Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 45063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 225(@200wpm)___ 180(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 225(@200wpm)___ 180(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Bryson’s thirty-seven, a successful doctor, and wouldn’t look twice at a wannabe podcaster, nineteen-year-old virgin… right?
My crush started way too early when Dr. Sawyer cast my broken wrist from a childhood accident.
My brother, Adam, would freak out if he knew about the inappropriate, oh-so-steamy fantasies I’ve entertained about Bryson. Not that it matters.
Adam and Bryson had a fight last year. It was so bad Bryson moved to the other side of the country. My brother won’t tell me what it was about, but I’m wondering what happened. No way their fight was about me.
Now Bryson is back, and I am so unprepared for the bombshell this possessive, jealous doctor drops on me. I never in a million years expected this…
An insta-everything, standalone romance with a curvy FL, HEA, no cheating, no cliffhanger, hot alpha male who is just as obsessed as his obsession.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
Harper
I stand next to my brother, Adam, feeling his grief emanating from him. It’s in the air, palpable, and it just makes the guilt twisting in my gut even worse.
On the other side of Adam stands Bryson. It’s been a year since he was on the East Coast when he and Adam had a huge fight. They’ve been best friends since Adam was a little kid—before I was born.
As the words are read, Adam’s wife is laid to rest. Gorgeous Eva was so quick with a smile and a joke and more of a second mother to me than a sister-in-law.
I have to stop myself forcibly from turning my head away from Adam and drinking in the sight of Bryson. I saw the doctor when we arrived. He’s six and a half feet tall, his suit tightly hugging his bulging muscles. His face was severe, his ice-blue eyes hidden behind heavy sunglasses, his chest heaving as though he wanted to run at me—to throw his arms around me.
To tell me he’s as obsessed with me as I am with him. It’s been this way ever since he first cast my broken wrist when I was a kid.
Adam and Bryson are both thirty-seven. I’m nineteen, almost twenty. Our parents took their time with the second kid, which means I had plenty of chances to crush on my brother’s best friend.
As they lower the coffin into the ground, I fight off tears, both wishing Bryson had stayed away and so relieved that he’s returned.
I’ve got no clue what their fight was about, but Bryson has always been there for Adam, and it’s no different now.
My mind returns to the countless moments Eva and I shared, the laughter across the dinner table, her hand ruffling my hair when she and Adam got married. It was almost a decade ago, and she asked me to be one of her bridesmaids, grinning down at me.
Adam wraps his arm around me, both of us sinking into our grief as my tough brother tries to hold back his tears.
In the end, it’s too difficult.
We cry together.
At the wake, I do everything I can to avoid Bryson. I try not to think about the countless times I enclosed our names in “love hearts,” as I sent messages out into the universe.
One day, we would be together.
I’d run my hand through his dark black hair… and then, as the years progressed, it would become increasingly silver, with tinges at the edges, and strikes of lightning through the night.
I knew we couldn’t be together, obviously. Bryson wasn’t the sort of creep to respond to a kid’s crush with a cast on her arm. That didn’t stop my mind from leaping into the future, imagining myself as the sort of woman who could intensify his expression.
I’m sitting in the corner with Mom and Dad, everybody somber, sharing stories about Eva. It’s almost too much to take.
I am lifted by the thought that Bryson is here whenever I grieve. He’s back. Is he here to stay?
It makes me hate myself, this obsessiveness, but I’ve never been able to stop. It’s like there’s a crazed stalker in my head, intent on making him mine when I should think of Adam and the pain it would bring.
Anyway, even if Adam and Bryson weren’t best friends until recently, it doesn’t mean Bryson would want me. He’s almost forty, mature, experienced, so handsome in a rugged and hot sort of way. I noticed several women sneaking glances at him during the service.
He runs his own medical practice… or he did until he uprooted and moved to the West Coast to work for a large, well-paying practice… after the argument.
“You don’t need to know the details,” Adam told me when it all went down, “but Bryson and I aren’t friends anymore. He’ll be moving away.”
It was difficult to hide my natural reaction, scream, yell, and demand Adam somehow make Bryson stay.
It wasn’t like I could tell my brother, “But I live for the moments where I can catch a glimpse of him, where he looks my way, and I can imagine his intense expression is all for me.”
“It’s a very sad day,” Dad says, sighing. “She lived an incredible life… the charity work, the teaching. Think of all the good she did.”
“And all the good she could’ve done,” Mom says, her voice shuddering.
My parents currently live in Spain, having moved away when I was eighteen for a business opportunity Dad couldn’t pass up. They knew Adam would take care of me since there are sixteen years between us, and he’s always been a guardian as much as a brother.
This makes my betrayal and fixation even worse.
Looking across the room, I spot Adam and Bryson together. They’re standing at the window. The sun has disappeared behind the clouds, no sunglasses on Bryson’s face, his powerful features softer than I’ve ever seen them…