Bold Fortune (The Fortunes of Lost Lake Series, Band 1) - Softcover

Crane, M. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593335376 ISBN 13: 9780593335376

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Opposites burn hot enough to melt the snow and ice of an Alaskan winter in this all-new series from USA Today bestselling author Megan Crane.

Quinn Fortune is the official protector of all the unspoiled beauty in Lost Lake, Alaska, as the head of the community trust. A rugged frontiersman through and through, he doesn't do soft. But he can't help his fascination with the pink-clad professor who shows up in Lost Lake seeking his approval for her cheerful outsider’s proposal about land that isn’t hers. Still, he agrees to consider it—if she can handle a month of good old-fashioned Alaska living. He’s betting she’ll head back to the safety of the Lower 48 within the week.

Violet Parrish is a thinker, not a doer, but desperate times call for extraordinary measures—like taking on the Alaskan wilderness. In January. Off the grid. With a mountain man hot enough to melt a glacier. The frozen Alaskan tundra should be no match for Violet’s determination, but the sheer immensity of the Last Frontier takes her by surprise—as does her attraction to gruff, impossibly handsome Quinn, and the unexpected heat that burns between them during the freezing Alaska nights…

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. M. Crane is a USA Today bestselling and RITA-nominated author. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.

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One

Violet Parrish, PhD, should have known that her long-­distance, never-­consummated romance with Stuart Abernathy-­Thomason—­also a PhD, though the sort who viewed any inadvertent failure to acknowledge his doctorate as a deliberate assault—­was doomed.

Looking back, there had been signs of his inevitable betrayal from the start. The long distance itself, because surely it wasn’t that difficult to fly from London to San Francisco, and yet the much-­discussed flight had never occurred. It’s been such a busy year, hasn’t it, Stuart had always said mournfully. The failure to engage in even the faintest hint of any intimate acts over their computers, when Violet had read too many articles to count that had insisted that said acts were how couples maintained their relationships across distances. I want you, not a screen, Stuart had told her, and could never be budged.

The glaring fact that when she’d excitedly told him that she was coming to London to visit, after making certain he had a gap in his schedule, he’d initially been excited—­then had come back the next day and told her that he’d been called away on those exact dates. What bad luck! he’d said in his plummy voice.

These were all signs Violet would very likely have continued to ignore had there not been the naked-­webcam incident.

“I don’t understand,” her boss and mentor said to her now, peering across the length of his crowded desk at the Institute of San Francisco, a small nonprofit with an academic pedigree and lofty ideals. Irving Cornhauser, too many degrees to choose just one, was often confused for a man in his eighties. He was fifty. “What does a web camera have to do with our work here?”

“I don’t think we should focus on that,” Violet said. She remembered all too well the office-­wide effort to teach Irving how to use social media. They’d concluded he didn’t want to understand. She slid her glasses up her nose and braced herself. “The issue is the relationship with Dr. Abernathy-­Thomason. My relationship with him. My former relationship, that is.”

She should have felt heartbroken. Wasn’t that the typical, expected response to catching one’s significant other in an intimate embrace with another woman? Then again, maybe this was heartbreak. Having never been in a relation­ship before—­by choice, as Violet liked to remind her mother, because she was an intellectual with other things on her mind—­she had nothing to compare it to.

She had not expected it to feel like heartburn, acidic and anger-­inducing. With a deep and growing sense of outrage that she was now forced into this position. Standing in Irving’s office on the first working day of the new year, confessing things that could only embarrass them both.

“Your personal life is your business, Violet,” Irving said in faintly censorious tones, as if Violet had pranced in here for a cozy giggle about boys. Having never done anything of the sort before, in all the years they’d worked together. “The less said about it, the better. Our role here at the Institute is to lend our considerable focus to small environmental matters that make big differences, and in so doing—­”

Violet wanted to scream. But she refrained, because she was an academic, not an animal. “I know the mission. I helped write our mission statement, actually.” But he knew that, of course. “I’m not making a confession because I want to go on a double date with you, Irving.”

He blinked at her in astonishment. Her fault for making reference to the fact that he even had a partner. More personal details he did not care to share on the job. Irving liked to think of these walls as a place of philosophical and intellectual purity. The less reference to the fact that they were humans, complicated, and with lives of their own, the better.

A philosophy Violet had always heartily supported, and yet how the mighty had fallen—­to a con man dressed up in a pretty accent. She was surpassingly ashamed of herself.

“The problem is that I discussed my research with ­Stuart,” she said before Irving could reply, because she wanted to get this out. Stuart’s betrayal and her stupidity had been burning her alive all throughout the Christmas break, when no one at work—­especially Irving—­answered calls or emails. She’d tried. “And worse, our paper based on that research for the spring conference. I thought it was a circle of trust and I was mistaken. Badly mistaken.”

The acid inside her lit her up all over again as she relived the whole nightmare.

It had been Christmas Eve. She had been at her mother’s place in Southern California, hiding away from too much Prosecco, a selection of white plastic Christmas trees, and the near-­constant caterwauling of off-­key carolers at the palm trees in her mother’s beach-­adjacent compound. She and Stuart had talked as planned, and she hadn’t given much thought to the kinds of questions he always asked her. He was so supportive. He was so interested. Despite her mother’s dire warnings about the lonely lives of sad girls who lived in their heads, he was involved.

Violet had found someone who not only supported her work, but understood it, as Stuart was part of a think tank dedicated to the same issues. She’d been congratulating herself on that score after the call had ended while enduring a series of frustrating questions from her mother’s sixth husband, who appeared to think Violet taught elementary school students. No matter how many times she corrected him.

Then she’d escaped to the guest room and seen that her laptop was still open. Upon sitting down at the desk to close it, she’d seen that Stuart had not turned his camera off.

It had taken Violet longer than she cared to admit to understand that Stuart had not, in fact, been playing some kind of game with that woman. Right there in his lounge in his tiny flat in London that she knew so well, after a year of looking at it through this same screen.

Naked.

She’d cleaned her glasses with great care, but no. It was still happening when her lenses were clear.

Maybe it really was the heartbreak and the betrayal that made her stomach hurt so much, but on the flight back to San Francisco the day after Christmas—­after a holiday packed full of recriminations (hers) and justifications (his), until he’d sneered at her and told her that he’d been using her all along—­all she’d really been able to think about was how insulting this all was. And how embarrassing it was going to be to explain to her colleagues.

She’d met Stuart at a conference in Nice last summer. They’d had one marvelous dinner, followed by a perfect kiss, before Violet had raced to catch her flight home. And their romance ever since had involved a great many letters—­okay, emails, but she’d felt like a modern-­day Austen heroine all the same—­and the odd video chat when their schedules allowed.

Far fewer said chats than there probably should have been, she saw that now. And none of them naked. But Violet had been so proud that at last she was having the relationship of her dreams. Not the shattered glasses against the wall, screaming bloody murder nonsense she associated with her parents’ bitter union—­finished before she was born but reenacted during custody skirmishes throughout her childhood—­and most of their many marriages since.

Her relationship...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593335376
• ISBN 13: 9780593335376
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@phaidon.com; gpsr@phaidon.com; ; Zähringerstraße 24; Berlin; 10707; Deutschland