Summer Nights

Catia Roday has learned the hard way that love always disappoints, so when she finds herself falling for Josh Rideout - the handsome, charming, seemingly perfect guy she just met on vacation - only to find out they hail from neighboring towns, she has one question: what's the catch? Unwilling to let love make a fool of her again, Cat tries desperately to ignore the chemistry between her and Josh, but it isn't easy when their vacation plans keep overlapping. With the universe constantly throwing them together, and her friends practically staging an intervention to tell her she's making a huge mistake, she decides to prove her point once and for all. On the way home, she makes a bet. She'll take her budding vacation romance back to the real world, and when she proves Josh is too good to be true, she wins! (And she avoids another heartbreak.) What ensues is a series of tests and games with Josh one step ahead of her the whole time, until Cat realizes the friendly wager has her betting against the one man who can revive her faith in love. Worse yet, it turns out Josh might not be the gambling type.

Dani Petrillo's friends are settling down faster than she can escape her latest one-night stand. After her best friend's wedding, she decides it's time to leave the single life behind and find true love. She joins a dating site that makes a bold promise - Eight Dates to Your Soulmate - if you can follow their dating bootcamp rules. The first one? No sleeping with any of your matches until the eight dates are over. Sure, she wants to find a good guy, but she also knows that no sex for months isn't going to work for her. Luckily, she's always been good at bending the rules. Dylan Pierce doesn't do commitment, and if his genes are any indication, he wasn't made for it anyway. He's also been trying to get his hot friend Dani into bed for years, so he's ecstatic when she suggests a friends with benefits arrangement while she's participating in some dating bootcamp nonsense. She gets her, um, needs taken care of while she looks for love, and he gets to sleep with Dani, no strings attached. Win/win. But when lines start to blur, their arrangement feels more and more like dating, and Dylan feels less and less like sending her off to some other guy when they're done. It might mean breaking some of his own dating rules, but he wants Dani for himself.

Sonya Pope is pragmatic, always rational, and has no time for setbacks, so when she arrives at her elopement to find her fiance wants to break up rather than get married, she uses the flight home to reprioritize. But when a woman on the plane has a medical emergency, she puts her mental list-making on hold and jumps to action. Unfortunately, so does the cocky, almost-paramedic two rows back. Ben "Trav" Travis totally got to that patient first, but the cranky nurse with the pretty brown eyes made a big show of taking charge. Sure, he might be one clinical rotation away from actually being a certified paramedic, but he has real-life experience. The kind he wouldn't wish on anyone. When Trav shows up at the hospital two days later to find the same woman is his preceptor, a second battle begins. Trav's got too much riding on this to let a woman with a chip on her shoulder make his life miserable, and Sonya's not about to let a pretty-boy with an adventure complex disrupt the one area of her life that she still has control over. But when a patient they both grow to care about needs their help, their head vs heart battle sparks into something neither one of them trained for.

I was supposed to be attending a friend's birthday party, not used as bait to lure out the elusive Holden Hayes. Holden was the last thing I needed. My life was already spiraling, a slow-moving head-on collision that you couldn't swerve to avoid. In hindsight, so was his. Neither of us was looking for a relationship, but that is precisely what we found. An instant, all-consuming, soul-deep connection that few people ever find. The problem was we both had pasts, ghosts that threatened to choke out all the light, and that's exactly what they did. The night we crashed, we didn't just break. We shattered. They say pain either hurts or changes you, but what about when it's twisted? His pain was a penance, and mine was a shield. Both were dark and laced in fear, but our fate was set. Sometimes love stories aren't beautiful. They're haunted. This is a standalone with a guaranteed happily-ever-after and no cheating. For mature listeners. A complete list of content warnings can be found on the author's website.