Shady Hollow

“I am married, Mateo, you need..” He grabbed my hair aggressively and claimed my lips. “I don't care.. I still want you. You are mine!” He pinned me against the wall and grabbed my ass. “Mateo, we are in my matrimonial home..” “Fuck that” Astrid, a 30-year-old woman, and Mateo, a 22-year-old dude, got into a secret and dangerous love affair, but is it genuine from both sides and how long can they keep it a secret???

Blue Pierce, freshly eighteen, was well-aware her quiet New York neighbors cared for money, but not much else. What she hadn’t realized, were the lengths her own parents would take to get it. Sold off into a marriage with a man she’d hardly met, Blue has one escape: a clandestine affair with Vincent Carmichael. Her father’s boss. Dark. Brooding. Hot as a bitch in heat… and twice her age.

"I ask you one more time, Ally Shale, who sent you?" He moved closer to me and fired his interrogatory knives through me. Despite the fury in his eyes, I only felt one thing: his iciness. His words were as cold as he is. He terrorised me just with a stare. Was this the same man who had put his hot lips on me back at the club? Ice and fire don't mix very well. Every breath of the man on me sends fear rushing through my veins. I know he is capable of murder, as every mafia member is. He seized my chin and looked at me all over as if trying to find the answer on my body. "I can't name my employers," my teeth chattered as I spoke. I addressed him just as Kevin's man had. "Sir Tyler, I just... I didn't mean to intrude into your personal conversation… I was trying to just get close to you…." All of a sudden, I felt incapable of lying. It dawned upon me what I had just been injected with. But despite being unable to lie, I was still able to resist naming who I worked for. Lies and secrets were, after all, two different matters. Could I have been injected with the infamous truth serum? I questioned myself in fear. "Your resistance to the serum is strong, my little prisoner." He laughed coldly at me, but the next moment, his lips curled into an indescribable and yet amorous smile.

Nora Ashby came to Vael Academy for one reason the scholarship that would clear her mother's debt and give her a future that didn't taste like survival. She did not come to become the vampire prince's fiancée. But Caspian Vael needs a human anchor before he can claim his throne, and after Nora walked up to him at orientation and made him look down at a shirt that had nothing on it then laughed and walked away he decided she was exactly the problem he needed. The arrangement is simple. One year. Public appearances. A convincing performance. At the end of it, she walks away with her debts cleared and her life back. Except nobody told her about the second clause. Nobody told her that the choice to leave would belong entirely to her. That no court, no prince, no ancient law could remove her once she'd signed. That the most powerful vampire on the island would have no legal way to protect her only a personal one. And nobody warned her that somewhere between the arguments and the rooftop conversations and the way he looks at her when he thinks she isn't watching, she would stop wanting to leave. Caspian chose her because she was the one human at Vael he was certain he couldn't fall for. He was wrong about that. He knew it by the third week. He just didn't know what to do with it.

Someone is killing unmarked souls, and Ru Roberts is the only one that can stop them. That's a bit of a problem, though, since she has no idea she's a Keeper. Adopted as a small child, Ru knows next to nothing about her birth parents. Her new mom insists she was given up because she "ruins everything." Hence, her name-Ruin. Yet, Ru has managed to make a life for herself in the small town of Reaper's Hollow, working as a fourth grade teacher, which she loves. If it wasn't for her inability to touch anything electrical without starting a fire, she'd be the happiest girl in Upstate New York. That is, until the charming and devastatingly handsome Cutter Michaels moves into the classroom across the hallway and starts filling her head with all sorts of unbelievable fantasies. He claims she is the lost Keeper, the daughter of a half-angel and a half-demon, and she is the only one who can help him locate three portals the Reapers, as in Grim Reaper, are using to ferry souls away to the Underworld. Ru knows he's lost his mind, and yet she finds herself being sucked into his delusions more and more each day. The fact that he can shoot blue fire out of his hands might have something to do with that. Once she begins having strange dreams where she comes face to face with Thanatos, the most powerful Reaper of all, Ru begins to think there might be more to Cutter's story than she's been giving him credit for. Will joining Cutter lead her to find her biological parents and discover the powers coursing through her veins, or will Thanatos claim her for his own?

By the fifth year of my marriage to Noah Lester, everyone insisted that I, Emma Newman, was his eternal muse. But I knew the truth. Behind my back, Noah cycled through a parade of fresh-faced, eager lovers. He even flaunted them at social gatherings, swapping one for another with shameless ease. When friends teased him—"Didn’t you swear Emma was the love of your life? Why the revolving door of mistresses?"—he’d just laugh, arms slung around his latest conquests. "Once you’ve caught your muse the glow fades. Give me someone new and tender any day—at least they keep things exciting." So I began plotting my escape. What Noah never realized was that I had grown tired of him, too. Tired of this life, of these performances. I was done.