A Year of Love Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 Helena Hunting, Debra Anastasia, Ilsa Madden-Mills, Max Monroe, BB Easton, Kennedy Ryan, Elle Kennedy, Sarina Bowen, Tijan, K.F. Breene, K. Bromberg, W. Winters

  All rights reserved

  Published by Helena Hunting

  Cover Design by Enchanting Romance Designs

  Formatting by Melissa Gaston

  A Year of Love is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are all products of the author’s twisted imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Contents

  A Year of Love

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  A Year of Love

  Fall in love all year long.

  12 months.

  12 authors.

  12 romantic short stories to make you swoon.

  JANUARY - RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR by H. HUNTING

  Secrets are shared, awkward conversations are unavoidable, and shenanigans abound when the Kids of Pucked get together for a New Year’s celebration.

  FEBRUARY – SKATING ON THE STARS by DEBRA ANASTASIA

  Asking her to marry him is the easy part, but Gaze needs everything to fall in line this Valentine’s Day. Pixie Rae deserves the best, and a wild raccoon has no part in the beginning of their forever.

  MARCH – BUTTERFLY, BROKEN by ILSA MADDEN-MILLS

  When Everly wakes up at Crystal Lake Academy, she has no idea how she arrived at the strange college. When a threatening letter appears, she seeks the help of the most ruthless gang at Crystal Lake. They’ll help her for a price.

  APRIL - APRIL FOOLS by MAX MONROE

  My April Fools’ Weekend beach getaway was only supposed to include three things: relaxation, wine, and fun in the sun. Something it absolutely wasn’t supposed to include: The bane of my teaching existence—Mack Houston—walking in on me in the shower.

  Relaxation. Fun in the sun. Ha.

  Looks like I’m the fool of April this time, huh?

  MAY – OPERATION: MILE HIGH CLUB by BB EASTON

  An all new sexy, hilarious, (mostly) true story from BB Easton, author of 44 Chapters About 4 Men, the memoir that inspired the #1 Netflix series Sex/Life!

  JUNE – FREE TO LOVE by KENNEDY RYAN

  Mere weeks from my wedding, I don’t have jitters. I have a future mother-in-law making everything obnoxiously bigger. The guest list. The band. The pain in my . . .you get the picture. My sweet, hot, sexy fiancé better fix it or there may not be a wedding at all.

  JULY – WEEKEND FLING by ELLE KENNEDY

  Getting stuck with her brother's annoying girlfriend and his sexy best friend is not at all what Kate had in mind for her family weekend getaway. But sometimes, the unexpected can be exactly what you need...

  AUGUST -TRAINING CAMP by SARINA BOWEN

  Do an internship with a professional hockey team, they said. It will be fun, they said. Too bad I'm terrible at my job. Until the rookie defenseman offers to help...

  SEPTEMBER - NO DRAMA, SERIOUSLY by TIJAN

  Mara only wants to be a normal college student. No drama.

  Too bad that her family might not let that happen. And who is Cruz?!

  OCTOBER- POSSESSION by K.F. BREENE

  A deliciously sexy demon tricks Jaelyn into showing up at the hottest and most dangerous Halloween party of the year. She must confront him and her past if she hopes to survive.

  NOVEMBER - FOREVER MORE by K. BROMBERG

  When Lyric Evermore crashed Angie McIntyre’s all-alone-on-Thanksgiving pity party four years ago, she never could have imagined it would be the start of their own annual tradition. Nor did either of them know, it might be the start of something more meaningful . . .

  DECEMBER – MY SECRET by W. WINTERS

  She’s my secret. Mine and mine alone.

  Copyright © 2021 Helena Hunting

  All rights reserved

  Published by Helena Hunting

  Cover Design by Enchanting Romance Designs

  Editing by Christa Desir

  Proofing by Amanda Rash of Draft House Editorial Services

  Ringing in the New Year is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are all products of the author’s twisted imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Banana Banger

  Lavender

  When I was eight years old, I walked in on my older brothers Maverick and Robbie dressing up a bunch of bananas in costumes. They were laughing so hard they had tears streaming down their cheeks. At one point, the two of them fell into a heap on the floor, gasping for air. Maverick actually peed himself. At the time, it really didn’t make a lot of sense. I had no clue where they found the costumes, or why they were playing dress up with them. Or why they wouldn’t let me play dress up too.

  Fast forward to today, which happens to be New Year’s Eve, and I’m once again staring at a bunch of bananas dressed in a variety of festive holiday costumes. There’s Santa, of course, and three different elves, as well as a snowman and a reindeer. They’re arranged on the dining room table in suggestive positions.

  Santa is giving it to the reindeer from behind. The snowman is getting a blowy from an elf, and the other two elves are engaged in a sixty-niner.

  For a moment—a very, very brief one—I contemplate how hilarious it would be to put these to use with my boyfriend. Except I’m aware that they’ve already dressed up more than bananas.

  That particular fact I didn’t learn until long after I found my brothers in tears on Robbie’s bedroom floor.

  For a lot of years, I was blissfully unaware of what they were meant for, other than banana costumes. When I was a teenager, Maverick explained that our mom dresses up our dad’s business in them. Now, I can’t unknow that piece of information.

  I also can’t believe that my mom hasn’t found better hiding spots for these.

  “Maverick!” I call out.

  Robbie is currently in the middle of nowhere, living in a tent with his girlfriend, working on his PhD in pot, so I know he had nothing to do with this, not this time. We FaceTimed with him on Christmas Day. He was higher than Snoop Dogg in the 90s, but also ridiculously happy.

  It isn’t Maverick who appears in the dining room doorway. It’s my twin, River. “He took off about an hour ago. What’d he do now?”

  “Where’d he go? Did he go to Kodiak’s without us?” I motion to the dressed up, sexualized bananas.

  “Oh shit.” River covers his mouth and snorts a laugh. “I think Mav went back to school.”

  “Why would he do that on New Year’s Eve?” All our friends are here, and Mav rarely misses an opportunity to party. Well, in the past that would be true, but lately he’s put the breaks on the party bus. At least that’s how it seemed at the end of the semester.

  River lifts one shoulder and lets it fall. “He gave some bullshit excuse about having to grab a textbook for one of his
classes next semester so he could get a head start on reading.”

  “Wow. That’s . . .”

  “Unbelievable?” River supplies.

  “Totally. He basically waits until the eleventh hour on everything that isn’t hockey-related.”

  “Yeah. I know.” River nods and pulls out his phone, snapping photos of the porno-banana gangbang.

  “What do you think he’s really doing?”

  “That’s a good question. Usually I have the market on morose and emo cornered, but he’s stepped into that role over the holidays like it’s his damn job.” River rubs his chin. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, so he has some sparse, patchy growth going on.

  “Right? He’s been super moody. Like PMS-style cranky,” I agree.

  “Maybe it’s because he hasn’t been laid in a a couple weeks?” River speculates.

  “It’s possible. He typically has a new girl lined up as soon as he dumps the old one, but come to think of it, I haven’t seen him with anyone since that Talia girl, the one he dated after Carrie? Or maybe it was Carly,” I muse.

  “Carly, I think. She was all right.”

  “Did you ever talk to her?” I generally smiled and waved whenever they walked through the kitchen/living room/back yard on their way to his bedroom. If they stopped to grab a snack, I would say hi and ask about mundane things like the weather or classes. But I didn’t bother getting to know Maverick’s girlfriends since they never stuck around long.

  River frowns. “Uh, come to think of it, nope. I take back the she-was-all-right part.”

  “Now I want to know what the hell is going on with our brother. Do you think he has an actual girlfriend?”

  “Doubtful. Especially since it’s the holidays. And I can’t see him getting involved with one semester left and a deal with Nashville dangling like a carrot.”

  “It’s definitely weird.” And now I really want to get to the bottom of it. But not badly enough that I’d drive to campus to see what he’s up to. “Maybe Kodiak knows.”

  “I don’t know that he would tell Kody.”

  “They’re best friends, why wouldn’t he tell him?”

  “Because you’re Kody’s girlfriend, and girlfriend status trumps best friend status. If Mav tells Kody, and you ask him, Kody will most definitely tell you.”

  “Not if Maverick told him not to say anything to me. He’s a pretty loyal guy.”

  “Yeah, but if you ask him after sex, when his guard is down and his brain is functioning at about twenty-five percent capacity, there’s a chance he’ll accidentally tell you. And then he’ll feel like a bag of guilty assholes. Mav knows this, so I don’t think he’s said anything to Kody, but feel free to prove me wrong and ask anyway.”

  I scowl at my twin. “I don’t want to make Kodiak feel like a bag of guilty assholes.”

  He shrugs. “He always feels guilty; it’s not like it’s new for him.”

  I elbow him in the ribs. “I don’t want to make his guilt worse.”

  “Why, because you’ll feel guilty for making him feel guilty?”

  “No. Well, yeah, but when he feels guilty, he gets clingy.” And needy. Sometimes the needy is fine. Most of the time, actually. But occasionally he gets a little obsessed with making me feel good. There have been a couple of times that he’s been so fixated on giving me guilt-inspired orgasms that he’s licked my clit raw. Once it was a result of a run-in with Bethany, who was my roommate when I tried to live in the dorms for all of thirty-six hours. She was also a stick chaser and tried to hook up with Kodiak before he became my boyfriend.

  During our short, unpleasant exchange in the campus bar’s bathroom, she told me that she and all her friends had masturbated in front of my boyfriend. It wasn’t true. I know because I asked Kodiak point-blank and told him that I wasn’t going to be mad either way, I just needed to know so I could deal with it and we could move on.

  Kodiak can’t lie to me. Which probably sucks for him, because it means if I want to ruin a surprise, I can. So I don’t abuse the fact that I’m his personal truth serum.

  While his knee bounced a million miles a minute and his mouth was so dry that he had to drink two liters of water, he explained what had really happened. On the first day of classes—after he dropped me off at my place, we’d argued, and I’d stormed off, flipping the bird over my shoulder—he’d gone home to stew in some self-loathing for being an asshole to me.

  Bethany had come up to his room and tried to get with him, right after she’d been fooling around with Quinn, one of Kodiak’s roommates. Kodiak had told her he didn’t have condoms, which was a lie. Kodiak always has three boxes on hand. He considers us to be running low when we open the second-to-last box, and immediately goes online after we have sex and orders more. He has a condom subscription on Amazon because he gets a better deal that way.

  Anyway, she pulled out some condoms, and he lost his cool and told her he wasn’t going to have sex with her, especially since she’d just been hooking up with his roommate. She’d heard the rumors (which, based on our sex life, definitely hold a grain of truth) and offered to give him a free show. He said no thanks. She told everyone otherwise.

  Has he been given free shows prior to Bethany? I have no doubt in my mind that he probably has. I’d even go so far as to say there’s a chance that one of her friends has given him a masturbation demonstration prior to me moving to Chicago.

  Kodiak is twenty-one years old, in college and an elite athlete. He might have been in love with me his entire life, but that doesn’t mean he’s been a monk. And while a small part of me would like to tit-punch every single girl who’s ever seen his dick or experienced his amazing oral skills, I’ve benefited directly from his previous practice. Do I want a list of the girls he’s hooked up with before me? No. But I’m not an idiot. I know I’m not his first. Just like he’s not mine (and he hates that fact). But I’m sure as hell planning to be his last and only for the rest of my life and his.

  Anyway, after he told me the truth about Bethany, he fell into a guilt spiral. Mostly because he’d spent the first two months of the semester trying to make me hate him out of fear that he’d ruin me if we ever ended up dating. And the whole Bethany ordeal was directly related to that. He felt like he needed to find a way to earn my forgiveness. By giving me orgasms. Hence the raw clit situation.

  River snorts, pulling me out of my mental musings and my trip down Raw Clit Memory Lane. “Kody is always clingy.”

  I give him the stink eye. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, River.”

  “Josiah’s not clingy.”

  “No. He’s not. But you sure are.”

  River’s usual furrowed brow furrows even more. His forehead looks like a barren farmer’s field getting ready for seed with how many lines there are. He’s probably going to need Botox by the time he’s twenty-five. “I am not.”

  “You text him every five minutes.”

  “I haven’t texted him once during this conversation.”

  “But your hand has been tucked into your pocket fifty percent of the time.” I don’t think this is true, but I am 100 percent right about River and his clinginess with Josiah. “You’ve been glued to your phone the entire time we’ve been home for the holidays. And when we’re back in Chicago you incessantly check your phone whenever Josiah leaves to go to class, and you make him text you to let you know that he made it there safely.” Our parents don’t know about Josiah yet and River doesn’t seem to be in any rush to tell them, which is too bad. If he would just come out and tell them he’s gay, then maybe Josiah could have come back early from visiting his parents in California and celebrated New Years with us.

  “I do not do that.” His gaze shifts away.

  “Uh, yeah, you totally do. And I would know, because I have class with him, remember?”

  “Fuck.” River runs his hand through his hair. “Do you think I need to tone it down? I just worry, you know?”

  “He thinks it’s cute for now.
I’ll let you know if there’s something for you to actually worry about.”

  Our dad comes sauntering into the dining room, his eyes trained on the cell phone in his hand. He’s wearing a smirk. I bet a million banana costumes he and my mom are sexting.

  I have accidentally been on the receiving end of one of my mother’s inappropriate messages to my dad. There were references to beavers eating wood. Thankfully I stopped her before she could add anything else that I couldn’t unread.

  His gaze lifts, first to me and River standing on the other side of the room, both of us wishing we could sink into the floor and disappear, before he turns to see. . .

  “Oh fuck. What the hell?” His arms flail like an octopus on some kind of drug-induced trip.

  “Maverick was sleuthing, and he was apparently successful.” I totally throw my brother under the bus.

  “How the fuck does he always find them?” my dad mutters. “I’m going to pin him down and shave his head.”

  “He’s gone back to school,” I tell him.

  “What?” My dad frowns. He looks like an angry Superman with some gray hairs.

  “Mav’s gone back to school. Said he needed to get some early reading done.”

  Dad rubs his chin. “That sounds like a giant load of bull.”

  River and I both shrug. At the same time.

  “Maybe he realized he actually needs to put some effort in?”