outburst, to apologise.
Her efforts to ingratiate herself had left him as unmoved as her earlier tantrum. He actually thought she might have a point—maybe he was selfish. The possibility did not unduly bother him. Was selfishness not the upside of being single and not in a serious relationship?
Upside? Were there any downsides to being in a position where one did not have to consider the wishes of other people? Emilio could not think of any.
In the past he had done his duty and pleased others, namely his father. That unquestioning compliance had resulted in a failed marriage entered into when he was too young, stupid and arrogant to believe he could fail at anything.
On paper his father had been right. He and Rosanna had been the perfect couple, they had a lot in common, they came from the same world, and, most importantly from his father’s point of view, his bride had been good breeding stock from a family who could trace their bloodline back almost as far as his own family.
Emilio slid into the driving seat of his car, his lips twisting into a bitter smile of recollection as he fastened his seat belt.
Luis Rios had been incoherent with outrage when the marriage he had promoted had failed. He had used every threat and bullying tactic in his considerable arsenal and had become frustrated when he saw none made any impression on his son.
His fury had turned to scornful contempt when Emilio had introduced the topic of love, suggesting mildly that the absence of it might be a possible reason for the short life span of the doomed marriage.
The irony in his voice had sailed—predictably—directly over his father’s head.
‘Love?’ his parent had snorted contemptuously. ‘Is that what this is about? Since when were you a romantic? ‘
The question had, Emilio conceded, been legitimate. It was true that his own attitude towards the hype around romantic love had always been at best condescending, at worst contemptuous.
He had continued to feel that way right up to the moment he had found out the hard way that love was not an invention of overactive imaginations, that it was possible to look at a woman and know with every fibre of your being that she was meant to be yours.
The instant was indelibly seared into Emilio’s memory, every individual detail of her breathless late arrival midway through the boring dinner carrying the scent of the warm summer night into the stuffy room with her.
His heart had literally stopped, which was crazy when you considered how many times he had seen her walk into a room previously, but in that moment it had been as if he were seeing her for the first time.
Wary of sliding into self-pitying mode, jaw clenched, Emilio pushed away the image of her face allowing the far less pleasing image of his father’s face to fill the space it left. He no longer attempted to fill the empty space in his heart; he lived with it.
