Ramblings From This Chick: A Naughty New Year with Tessa Bailey and Giveaway

Thursday, January 2, 2014

A Naughty New Year with Tessa Bailey and Giveaway

A Naughty New Year - Tessa Bailey

Tessa lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and young daughter. When she isn't writing or reading romance, Tessa enjoys a good argument and thirty-minute recipes.

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New Year's Eve is such a romantic night. So full of possibilities...even if the following morning feels just like the day before! Often including one king-sized hangover. But the night itself is incredibly exciting. It feels like the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, which is what I hoped to portray in this original scene. To me, there is nothing more romantic than a man returning to his woman when she needs him most.

***

This is stupid. I should go.

In the giant ballroom full of festive New Year’s Eve decorations, Denise felt like an imposter. A bug under a microscope. She leaned against the bar, sipping a glass of complimentary champagne, alone in a sea full of happy couples. Lovers brimming with optimism, dancing, making promises. With five minutes to go until the ball dropped, marking the beginning of 2014, she suddenly felt like she was suffocating. Why had she come here in the first place? That’s right. This is where she and Brandon had met, exactly five years ago today. Where he’d swept her into an embrace as the clock struck midnight, stealing her breath and her soul with one kiss. They’d spent the next day together. Then another and another, right through their wedding day, honeymoon and moving into their first home.

He’d been deployed sixteen months ago, being sent overseas before she’d had a chance to wrap her mind around being without him. At this moment in time, she had no idea where he was. If he was safe, hungry…if he still felt the same way about her after such an absence. People changed, didn’t they? It might not matter that she felt like a piece of her was missing, never to be replaced until he walked back into her life. She didn’t have him here to reassure her. She had nothing to hold on to.

She’d come here tonight to feel closer to Brandon, to exist inside a precious memory, just for the night. She thought it might make the separation seem more temporary, but it had only succeeded in making him seem a million miles away.

A woman jostled her elbow as she playfully swatted her boyfriend, splashing Denise’s drink onto the bar into a fizzy puddle. A sign that she should go. At that moment, it became imperative that she get past the ballroom doors, out into the night, before the clock struck midnight. She couldn’t be there when happiness erupted around her. Not when she felt like this. Denise stuffed her clutch purse under her arm and turned from the bar, intending to weave her way through the crowd as quickly as possible. A tuxedoed man blocked her path and she tried to skirt past him with a muttered apology. When he didn’t budge, she looked up into his face, assuming he hadn’t heard her. The words died on her lips.

Brandon. For a moment, Denise didn’t trust her eyes. She blinked once, but his image remained. His perfect, handsome image. Here. Safe. Smiling down at her.

“You going to stand there all night, baby doll, or are you going to put me out of my misery and kiss me?”

The same words he’d said to her five years earlier. Around them, the crowd began to count down the remaining seconds of 2014. A small cry escaped her lips. No way could she survive the full ten count. She threw herself into his arms and molded her lips to his, relief swamping her as his arms banded around her and he groaned against her mouth, in a way that felt like home.

She pulled back ever-so-slightly. “Spend tomorrow with me?”

“Every single day.” His eyes were full of promise. “Forever.”

Brent Mason and Hayden Winstead can't stand each other. She plans exclusive parties for her rich family’s charities. He’s a rough and tumble cop who rigs explosives for a living. Could two people be any less suited for conversation? They think not and prefer to keep it that way.

Unfortunately, their two best friends are deeply, disgustingly in love. Forced together, the mutual attraction simmering beneath the surface of Brent and Hayden’s non-relationship grows with every argument until it explodes into a scintillating night of mind-blowing sex. And it won’t be the last, as far as Brent’s concerned.

Hayden has a secret, though. Her father’s company is relying on a merger to save them from financial ruin, and only Hayden’s marriage to the CEO’s wealthy son can secure the deal. If she’s to protect her family, she’ll have to forget Brent. And he has no intention of being forgotten.

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