After college, Rory Finn left behind the familiarity of her quiet, picturesque hometown to pursue a professional career in the city. With her sights firmly on the future, Rory pressed on in hopes of forgetting the past until a jarring bit of unwelcome news forces her to confront it.
Her first love, the one she'd tried so hard to forget, is about to marry someone else. That pang Rory feels isn't envy, it's not even regret. It's love. But Rory can't be that girl. She won't. But if she doesn't, she'll never know what could have been. She'll never have another chance to tell him how she feels.
As she embarks on an impulsive, desperate bid to win him back, her mission turns into an unexpected and emotional journey of rediscovery. HAD TO BE YOU explores a history of love from its tentative beginnings to what may just turn out to be its final bittersweet end, as Rory ignores her head and follows her heart.
Had To Be You
by Juliet Chatham
PROLOGUE
Moonlight framed the inky patch
of sky out
the port window,
illuminating silhouettes of
pale shadows. Overhead, halyards clapped softly in the breeze, keeping
time with the creak of lines as the boat shifted, gently rocking in the waves.
Tiny thrills
of heat shivered
through her body,
thrumming with warm
electricity. One moment it felt like she was flying, and in the next,
melting away into a dream. His body was hot and hard, his kisses so soft and
deep. Her lips parted in a quiet moan as his tongue slipped past, tangling with
hers in a delicious slow slide, the surrounding ocean luminous and shimmering
in the quiet summer night.
Her breath
quickened, the wind like a
whisper of cool
silk against heated
skin as his mouth moved down her neck, tongue tracing
the hollow of her throat. She trembled with longing on every
soft caress as his skilled hands
curved around her
hips, smoothing warm
paths down the small
of her back. They
found their rhythm,
the ebb and flow,
bodies moving together
in perfect waves of
passion, a hot
undercurrent of pure
lust running beneath
this deep well
of feeling and emotion.
Mindlessly,
breathlessly, she gasped his name in a hot, hungry plea. He responded with a
soft groan, a jolt of pure desire.
She bit
her lip to
mute her cry,
clutching at his
broad shoulders, grasping
at the taut muscles in his arms, anything to hold
onto as she began to feel weaker and weaker against that relentless ache of
need. Each roll and push of his hips was a pure revelation of sensation,
filling her again and again. Her body arched, breasts crushed against the
muscled wall of his chest.
The
pleasure was indescribable, waves of ecstasy building in intensity. Heart beats
raced between shallow breaths and
quiet gasps as
she tightened around
him. Soft, thrilling declarations of love burned in his
kisses, murmured into her neck, whispered past her ear as he stroked her
hair. Yet he never
had to say
it at all;
she felt it everywhere. This
feeling, this exquisite, endless
ache, wasn’t just him inside her body but inside her heart as well, bursting
with the diamond brilliance of the starlit sky.
After, feeling
thoroughly sated yet
somehow still weak
from want, she settled into
his arms. She could feel the thunderous pounding of his heartbeat
gradually soften and slow through his warm skin as the boat bumped against the
mooring, floating on an aimless current. A sleepy smile lifted the corner of
her lips as he pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“You’re
going to marry me someday,” he said in his usual joking way, though with a
husky edge to it. “Just so you know.”
“I’ll
consider myself forewarned,” she replied and closed her eyes.
They
couldn’t stay here too long. She would have to go soon. But right now her whole
world consisted of
this place of
pure contentment and
perfect happiness, wrapped
inside a fleeting moment in time.
Excerpt 2
Jill
clicked off the phone and exhaled loudly, shaking her head.
“What
was that all about?” Trevor came back
into the room and
dropped into the chair across from her. He had a pint of
ice cream in his hand. “Is she upset because Matt is marrying Amanda? Doesn’t
she like her?”
“No,
it’s not that, really,” Jill replied,
gazing out the
window. A smudge
of moonlight was barely visible
in the night time sky above the buildings across the street. “Rory doesn’t even
know Amanda. They’ve never met. She’s just upset Matt is getting married, period. There’s a long history there, you know. Once upon a
time... well, they were pretty close. They were best friends, each other’s
first loves, you name it.”
Trevor
always tried to play it off like he was barely interested in gossip, above it
all even, but when they were alone he definitely took a sort of conspiratorial
delight in getting the scoop on
Jill’s small hometown
crowd. He himself had never experienced
just how tight
some childhood ties could bind.
“I
guess I recall you telling methat.” Swallowing a mouthful of ice cream,
hefrowned. “So, is she just jealous he found someone else? Or does she still
have feelings for him?”
“Who
knows?” Jill replied with another yawn, propping her elbow on the back of the
couch to rest her head in her hand. “Rory Finn is a very complicated girl.
Believe me, she makes me look easy.”
“Maybe
we shouldn’t talk about how easy you look, love,” he murmured as he dug his
spoon in, trying to hide a grin, “when you’re sitting there all knocked up.”
“Give
me that ice cream and I just might forget you said that.”
A lifelong New Englander, I divide my time between the North Shore and Cape Cod. My favorite things are beaches, boats, books, bars, the Boston Red Sox and boys, but not necessarily in that order. Consequently, you’ll probably find that these are the things I write about, too.
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