Read Ugly Ducklings Finish First Online
Authors: Stacy Gail
Ugly Ducklings Finish First
Ugly Ducklings Finish First
By Stacy Gail
Metal Mouth. Queen Geek. Dr. Payton Pruitt heard it all growing up. But she’s over it, and attending her ten-year high school reunion is the perfect way to prove it to herself. Even if there’s only one person she’s interested in seeing in Bitterthorn, Texas: Wiley Sharpe.
Now a respected lawyer, Wiley didn’t live down to the label Most Likely to Be Slapped with a Paternity Suit. But recent acts of vandalism suggest someone still sees him as a heartbreaker, and the reunion seems a likely place to find the culprit. Instead, Wiley comes face-to-face with his old pal Payton—and is wowed not only by her transformation into a ravishing swan, but by the connection they still share.
Payton is pleased the playboy she used to tutor has grown into an honorable man, but she’s too smart to fall for a guy with roots in a place she couldn’t wait to leave. But while Payton is an academic genius, Wiley is the one with the PhD in pleasure, and he intends to use it to convince her to stay...
63,000 words
Dear Reader,
I feel as though every month I start my letter the same, gushing over our month of releases and telling you how amazing and fantastic they are. This month, I’m going to change things up and start by telling you that they’re all quite awful. Okay, not really. Poor authors, I wonder how many of them reading this just had a mini heart attack? Of course you should be excited about this lineup of releases, because it’s another wonderful and diverse month.
In the new-and-unique category, this month we have our first ever decide-your-own-erotic-adventure. Christine d’Abo’s
Choose Your Shot
is an interactive erotic adventure that not only lets the reader choose who the heroine ends up with, but what kinky fun the characters get up to along the way.
We’re thrilled to welcome Karina Cooper to Carina Press. She’s moving her steampunk series, The St. Croix Chronicles, to Carina Press—starting with a prequel novella,
The Mysterious Case of Mr.
Strangeway
, in which a young Cherry St. Croix takes on her first bounty, only to find her efforts challenged by a collector whose motives run deeper than a hefty purse. Look for book three in The St. Croix Chronicles,
Corroded
, releasing in September 2013.
We have a strong lineup of contemporary romances this month. Fiona Lowe returns with her next Wedding Fever book,
Picture Perfect Wedding.
Tamara Morgan brings us
The Derby Girl
, in which a roller-derby girl lives up to her “bad girl” image to woo an unattainable plastic surgeon, only to discover that he’s the one man trained to see past the surface. In the humorous contemporary romance category, Stacy Gail’s
Ugly Ducklings Finish First
will be a hit with fans of high-school reunion romances, and with those who like their romance on the more lighthearted side.
I’m also thrilled to welcome
three
debut authors to Carina Press this month, all with contemporary romances. In Kelsey Browning’s
Personal Assets
, book one of the Texas Nights series, a recovering good girl needs the right man to help her find her inner bad girl—which is easier said than done in a small Texas town. Next, when the bank refuses Emma the loan she needs to save her family home, she must turn to her neighbor Mitch McKenna, a sexy real-estate investor whose reputation she’s spent the past six months pulverizing into sand, in
Unexpectedly You
by Lily Santana. And last, but certainly not least,
Knowing the Score
by Kat Latham features a smokin’ hot rugby player with a scandalous past who gives up his vow of celibacy to help a virgin overcome her fear of intimacy. Three debut authors offer up three terrific contemporary romance novels—make sure to give them each a try!
This month we also have three fantastic male/male romances. Kim Knox kicks off a fun-filled science-fiction historical trilogy. As described by the author,
Agamemnon Frost and the House of Death
is
Sherlock Holmes
meets
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
With aliens. Check out further Agamemnon Frost stories in September and October 2013.
John Tristan joins Carina Press with his male/male fantasy romance,
The Adorned.
A beautiful young man indentures himself to a tattooist and becomes a living canvas for the artist and his inhuman patrons. And for those who like their male/male romance in the contemporary genre, Libby Drew’s
Bending the Iron
is sure to hit the mark as she builds a brand for emotional, wonderful male/male romance.
Following book one of her Magick Trilogy,
Magick by Moonrise
, Laura Navarre takes us back into her historical paranormal world. When the Angel of Death falls in love with life, will a secret Tudor princess pay the ultimate price? Tudor England and the celestial realm collide in
Midsummer Magick.
Last,
Love Letters Volume 4:
Travel to Temptation
continues the collection of
A
to
Z
erotic short-story romances penned by Ginny Glass, Christina Thacher, Emily Cale and Maggie Wells. Volumes 1 through 3 are now available. Look for volumes 5 and 6,
Exposed
and
Cowboy’s Command
, on sale in September and October 2013.
As always, we have a significant backlist of books that I hope you’ll browse and take a look at, in genres from horror to mystery to fantasy to female/female and across the ranges of romance. There’s an adventure waiting for every reader!
We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to
[email protected]
. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
www.carinapress.com
www.twitter.com/carinapress
www.facebook.com/carinapress
Dedication
For Eva Lopez, MD, true brainiac and zebra hunter
extraordinaire. At last, it’s your story!
Chapter One
The heavy pulse of music echoed off Bitterthorn High School’s locker-lined walls. A scattering of people dressed in suits and cocktail dresses milled outside the gymnasium, but the main action was through the double doors at the end of the hall. Straightening his tie one last time, Wiley Sharpe pushed through those doors and into his ten-year high school reunion, his attention razor sharp as it slashed over every face in the crowd.
Ready or not
,
here I come.
“Wiley! Hey, if it isn’t the Coyote!”
On the alert, Wiley turned just as a hand slapped against his shoulder and propelled him deeper into the noisy, dimly lit gymnasium.
“Holy cow, isn’t this amazing? A real blast from the past. How ya doin’, buddy?”
He turned to regard the smallish man with a weak chin and generous spare tire with zero recognition. His gaze flicked to the sticker slapped off-center on the man’s tweed jacket and read,
Hi!
My Name Is
... “Tom Pattison.” Relaxing enough to smile, Wiley shook Tom’s hand and struggled to relate the pudgy, balding man with the memory of the scrawny kid he’d known a decade ago. “Wow. What a surprise.”
“You can say that again! Boy, I recognized you from the moment you walked through the door.”
“Really?” That made one of them.
“What have you been doing, sleeping in a time capsule?”
“Good guess.”
“Listen, I want you to meet the wife.” He wrapped an arm around the shoulders of a red-haired woman who so perfectly matched him in overall size and coloring Wiley couldn’t help but think of bookends. “Liz, this is Wiley Sharpe, former BMOC and all-around head jock of our little campus.”
Wiley offered a polite smile. “How do you—”
“You had your best game right here on this court, didn’t you?” Clearly lost in a glory-days fog, Tom scanned the crowded gymnasium. “Thirty points and some god-awful amount of rebounds, am I right?”
It was thirty-three points, ten assists and twelve rebounds, but Wiley merely shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Hell, I remember it like it was yesterday.” Tom turned to his wife with a grin. “Honey, this is the guy I told you about. You know, the one who was voted most likely to get slapped with a paternity suit?”
“Oh, that’s right.” Liz smiled at Wiley with the renewed interest of a hungry woman sizing up a fresh piece of center-cut meat. “Has that happened yet?”
The loud blaring of music covered Wiley’s sigh. It was probably ridiculous to hope everyone had forgotten about that. “I’m happy to report it hasn’t.”
“Luckiest guy I’ve ever seen, if you know what I mean.” Tom guffawed, slapping Wiley on the back once more.
Smile screwed firmly in place, Wiley searched the room for an escape route.
“So, Coyote. What are you doing these days?”
Getting threatening emails
,
being harassed by crank calls
,
having my house covered with spray-paint.
You know
,
the usual.
“I’m a practicing family lawyer here in Bitterthorn, but I also teach part-time at UTSA.” He spotted a deputy placed discreetly near the entrance, no doubt Sheriff Berry’s ham-handed idea of staying on top of Wiley’s harassment case, and decided now was as good a time as any to make a break for it. “If you’ll excuse—”
“A lawyer? Did you say
lawyer?
” Tom’s face turned stoplight-red as he laughed hard enough to bring up a lung. “
You?
No way, you’ve gotta be kidding!”
Wiley’s smile vanished. Maybe trawling his high school reunion for crazy-ass stalkers was a bad idea, after all. “No, I’m not kidding.”
“Dude, no one’s going to believe that. Aren’t you the guy who didn’t get to graduate with the rest of the class?”
Wiley cleared his throat. “I received my diploma later that summer.”
“We all thought you’d
never
graduate. You had to have that brainy kid tutor you—you know, that weird little metal mouth. What was her name? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Payton Pruitt.”
“Yeah, Payton Pruitt! She was like, eight when she graduated.”
“Actually she was fifteen.”
Tom waved this away as unimportant. “Remember how everyone ragged you about being taught by the Baby Brain? This poor friggin’ guy,” Tom confided to his wife, “had to be tutored through his junior and senior years by the nerdiest nerd to have ever nerded her way across God’s green earth, because the coach was paranoid about benching him for failing grades.”
Wiley’s eyes narrowed. “We’re almost thirty, Tom. In case you missed the memo, calling people childish names is officially absurd.”
“Oh yeah, I was just—”
“Uh-huh. I’ll see you later, all right?”
“Hey, Coyote—”
“Take care.” As he slipped into the crowd, Wiley took a fortifying breath. Holy crap. If the rest of the evening was going to be that rough, he was in for one pisser of a night. But he had to stick it out. If he wanted answers to who the hell had it in for him—someone who knew he’d been called the Coyote back in the day—the reunion was the perfect place to start looking.
An hour later the gym was more packed than ever. The clash of perfumes, colognes and the scent of warm bodies meshed into an overheated musk that brought Wiley back to the dances of his youth. A couple of his old classmates whom he saw every day—the few who’d opted to stay in the small town of Bitterthorn, Texas—drifted by to ask after his latest case, a foreclosure that had everyone concerned. Already he’d danced with his first love, Karen Hobbs—now Karen Goldblatt—laughed with old teammates about locker-room shenanigans and passed the time with the school’s former principal. Friends he had forgotten he had surrounded him in every smiling face he saw.
Which was great, except for one small problem. He was even more stumped for answers now than when he’d first arrived.
Shit.
Back to square one.
Wiley’s preoccupied gaze landed on a tall, dark-haired woman hovering close to the main doors, and the frustration of his fruitless search vanished as he took in the spectacular length of her legs. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t having a great time, if her taut expression was anything to go by. Like him, she was scanning the crowds as if her life depended on it. She had one of those chic envelope purses under one slender arm, and her rose-colored halter dress clung to her frame like a jealous lover, underscoring her subtle curves with cool, unruffled elegance.
A corner of Wiley’s mouth lifted in pure male appreciation while the search for his stalker got jettisoned to the backseat.
Unruffled
was as good a description as any for this lady. All slicked down and polished up, she looked like she’d dropped out of a bandbox with not a single hair out of place. Hell, it was only human nature that his fingers itched to muss her up in every delicious way imaginable.
Before he got too far ahead of himself, Wiley flicked a quick glance at her long-fingered, delicate-looking hands. They revealed a couple glittering rings, but not one on the finger that would put her in the No Trespassing zone.
In a heartbeat, his smile shifted from appreciative to predatory.
Promising.
Definitely promising.
She had to be somebody’s date, he concluded, not taking his eyes off her out of an irrational fear she’d vanish. Any man would want to have such a woman accompany him to a reunion. Or anywhere else for that matter, though preferably to a bed with lots of room to maneuver. She was the picture of sophistication, with a chin tilted at an angle just haughty enough to make him want to bug her. Poke her. Make her give up and give in even as she insisted he do the same.
Which, of course, he would.
She shifted her weight, and the subtle flare of her hip jutted out like a challenge. His attention lingered on that smooth line—the curve of her ass made his mouth water, and those traffic-stopping legs left bare and gleaming like living silk were so perfect they didn’t seem real. High-class usually equaled high-maintenance, but just one glance told him this looker would be worth it. More than worth it. A man who had such a woman in his life could only count himself as one lucky son of a gun.
And he’d be right.
A sensual tug resonated deep in his gut, a familiar reaction to a beautiful woman, but unfamiliar in its intensity. And he realized with an unnerving start that even if there had been a ring on her finger, it wouldn’t have mattered. He still would have noticed her. He still would have wanted to talk to her. To lean closer to see what color her eyes were. To breathe in her elusive scent. To sample the silken glide of her skin beneath his hand. And lips. And tongue.
He still would have desired her.
Wiley’s pulse paused when the woman’s hand crept to her throat. In a nervous gesture she couldn’t seem to restrain, she fiddled with a dainty gold chain that glittered beneath the hollow of her neck before she brought it to the slicked-up bow of her mouth.
Her mouth
...
Wiley pushed his way through the milling crowd, his edgy restlessness forgotten under a wave of nerve-tingling anticipation.
* * *
She’d done it.
Payton Pruitt looked around, so pleased with herself it was all she could do to not break into an all-out victory jig right on the spot. She had come to the last place on earth she wanted to be, walked through the front doors like they weren’t her personal Gateway to Everlasting Hell and looked at the people who had made her life a misery a decade ago. And wonder of wonders, she hadn’t thrown up on her shoes.
In her book that definitely called for a happy dance.
When she’d received the invitation, her knee-jerk response had been to throw it away before she broke out in hives. A
reunion?
What a rip-snorting laugh that was. It was amazing anyone from her class had the gall to invite her back, especially since they knew she had no friends to reunite with. Super-nerds like her never had
friends
in high school. Tormentors, though—that was another story. She’d had so many tormentors she couldn’t even count them all. Some days it had felt like a Hollywood cast of thousands.
It had taken weeks to work up the courage to come back to Bitterthorn, along with a couple of obsessive-compulsive trips to the salon to get her short brown hair cut to perfection by a stylist known only by one name. To further boost her confidence, she’d also bought the high-end hybrid car she’d been waffling on, using the excuse of needing a reliable vehicle to cover the four-hour drive from Houston to Bitterthorn. It didn’t help. That stupid invitation had proved to be a powerful little sucker. Despite her best efforts to prop herself up, it still knocked her off her hard-won high horse and back into the land of perpetual inferiority. And all it had done was simply invite her to step back into hell.
But when it came right down to it, there had never been any other choice. She’d
had
to come back to Bitterthorn High this one last time. If she ever wanted to have peace of mind again, she was damn well going to face the dragon that was her past and curb-stomp it until it stopped twitching.
Let the stomping commence.
Grim-faced, Payton made herself look for her past torturers in the crowd and even managed to spot a few. How nice, she thought, her upper lip curling. The heartless bastards looked like they were having a whale of a time, chatting it up and laughing like they weren’t as evil as the Spanish Inquisition. Did any of them remember tying her Pretty Bitties training bra onto the gym’s basketball hoop for all to see? Did any of these now grown men recall how, as boys, they would literally run away screaming because she committed the unpardonable sin of walking the same hall with them? Even now, would any of them care that barfing up her breakfast had been a part of her daily getting-ready-for-school routine?
Probably not, on all counts.
It didn’t matter, Payton told herself, irked with the whiny pity party kicking inside her. She wasn’t their victim anymore. The person who walked through the doors of Bitterthorn High’s gymnasium was no longer the ugly duckling they’d bullied. Her once frizzy brown hair was now smooth and sleek, her teeth a study of gleaming perfection after years of enduring braces and retainers. Her tormentors could suck it hard as far as she was concerned. She didn’t need their validation. Why would she? She believed in herself, and that was all that mattered.
Now, she thought, dropping the chain she was chewing on. Time to bounce before she puked her guts out.
“At last, my evening is complete.”
Startled by the voice so close to her ear the breath teased her hair, Payton snapped around to find herself captured by the greenest eyes she had ever seen.
Wiley.
Payton’s throat closed with a click. Her blood stopped dead in its tracks. The planet might have even paused in its cosmic rotation. With a conscious effort she locked her knees before they could take the easy way out and buckle beneath her, and it took every ounce of strength she had not to lick her lips and smooth her hair back. She’d patted herself on the back too soon, she despaired even as she battled against the desire to run, or hide, or curl into a fetal position. Coming face-to-face with a roomful of almost-strangers was a snap compared to meeting the sorest point in her past.
The years had been good to Wiley Sharpe. Too good. How was it possible the added maturity of ten years only made the virile impact of this man all the more potent? Seriously, how was that fair? He should be balding or graying, or
something
, damn it. But no. His hair was still the thick hammered-gold pelt she recalled all too well. The remembered feel of it sliding beneath her fingers as she’d comforted Wiley so long ago after his father’s sudden death made her fingers tingle. His movie-star features had become more defined with age, stronger and elegantly carved compared to the boyish features of his youth. There was the slightest dent in his nose where he’d had it broken by a bully, yet that one imperfection only enhanced the overall character of his face. His jaw was rugged and square, and the brackets on either side of his full yet masculine mouth were more pronounced, as though he smiled far more often than he frowned.