Title: The Trouble With Trouble
Series: Trouble #5
Author: Erin Kern
Release Date: November 10, 2014
SYNOPSIS
When life gives you lemons, you make
lemonade. Right? Well, Courtney Devlin has had her fair share of lemons in life
and, quite, frankly, she’s sick of lemonade. After a life-altering car accident
and ending her engagement, Courtney spends the next four years putting the
pieces of her broken heart back together. She’s tough and determined not to let
her vulnerabilities get the best of her and has made a career for herself as an
interior designer. And things finally start clicking into place when her boss puts
her in charge of her own design job: A complete overhaul and redesign of her
brother’s restaurant, McDermott’s Steakhouse.
The only problem? Her brother, Chase,
isn’t the one she’ll be working with. It’s her ex-fiancée. Grant Blackwood.
After Courtney called him a “no good
cheating rat-bastard”, Grant left Trouble, Wyoming. The biggest mistake of
Grant’s life was allowing Courtney Devlin to slip through his fingers. He knows
he screwed up big-time and he’s spent the last four years regretting the way their
relationship ended. Then, after his father falls ill, Grant returns to Trouble
and takes a job as the general manager of Chase McDermott’s restaurant.
Grant knows better than anyone that
getting involved with Courtney Devlin is like playing with fire. She’s feisty,
determined and honest to a fault. But he’s never stopped loving her, and plans
on using her new job with him as a way of showing her he’s a changed man. However,
he’s unprepared for how much hotter the spark is between them.
Seems as though time
away couldn’t diminish what Courtney and Grant once had with each other.
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EXCERPT
Then she spotted him. Or, rather his legs. Slightly bent at
the knees, covered in a pair of shiny basketball shorts and moving up and down,
in the doorway of his office, as though being lifted. As she came closer to his
office, the movements of his legs made sense.
A pull-up bar installed at the top of the door frame.
And then the rest of him. Not clothed. As in bare-chested,
muscles contracting as he lifted himself chin-level with the bar, then slowly
lowered again. Then lifted. Then lowered.
Oh Lord.
“Are you going to say something, or should I keep going so
you can stand there and watch?” Grant asked in a surprisingly non-winded voice
as he continued his reps.
Courtney wasn’t sure she could do even one of those, much
less sound so calm while doing so.
Her eyes remained glued to his torso, specifically how
dangerously close those shorts were to slipping right off his narrow hips. And,
yeah, white boxer briefs looked spectacularly amazing against tanned skin.
Especially when that skin was pulled tight over a freakin’ eight pack.
“I don’t understand what’s going on here.” And, dammit, did
she have to sound like she was on the verge of a really good orgasm? Why
couldn’t he work out with a shirt on? Or, better yet, not have a body that
could have been sculpted from granite?
“What does it look like?” he asked as he touched his chin
to the bar, then lowered himself again.
“Well, it kind of looks like you’re doing something other
than what you asked me here for.” And torturing me in the process!
“Maybe, maybe not,” he replied with a half a smile.
She stabbed her hands on her hips. “Did I get the day
wrong?”
Grant touched his chin to the bar one last time, then
dropped to the floor, landing on his feet with the grace of a ballerina. A
one-hundred and eighty pound, six-foot-three ballerina.
“No, you got the time wrong.” He hooked his hands on his
lean hips and stared at her. A single bead of sweat rolled down in between his
pecs, then traced the contour of his abs before being absorbed by the elastic
band of his briefs.
She yanked her gaze to his face and willed the heat to seep
out of her cheeks. “I’m ten minutes early.”
“You’re twenty minutes late.” He spun around and sauntered
into his office. “I told you noon.”
She followed him, secretly congratulating herself for not
ogling his cement-hard ass. “You said twelve-thirty.”
Grant swiped a towel off his desk and rubbed it over his
face. “No. I specifically remember saying twelve.”
Shit, now she was second guessing herself. Had he said
twelve? She’d written twelve-thirty but that had been after she’d hung up the
phone with him to schedule the meeting. In the past, her short-term memory had
a way of altering itself. She’d been positive she’d heard twelve-thirty, but
since she hadn’t written it down the second he’d said the time, it was possible
she’d gotten it wrong.
“I can tell by the look on your face that you’re
remembering more accurately.” He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Go ahead, you
can say it.”
Oh, now the gorgeous bastard was asking for it. Would Chase
kill her if she strangled every last cocky breath from his manager’s lungs?
“What, that you’re just as smug as you were four years
ago?” she countered instead. Admitting to herself that she was wrong was one
thing. Saying that to Grant? She’d rather tar and feather herself.
His only response was a chuckle. The deep throated kind
that skittered along her nerve endings like a pebble hopping over the glassy
surface of a lake.
“Always something to say,” he commented with a shake of his
head. Then he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts, and pushed
them down his legs.
Panic shot through her system faster than it took him to
step out of his shorts. “Wait, what’re you doing?”
Holy Guacamole, if he stripped out of those boxers she’d
have an aneurysm. Bad enough the cotton material was so tight over every ridge
of muscle, he might as well not even be wearing the things.
One of his brows crept up his forehead. “What does it look
like? Feel free to stay and watch.”
And then he dropped the boxers.
AUTHOR BIO
I started writing back in 2004 and six years later self-published the third book I wrote. Two years after that I landed a contract with Grand Central Publishing.
Now I'm just chugging along, spitting out books faster than my kids can turn my living room into a disaster zone...
Actually, that's not entirely true. I only wish it were true.
But in all seriousness, I write sassy and sexy contemporary romances for Forever Romance. My Trouble series is available online and wherever paperbacks are sold.
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