Love You More
Colleen Luview's love life is cursed. No, really. The small-town nurse is notorious in her touristy mountain community. After every third date she's ever had, the guy ends up in her emergency room.
She's untouchable now, and it's not her fault.
Resolved to branch out and find a way to have a life with a partner, children, and meaning, free from being a love pariah in a town devoted to it, she decides to leave her beloved Love You, Maine—where every day is Valentine's Day—to find a bigger dating pool.
And a better nickname than Third Date Colleen.
Moore Mottin hates feeling like damaged goods. Married and divorced twice before age thirty, he has a fifteen-year-old from a teenage pregnancy, was cheated on during his second wedding, and now even his best friend, Luke Luview, considers him the butt of every bad-luck joke when it comes to love.
When Luke's sister, Colleen, picks him up from the airport and a freak snowstorm forces them off the road, he rescues her from an icy pond and finds an old hunting cabin for shelter and safety. Vulnerable and shaking, the two give in to their long-simmering feelings for each other, but when they're discovered in the worst way possible, what seemed like a new lease on life turns into a life-altering mess.
Can Moore and Colleen overcome all the obstacles holding them back from a love that's been in front of their faces all this time?
If you're looking for a story featuring two star-crossed lovers doomed by unfair reputations, with a smooth-talking single dad who runs a jewelry store and his best friend's sister, set in a small town in New England, with a calico cat named Sandwich, a heroine with a dry wit and a can-do attitude, and a hero who just wants a good relationship with his estranged child and the chance to find lasting love… then this is your book.
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, and maybe some peanut butter for your burger (What? It's a thing…), and get your happy meter ready as you read the third book (a standalone!) in the Love You, Maine series—where love isn't just a feeling… it's a way of life.
Standalone
One-night stand
Forced proximity
Best friend's sister
Single dad
… and a calico cat named Sandwich
Chapter One
Colleen
Ding!
Colleen Luview’s eyes flitted to her phone, secure in a dashboard holder, the text coming through loud and clear as she saw the sign for the airport exit, piles of snow under the sign but the road clear, salt and sand trucks already sprinkling the roads for the pending new snow. Memory reminded her to stay in the right-hand lane for arrivals.
The text was from Tim, the guy she was currently dating.
It’s date four tonight. No ER. We’re good to go. Can’t wait to break the curse officially.
Her sigh stretched back at least a decade.
Ahhhhhh. Life was good.
Dating Tim Fields, the local CPA’s son and an accountant himself, was still super weird.
But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and when your nickname in your hometown was Third Date Colleen, you took what you could get. Every guy who wasn’t a transplant had been part of her life since birth, so her dating pool was more like a wide, shallow puddle.
A good dart player, strong at miniature golf, and a shockingly great kisser, Tim had surprised her.
And now, so had fate.
Her nickname started when she was twenty-one, fresh out of her two-year nursing program, her RN so new, she hadn’t even received her diploma yet. After her third date with local handyman Jake Forsythe, she’d gone to bed, woken up the next morning, headed to work in the emergency room of Luview Medical Center–and he’d been her first patient, the victim of a hedge trimmer that flipped when he wobbled on his ladder, earning him seventeen stitches from wrist to elbow and three in his groin.
Because he’d nearly cut off his, um… root.
Jake had the dubious honor of being the first victim of the curse.
He also had a new nickname: Slicer.
It was all downhill from there.
Joe Martinez had been bitten by a timber rattlesnake.
Mike McGinty had twisted his ankle hauling stone.
Gerry Jones got food poisoning.
And so on, until old Doc Blythe had finally said, as he wrote up an anti-nausea prescription for poor Gerry, “You really have a pattern, don’t you?”
She’d been leaving, about to go off shift, and his comment had stung, though she didn’t know why. Moore and Luke were walking in, the three of them on their way to go canoeing.
“What’s that, Doc?” she’d asked, not quite sure what he meant.
“You go out with a guy on the third date and he ends up in your ER.”
Luke had snorted. Moore had started snickering. Under his breath, he’d stage-whispered, “Watch out for Third Date Colleen.”
Doc had pressed his lips together. Luke bust out laughing. Colleen whapped Moore on the arm, hard, but it didn’t matter.
“Third Date Colleen, huh? You’re cursed, young lady,” Doc had said as he finished the prescription and gave her a sympathetic look.
All it took was for her cousin Sandy to overhear that, and it spread like wildfire throughout Luview, Maine, the town founded by her ancestors, where love wasn’t just a feeling–it was a way of life.
In small towns, once you had a nickname, might as well tattoo it on your forehead.
Tim, though, she thought as she read the text again, taking the exit for the airport.
Tim was the antidote to the curse.
Was he her soulmate? No. Were they falling in love and getting married? Hell, no. Did she plan to sleep with him?
Absolutely.
Because that’s the other problem with the curse: No one was willing to have sex with her until date number four.
Which made Colleen cursed and horny.
Ding!
Another text, from Tim again.
Just got back from an unexpected business trip. At the airport, on my way to get my car. Can’t wait to see you.
Airport?
She was at the airport. Unless he meant Portland? The closest airports to Luview were Portland, Maine and Manchester, New Hampshire, which was where she was right now.
Picking up Moore Mottin.
Sure, she was dating Tim, but Colleen’s crush on her brother’s best friend had started in eleventh grade and ended, well…
Never.
It had ended never.
Which was why she drove two hours and ten minutes each way, totally out of her way, to pick him up at the Manchester airport today.
“Doesn’t matter,” she muttered to herself as she made the big loop around the arrivals section of the airport, half an eye out for him, the other half on her phone, waiting for Moore’s text. “Tim’s an anomaly. Not getting my hopes up,” she added, as if being down on herself would magically make some other part of her life work.
Like Moore appearing so they could get home ahead of the big snowstorm the radio announcers couldn’t shut up about.
Ever since she was a junior in high school and he was a freshman, she’d found herself transfixed by the sight of him, complete in his presence and yet in a constant state of yearning for more.
For Moore.
The summer between eighth and ninth grade had been very, very good to him, the geeky, awkward boy who was her little brother’s best friend transformed into a tall, muscled, hot guy.