This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be constructed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.Make Me Yours (Heron’s Landing Book 3)Published by Blue Violet Press LLCSeattle, WashingtonCopyright © 2016, 2020 by Iris MorlandCover design by Qamber DesignsAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.Published 2020.First edition published 2016 under the title Desire Me Dearly (Heron’s Landing Book 3). Second edition 2020.

On the first day of classes, Kat Williamson cursed the humidity rampant in August and hoped her hair hadn’t turned into a ball of frizz before nine AM. Although the school where she taught computer classes to elementary students had AC, it struggled to keep up when the temperatures reached above one hundred, which was pretty common this time of year in Missouri.Kat hustled to the staff room. The copy machine always had a line this close to the bell. Normally Kat arrived earlier, but she’d woken up late and had had to hustle it to get to school on time. Two other teachers were ahead of Kat, and of course one of them ended up getting the copier jammed.Kat sighed inwardly. Today’s going to be a mess, isn’t it? Luckily, she didn’t have to teach until later that morning, but she still needed to finish her lesson plans. Normally she was way more organized, but she’d been distracted last night with messing with closing her grandmother’s cell phone account. Apparently telling someone the a

After finishing her lunch in the teacher’s lounge, Kat had headed to the restroom before returning to her classroom for the rest of the afternoon. As she passed a supply closet, she noticed that the door was cracked open, but there was no janitor in sight. She knew the cleaning staff never left the door unlocked or open in case kids wandered inside and played with things they shouldn’t, and as she was about to shut the door, she saw movement in the corner.Her heart stuttered. A rat? Maybe a raccoon that had gotten in last night? Or had a kid gotten inside? She walked in, flicking on the light overhead, and scanned the room. She saw a flash of pink in the corner. Kat was about to reprimand whoever had decided playing in the supply closet had been a good idea when she saw that the child in question was huddled on the floor, her head in between her knees, completely still and quiet, even as Kat approached.“Emma,” she breathed, kneeling in front of her. She touched her shoulder gently

When are you coming back to LA?Kat stared at the Facebook message in her inbox and sighed. She wished she had an answer to that particular question, but at the moment, she had no idea. Would she go back to LA at all? It would make sense. She had come to Heron’s Landing to care for her grandmother, but now that Lillian had passed away, she was just kind of hanging around, perpetually in limbo.I’m not sure. But I’ll let you know, she wrote, hitting enter before she could rethink her response to her ex-boyfriend’s question. She and Marcus had dated for close to three years while she’d attended UCLA and then worked as a computer programmer. Their breakup hadn’t been messy or bitter; in fact, it had been a mutual decision. She was moving to Missouri, he wasn’t, neither wanted to do long distance. So they’d parted ways and that was that.Kat sighed again. Was that her life, then? To be logical, practical, but without passion or any real emotion? Her list of boyfriends wasn’t extensive,

“Ms. Williamson, I think my computer froze.”Kat looked up from her own computer to see Danny Tucker raising his hand. She restrained a sigh. The kid’s computer inevitably froze at least twice each class period, mostly because he seemed determined to press as many buttons as possible until the computer gave up the fight.Kat fiddled with the mouse and, seeing that the cursor was frozen, she used the tried and true Control-Alt-Delete and told Danny to do only exactly as he was told when the computer rebooted. Danny nodded, but she knew that was basically code for “I’m going to mess around again the second your back is turned.”Kat didn’t mind teaching most days. The kids were entertaining, and she essentially babysat while they played keyboard games to improve their typing skills. It was a far cry from her work as a computer programmer, and if she thought about how she was wasting her own education to sit here and make sure kids like Danny didn’t cause their computers to explode, she