Harlequin Desire January 2021--Box Set 1 of 2 by Maisey Yates (free biff chip and kipper ebooks .txt) 📕

bear to see him in pain. This was their first fight, and each blow had proven to be fatal.

* * *

The Uber driver hummed to the tune on the radio. John Legend was crooning about everlasting love over the speakers. Nina wished she could rip the radio out of the dashboard and toss it out the window. She was living proof that love was dead.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“It’s way out by the zoo, so…yeah.”

This meant nothing to Nina. “Okay.”

“Good thing the roads are clear.”

It was five in the morning. Nina had been up all night. With Julian banished to the other room, she packed, disentangled her phone charger from his and stuffed her makeup and important things in her tote bag. A quick text to Valerie and she had someplace to crash until she figured out her next step. The important thing was to slip out of Sand Castle undetected. She’d left Julian a note. It didn’t say much.

The driver tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. She had long, elegant fingers and wore a princess-cut diamond on her left hand. Maybe love wasn’t dead after all. She glanced at Nina and suggested she take a nap. It was a tempting suggestion, but bad things happened when passengers dozed off in public transportation. However, pretending to nap meant that the driver could go back to humming love songs and Nina could fold into herself and mope undisturbed.

She reclined her seat but did not close her eyes. If she did, she’d relive the night’s events. She kept her eyes locked on the tangled ribbon of highway. The minutes ticked away, and her eyes went dry from the strain. Despite her efforts, the unwelcome memories surfaced anyway and she relived it all.

* * *

It was close to six when Nina arrived at her cousin’s town house. Valerie lived with her husband in a tidy gated community. The porch lights were on, and she was waiting at the door. Valerie inspected her, eyes wide with concern. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

“We had a fight. It’s over.”

“It’s over after one fight?”

Nina massaged her temples. She did not want to be rude, but she really did not want to talk about it.

“You look exhausted,” Valerie said. “I’ll take you upstairs.”

The guest bedroom was, funny enough, a home office with a daybed pushed up against a wall. Nina stumbled onto the bed, and the enormity of what she’d lost came crushing on her. She wanted to howl with grief, but Valerie, in her pajamas and fuzzy slippers, hair tied back with a silk scarf, kept shuffling in and out of the room. She brought in a glass of water, a bottle of painkillers and a weighted blanket. Her cousin was an excellent hostess.

“Get some sleep,” she said. “I took the day off. We can talk later.”

“Why are you so nice?”

Valerie paused, a hand on the doorknob. “Excuse me?”

Nina sat up. “I’ve been nothing but standoffish with you…even bitchy. I keep hoping you’ll take the hint, and you never do.”

Valerie’s face crumpled. Without makeup, she looked far younger than her twenty-nine years. “It’s a long story.”

Nina shrugged. “I’d like to hear it.”

Valerie shut the door and took a seat at the neat Ikea desk. Nina had instantly recognized it. She’d had a similar one a few years back. “My favorite uncle, your father, died when I was seven.”

Nina was nine when her father had died in a car wreck. She hadn’t known that her absentee parent was anyone’s favorite anything. She hadn’t known much about him period. Her mother had been in her thirties when she got pregnant and not at all interested in settling down.

“On the drive back from the funeral, my parents were talking. They said he’d wasted his life. He was handsome and charming—a so-called ladies’ man. But as you know, he never worked a day in his life.”

“Yeah. I heard.” Nina looked down at her knuckles, embarrassed on her cousin’s behalf. Her father’s inability to hold a job was one of the reasons her mother had refused to take him seriously. When Nina was old enough, she’d explained that her father had been a fling and nothing more. “Someone to have a good time with.”

“It was the first time, at least to my recollection, that my parents ever mentioned you by name. My cousin Nina.”

Nina’s heart filled with a sort of ache that she had long thought extinct. Why did she have to pry? What good was it to revive these old ghosts?

“My mom went on and on about how beautiful you were. My dad thought my uncle was a loser for not raising his daughter. According to my folks, he didn’t like to be around your mom because they’d fight—”

“About money,” Nina blurted. “Yeah. I know.”

It was true her parents had fought about money, late child support payments in particular. Then her dad had died prematurely, leaving her mother to make do. Although money was tight, Nina had not wanted for anything—ever. And by the time she’d started middle school, her mother’s career had picked up. “Do you pity me? Is that it?”

“Oh, no! It’s the opposite!” Valerie moved off the chair and onto the daybed next to Nina. “My parents talked about you like some beautiful girl in New York City. In my mind, you were Eloise living at the Plaza. I wanted us to be best friends.”

Nina pressed a palm to her forehead. For her, it had been the opposite experience. Her father’s big, boisterous family, with their Caribbean accents and traditions and foods, were an exclusive club to which she’d been barred access. She had never wanted to have anything to do with them. Valerie shuffled out of the room and returned with a box of tissues.

“Where are your parents now?” Nina asked.

“Port-au-Prince. They live there six months out of the year.”

The older generation was now out of the picture. Here was Valerie, singlehandedly trying to repair the past and reshape the future. Nina couldn’t