LOL #3 Romantic Comedy Anthology Read online

  These sixteen all-new romantic comedy stories, from romance’s funniest bestselling authors, will make you laugh and swoon. Check the description before each story for a HEAT LEVEL rating, from Sweet to Spicy.

  The theme of this volume is SNOW. Enjoy!

  Waiting for Snow - Melanie Marchande

  For the first time ever, here’s his version of how the world’s most obnoxious billionaire playboy fell in love with his muse.

  Heat level: Erotic

  Skiing in June - Blair Babylon

  Rae Stone-von Hannover is no fairy tale princess. She’s a country bumpkin currently turning into a pregnant pumpkin. When three real princesses try to steal away Rae’s handsome prince, she’ll do anything to keep her man.

  Heat level: Spicy hot, 4 flames!

  The Snowman - Sky Corgan

  Ferne Lynch hates living in Alaska. She wants nothing more than to get away and explore the world. One night, she builds a snowman and makes a wish upon a star. Before the night is through, a mysterious man shows up on Ferne’s doorstep. Are they meeting by chance, or is something magical happening?

  Heat level: Sweet

  Can You Love Me Now? - Gretchen Galway

  Sasha Selkirk has been in love with her best friend’s brother, Jake Lapinksi, since she was thirteen. Now twenty-eight, she finds him at the snowbound mountain cabin where she’s staying… and trying to forget about him.

  Heat level: Sensual

  Snowbound - Victoria Wessex

  When a blizzard traps shy girl Arabella in a gas station with cocky but gorgeous Jarrett, it feels like a fate worse than death. But as temperatures plunge outside, the friction between them leads to sparks… and a whole new way to keep warm.

  Heat level: Spicy

  It Was Always You - Brenna Aubrey

  When Jeremy, her brother’s best friend, came back into her life, Michaela cursed the fact that she was in a relationship. Now Michaela’s single again, but he’s dating her roommate.

  Heat level: Sensual

  Take for Granted - Daisy Prescott

  Jo and Ben Grant are spending a week in Aspen, without the kids. Bliss. Heaven. When Jo plans a wild evening out, will Ben embrace the crazy?

  Heat level: Sweet & Spicy

  Fall Fast - Zoe York

  Navy SEAL Nathan Meyers isn’t complaining about being snowed in at O’Hare Airport with a sexy flight attendant. But one night together isn’t going to be enough…

  Heat level: Erotic

  Vegas Holiday - JJ Knight

  Jo’s high-profile wedding is getting to her, so she escapes to Las Vegas with her best friend to take a day off. Mayhem ensues, including a surprise attack by an army of Xena Warrior Princesses, and the arrival of an entire troupe of Elvis impersonators.

  Heat level: Moderately spicy

  When Things go Wrong - Lacey Silks

  High school friends who don’t believe in lasting relationships reconnect when they’re forced to spend the night together, trapped in a cave.

  Heat level: Erotic

  This Never Happened - Julia Kent

  A stolen kiss with her professor two months ago comes back to haunt a young woman when fate—and Mother Nature—bring them together.

  Heat level: Mostly sweet, some spice!

  Snow Kissed - Rachel Schurig

  Too-shy-for-her-own-good Bella is taking a break from her med school applications to get some dating experience. Scott seems like just the guy to help her, and a working vacation at a luxurious ski resort is the perfect setting… for romance, or disaster.

  Heat level: Erotic

  Begin Again - Harlow Nash

  After catching her cheating ex in the act, Louisa Gallo has sworn off men forever—until she collides with an old flame and starts to second guess everything she thought she knew about love.

  Heat level: Sweet

  Once Upon a Midnight Snowy - N.M. Silber

  Prosecutor Kevin Taylor can’t help falling for his feisty neighbor Alison Klein twice - once in the show, and once in the night. A cryptic note and a unexplained bang bring the two would-be sleuths and lovers together for romance and mystery.

  Heat level: Sweet

  Warm Winter Kisses - Juliet Spenser

  Best friends forge a deeper connection during a winter storm. Hannah is a B&B manager and her best friend, Liam, is a detective. Can she keep her feelings a secret from the hunky investigator?

  Heat level: Sensual

  Love and Elephants - Mimi Strong

  A jaded businessman who doesn’t believe in love crosses paths with a witch or two. A case of mistaken identity leads to shenanigans, and kissing!

  Heat level: Sweet

  Turn the page to begin reading the stories, or click one from the menu!

  Waiting for Snow

  Melanie Marchande

  How the world’s most obnoxious billionaire playboy fell in love with his muse.

  DESCRIPTION:

  Hello, my name’s Adrian and I’m addicted to my secretary.

  (Hello, Adrian.)

  Let me tell you how it happened. She had the audacity to waltz into my life, all quirked eyebrows and sarcastic comments and refusing to let me get away with anything. It was terrible.

  I loved it.

  GENRE: Contemporary Billionaire Romance, 9,600 words or approximately 38 pages. It contains adult language, spicy love scenes, and a billionaire author who’s exactly as sexy as he thinks he is. This is a standalone short story with a happy ending. The characters of Meg and Adrian were introduced in Melanie Marchande’s New York Times bestselling novel His Secretary: Undone, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy their unfolding love story as presented here, from Adrian’s point of view for the first time ever.

  HEAT LEVEL: Erotic

  Turn the page to begin reading Waiting for Snow by Melanie Marchande, or click here to return to this anthology’s Table of Contents.

  Waiting for Snow

  A His Secretary: Undone Short Story Melanie Marchande

  Then

  She’s hopping on one foot, trying in vain to yank off her snow boot and change into some more work-appropriate footwear. She has no idea I’m watching her.

  It’s snowing outside.

  I’ve never been a fan of winter. Specifically, the holidays. Business slows down, everyone’s supposed to go home and spend time with their families. It’s Bizarro World.

  Everything else in life is tailor-made for us singles - we’re expected to have no loyalties except to ourselves and our jobs, to work ourselves to death, to be motivated, to be driven, to care about absolutely nothing except success.

  Then, November comes. Everything we’re supposed to focus on during the rest of the year suddenly falls by the wayside, and for those few months out of the year, suddenly it’s all about family.

  Everything on TV, everything in every single movie, they all seem designed to make me feel like shit. For those few months out of the year, I’m not supposed to be a successful businessman anymore. I’m supposed to have a few giggling toddlers running around my feet, grabbing presents under the tree and shaking them. I’m supposed to stumble into the kitchen after too little sleep and too many cookies “for Santa,” and pry open the can of discount coffee while the jingle reminds me that this is the best part of waking up.

  But in reality, outside of Commercial Land, I’m alone in the world. And so is my secretary.

  Well, Meghan has family, but she doesn’t like them. That much is obvious.

  Risinger Industries doesn’t shut down for the week of Christmas. I like to keep people on their toes. Of course we’re not actually open, and no one but me is actually working - but I feel like if I shut the place down completely
, everyone gets complacent. Meghan only asked for four days off. Four days? Who doesn’t ask for a week, for Christmas?

  Meghan doesn’t want to spend time with her family. She’ll use me as an excuse, which shouldn’t bother me. And it doesn’t. Except… well, it goes against everything I thought I learned about her, in the last four months. From the moment I hired her, “spineless” was never an attribute I would’ve pinned on that woman.

  Sarcastic, yes. Infuriating. She’s biting back all the nasty things she wants to say to me, but if she thinks I can’t tell, she’s insane. If looks could kill, this place would just be a smoking pile of rubble. She hates me.

  So I smile a little bit, watching her struggle with her boots. It’s just funny to watch her, those little noises of frustration, the way she’s bent over so her skirt hikes up to the middle of her thigh -

  All right, so she’s fucking sexy. Let’s just move on from that.

  I have been trying. Since day one. I’ve made a valiant effort not to think about her that way, because it’s such a bad idea. She’s the only assistant I can see myself keeping for any length of time; I’m not going to jeopardize that by getting too close to her. There are plenty of women in the world, and she’s nothing special.

  I keep telling myself that, until I almost believe it.

  In the past, I’ve made a point of hiring against type. My secretaries are always slender blondes whom everyone assumes I’m fucking, not realizing that my tastes run more to freckles and curls and hips soft enough to really sink your grip into. I want to feel like I’m leaving fingerprints on her body. I want lush, I want soft, and more than that, I want her.

  God damn it.

  At that exact moment, she turns around. Her face is slightly flushed, and her hair is frizzing wildly in defiance of everything I’m sure she did this morning to tame it.

  “Good morning, sir,” she says, her eyes widening slightly. She might hate me, but she’s still trying to put on a professional front, and she’s not particularly pleased that I’ve spotted her struggling with something that ought to be simple.

  “You’re early,” I point out.

  “Yesterday, you said I was late.” Her mouth twists a little. “Is this another one of your famous no-win scenarios?”

  I grin. She’s the only person in the this building who’s not afraid of me, and part of me wishes she was. But much more than that, it thrills me a little.

  “Just try to improve your sense of timing,” I tell her. She’s not going to take me seriously. She never does. I can make ridiculous demands of anyone else in the office, and they’ll just give me that deer-in-the-headlights look, and stumble backwards out of the room saying yes, Mr. Risinger, I’m sorry, Mr. Risinger. This girl, meanwhile…

  Maybe it’s because she can tell I’m picturing her in nothing but fishnets.

  God damn it, am I?

  Well, I certainly am now.

  I am a grown man with control over my own life, and my own desires. I have been for, what, almost a decade now? I will not be stymied by a voluptuous redhead who just happened to walk into my life when I needed another distraction like I needed a hole in my head.

  Somehow, I have to exorcise her from my life. My thoughts. I only know of one way to do that, and I really, really don’t want to.

  But I can’t see any other choice.

  I have to write about her.

  Now

  She whistles softly, and the fluffy Pyrenees comes trotting right to her. He stares up at her, big, black eyes watching her intently. Waiting for her next command.

  “Good boy,” she murmurs, scratching behind his ears.

  I relate to this dog more than I probably should.

  Meg glances at me. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to adopt him. He’s already got six families on his waiting list.”

  “Good,” I tell her, sternly, covering pretty well for what was actually running through my head. “You spend too much time here with all the animals to actually take one of them home.”

  Our breaths come out in bursts of white steam, but there’s still no snow. It was a green, gray, crunchy Christmas. I’ve never thought of myself as sentimental, particularly not about inconvenient weather patterns, but it feels strange to be this deep into winter without a single significant snowfall. I guess, in a way, I like the city better when it’s blanketed in white, quieting everything. Until the plows come by and turn it to sludge.

  I hired her in the early autumn. I distinctly remember that. Those times when the plants can’t quite decide if they should keep blooming, and the sun-warmed days give way to cool, crisp nights. It wasn’t until the first snowfall that I realized I might have something other than idle feelings of fleeting attraction for her, and now we’re…

  Well, something. “Dating” is too casual, and half of her clothes are at my place even if she hasn’t technically moved in. When she decides not to spend the night, I act all cool, then spend the night tossing and turning sleeplessly in the very same bed that I once wouldn’t let another human being into. Fucking strangers in hotels had its charms, but now I can’t even relax without her curled up in my arms.

  The next step is obvious. I have to ask her to move in with me. There’s no reason to delay it any longer.

  Except somehow, I can’t quite find the words.

  She’s surrounded by dogs. There’s something about her that quiets them, and draws their attention. She doesn’t have to speak, or produce treats from her pocket, although it helps. I’ve noticed the same quality in many of the people who volunteer here at the shelter. I like animals just fine, but I don’t seem to have that preternatural connection with them.

  “Did I tell you I ran into Larry from accounting the other day?” she calls out to me, from across the yard. “At the store.”

  “Let me guess.” I hold up my hand in a wait gesture. “He said ‘finally.’”

  She laughs. “Everybody knew, except us. I had a hell of a time convincing him this was a relatively new thing. He has this complex theory about how men and women can never end up together if they spend too long as friends, or… whatever we were. Because - I don’t know, something about how women lose the ability to see you as a sex object after a certain amount of time? I don’t know. At a certain point I had to force myself to stop listening because I felt like I was getting stupider.”

  Laughing, I make a halfhearted grab for the knotted rope toy that she’s using to taunt one of the beagles. She feints, and the dog loses interest pretty quickly when he catches a scent on the grass.

  “One of those guys who needs a complex algorithm to try and explain why not every woman in his life wants to fuck him,” I smirk. “Poor child. Probably thinks he needs to wear a funny hat to get their attention, too.”

  She’s grinning. “Hey, there are much stupider things you can do. Sometimes striking up a conversation with a stranger is the hardest part.”

  I just snort. “Ridiculous.”

  “Of course you think it’s ridiculous,” she says. “Women would talk to you even if you were wearing sweats. Actually… I’ve seen you in sweats, I think women would be even more likely to talk to you in sweats.”

  Her cheeks color slightly as her eyes grow a little distant with pondering.

  “You’re trying to think of something I wouldn’t look hot in, aren’t you?” I grin. “I’d better go pour a drink and make a sandwich or something, this could take a while.”

  She gets quiet and thoughtful for a moment. “Do you think they’re right?”

  “What the pickup artists?” I smile at her, patting the bench beside me, but she’s lost in thought.

  “No. Jesus. I mean everyone we used to work with. Did they really pick up on it before we did, or did they just assume we must be fucking because we were always snapping at each other like an old married couple?”

  It’s an interesting question, actually. Looking back, I can’t quite trace how long I’ve truly loved her. But I know it’s much longer than she realizes, an
d probably longer than I want to admit.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, thoughtfully. “I definitely started developing feelings a good while before the conference.”

  “You mean, back when you started writing your books?”

  I chuckle. When Meg first found out that I was secretly Natalie McBride, author of her favorite steamy romance novels, she wanted to kill me. I could see it in her eyes. Or at the very least, seriously injure me. I’ll never forget the way my heart squeezed in my chest when I got that first piece of fan mail from her, my email pinging so innocently, unaware of the chain of events it was about to set off.

  When she realized that the secretary in the books was based on her, she actually took it pretty well. Of course, by then, we’d spent almost a full week blowing off a writing conference to have rough, uninhibited sex. That does tend to cast things in a different light.

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t until after that. At least… I’m pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure.” She grins, fetching the knotted rope from the ground and tossing it to the eager crowd. “You just don’t want to admit that you fell in love at first sight.”

  “Maybe.” I stretch my legs out in front of me, leaning my hands on the bench. “Maybe because that’s not a real thing.”

  “You’re so romantic,” she says, wiping dog slobber on her jeans.

  I roll my eyes at her. “I can’t win, you know. If I tell you something actually romantic, you just say I’m a liar.”

  “Well, stop lying.” A chocolate lab comes back with the rope in his drooling jaws, and she grabs it, laughing when he’s suddenly reluctant to let go. “I’ll always roll my eyes when you make ridiculous claims like…”

  “Like you’re the most beautiful woman in the world? I know. I’m not going to stop saying it, though.” I shrug. “Maybe eventually you’ll believe me.”

  “It’s just one of those things that people say,” she points out. “You’re obligated to say it. Nobody else in the entire world thinks that’s true, and we both know it. I’m not saying that you wish I was different, but you can’t make objective statements of fact like that and expect me to -”

  I grab her arm and yank her towards me, and she stops, laughing. I’ve thrown her off-balance, not quite enough to fall, but enough to make her sit down heavily and haphazardly beside me.