This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781786530745
Version 1.0
Published by BookShots 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © James Patterson 2016
Cover photography © Istock
The BookShots name and logo are a trademark of JBP Business, LLC.
James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental
First published by BookShots in 2016
BookShots
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
BookShots is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781786530738
CODI GARY is an obsessive bookworm, who likes to write sexy contemporary romances with humour, grand gestures, and blushworthy moments. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading her favourite authors, squealing over her must-watch shows, and playing with her children. She lives in Idaho with her family.
The Bear Mountain days are cold, but the nights are steamy…
Allie Fairchild made a mistake when she moved to Montana. Her rental is a mess, her co-workers at the trauma centre are hostile, and her handsome landlord, Dex Belmont, is far from charming. But just when she’s about to throw in the towel, life in Bear Mountain takes a surprisingly sexy turn…
Along Came a Spider
Kiss the Girls
Jack and Jill
Cat and Mouse
Pop Goes the Weasel
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Four Blind Mice
The Big Bad Wolf
London Bridges
Mary, Mary
Cross
Double Cross
Cross Country
Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo)
I, Alex Cross
Cross Fire
Kill Alex Cross
Merry Christmas, Alex Cross
Alex Cross, Run
Cross My Heart
Hope to Die
Cross Justice
Cross the Line
1st to Die
2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross)
3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross)
4th of July (with Maxine Paetro)
The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro)
The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro)
7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro)
8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro)
9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro)
10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro)
11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro)
12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro)
Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro)
14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro)
15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro)
Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge)
Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge)
Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge)
Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge)
I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge)
Gone (with Michael Ledwidge)
Burn (with Michael Ledwidge)
Alert (with Michael Ledwidge)
Bullseye (with Michael Ledwidge)
Private (with Maxine Paetro)
Private London (with Mark Pearson)
Private Games (with Mark Sullivan)
Private: No. 1 Suspect (with Maxine Paetro)
Private Berlin (with Mark Sullivan)
Private Down Under (with Michael White)
Private L.A. (with Mark Sullivan)
Private India (with Ashwin Sanghi)
Private Vegas (with Maxine Paetro)
Private Sydney (with Kathryn Fox)
Private Paris (with Mark Sullivan)
The Games (with Mark Sullivan)
NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp)
Sail (with Howard Roughan)
Swimsuit (with Maxine Paetro)
Don’t Blink (with Howard Roughan)
Postcard Killers (with Liza Marklund)
Toys (with Neil McMahon)
Now You See Her (with Michael Ledwidge)
Kill Me If You Can (with Marshall Karp)
Guilty Wives (with David Ellis)
Zoo (with Michael Ledwidge)
Second Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan)
Mistress (with David Ellis)
Invisible (with David Ellis)
The Thomas Berryman Number
Truth or Die (with Howard Roughan)
Murder House (with David Ellis)
Never Never (with Candice Fox)
Woman of God (with Maxine Paetro)
Black & Blue (with Candice Fox)
Break Point (with Lee Stone)
Cross Kill
Private Royals (with Rees Jones)
The Hostage (with Robert Gold)
Zoo 2 (with Max DiLallo)
Heist (with Rees Jones)
Hunted (with Andrew Holmes)
Airport: Code Red (with Michael White)
The Trial (with Maxine Paetro)
Little Black Dress (with Emily Raymond)
Chase (with Michael Ledwidge)
Let’s Play Make-Believe (with James O. Born)
Dead Heat (with Lee Stone)
Triple Threat
113 Minutes (with Max DiLallo)
The Verdict (with Robert Gold)
French Kiss (with Richard DiLallo)
$10,000,000 Marriage Proposal (with Hilary Liftin)
Kill or Be Killed
Taking the Titanic (with Scott Slaven)
Killer Chef (with Jeffrey J. Keyes)
What you are holding in your hands right now is no ordinary book, it’s a BookShot.
BookShots are page-turning stories by James Patterson and other writers that can be read in one sitting.
Each and every one is fast-paced, 100% story-driven; a shot of pure entertainment guaranteed to satisfy.
Available as new, compact paperbacks, ebooks and audio, everywhere books are sold.
When I first had the idea for BookShots, I knew that I wanted to include romantic stories. The whole point of BookShots is to give people lightning-fast reads that completely capture them for just a couple of hours in their day—so publishing romance felt right.
I have a lot of respect for romance authors. I took a stab at the genre when I wrote Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas. While I was happy with the results, I learned that the process of writing those stories requires hard work and dedication.
That’s why I wanted to pair up with the best romance authors for BookShots. I work with writers who know how to draw emotions out of their characters, all while catapulting their plots forward.
You’re about to fall into a plot that doesn’t stop. All of us enjoy a good love story between a fated couple. In Hot Winter Nights, Codi Gary raises the stakes by tempting her heroine, Allie Fairchild, with two strapping men. Who will she choose? I guess you’ll have to race through these pages to find out ….
James Patterson
ALLIE FAIRCHILD STARED out her windshield at the ramshackle cabin.
Please tell me I have the wrong address.
Scrambling for the MapQuest printout amid the fast-food bags and other evidence that she had blown her diet once again, she read the directions over and over. Finally, sure that she hadn’t misinterpreted them, she looked up at what had been described to her as “charming and rustic.” She was pretty sure it had been the setting for her favorite horror movie, The Cabin in the Woods.
In fact, she half expected to see flesh-eating zombies pop out from behind the thick pine trees surrounding it. When her landlord, Dex Belmont, had warned her that they were a few miles outside of Bear Mountain, Montana, he had definitely been bending the truth a bit. According to her car’s odometer, she was a good ten miles from the town limits on a curvy road that had made her stomach queasy ….
And in the middle of the freaking forests of Narnia.
Leaning her head on the steering wheel of her Jetta, she groaned in defeat. After thirty-two years, she had thought that she was making a solid choice for once. She’d planned to come to small-town Montana to turn a poorly run trauma center into one of the best in the country, and therefore erase all of the potholes in life she’d been unable to avoid thus far.
“Hoooooooooooowwwwwllll!”
Allie jumped a foot in the air, shrieking. Outside her window was a huge hound with its mouth practically pressed to the glass, vibrating her door with its deep bellow.
“Bluebell!” a deep voice said loudly, out of sight. The car-shaking sound stopped and the dog sat, its hot breath fogging her window. Allie’s hand gripped the front of her blouse, sure her heart was going to pound its way right out of her chest.
Suddenly, her passenger door opened and a man peeked in.
“Sorry if she scared you. She likes to be the welcoming committee.”
Allie blinked, taking in a head of tousled, sun-streaked brown hair and green eyes set in a tanned, gorgeous face. The man’s smile was wide and boyish, completely dispelling her previous surprise and terror. The muscles of his shoulders stretched the lightweight T-shirt he was wearing, and the brief flash of a tattoo beneath the sleeve tempted her to reach out to get a better look.
“Do you always spring out at people like a serial killer?”
His golden eyebrows rose, but he didn’t lose that smile. “Not usually, but we’ve been waiting for you.”
Clearing her throat, she said unconvincingly, “Yeah, that isn’t helping your whole stalker vibe.”
He held his hand out to her, hovering over the center console. “I’m Dex Belmont. Allie, right?”
This guy was her landlord? Taking his hand hesitantly, she tried to ignore the pleasant warmth of his palm against hers. He had lured her out to his property with a bunch of misleading photos, after all. None of the shots of this cabin had shown an iffy-looking roof or a porch that was missing a sturdy railing.
“Yeah, I’m Allie, and I have a bone to pick with you—”
“Hang on, before you start picking, why don’t I come around and get your door?”
“I can get my own door, thank you very”—he slammed her passenger side door before she finished and was coming around the front—“much.”
She reached for the handle at the same time he did, and when he pulled it open, she practically fell out on her face, putting her nose-to-nose with his dog. Big, droopy brown eyes stared at her from inches away, and then a large, wet tongue smothered her nose with slobber.
Mustering whatever dignity she had left, she started to climb to her feet, shaking off his hands as he attempted to help. Swiping at her nose with her arm, she glared up at him. Wow, he was tall. She liked tall.
She shook away her thoughts and said, “This is not at all what you promised me. You told me that the cabin was ‘cozy’—”
“Look, I may have tweaked the truth a bit, but you’re also here two weeks earlier than I was expecting.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, and Allie tried to ignore the way the muscles flexed as he scowled down at her as if she were the one who had bait-and-switched him. “So, before you start throwing a walleyed fit, how about you take a look inside and I’ll tell you about all the improvements I’ll be making?”
If Allie was smart, she’d get her butt back in her car and hightail it out of there, but this had been the only place for rent, according to the realtor she’d spoken to over the phone. She could buy a place, but she hadn’t been ready for that kind of commitment. She wanted to take a few months and get used to Bear Mountain before she actually bought something.
And the few motels she’d passed hadn’t looked better than this.
“Fine. Lead the way, McDuff.”
That smile was back in place, doing crazy things to her insides, although her outsides were freezing. She rubbed the arms of her lightweight sweater. “How are you only wearing a T-shirt? I wasn’t expecting it to be so cold already.”
“We start getting snow around mid-October, but so far we’ve been storm-free.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder and she finally understood exactly what the word smolder meant. “And as to my attire, my temperature runs hot. Wanna feel?”
“Get real.”
Dex chuckled as he climbed up onto the porch. “You never told me why you decided to move from New York to Bear Mountain. I can’t imagine it was for the culture.”
Allie hesitated in answering when the first porch step squeaked loudly under her foot. “Are you sure I’m not going to fall through here?”
“Front porches squeak, I promise. The first thing I did was start on the porch, so I’ve already reinforced and replaced a lot of it.” He stood at the top of the steps and held his hand down to her. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Despite the temptation, she ignored his hand and walked past him, her shoulder brushing the front of his shirt. She snuck a glance at the hard outline of his chest, swallowing.
“You were just going to tell me why you left home?”
“I needed a fresh start and figured rural Montana was as good a place as any for a change.”
“What exactly will you be doing here?” he asked, holding the front door open for her.
“I’m running Bear Mountain Memorial Hospital.”
He seemed skeptical. “You’re awfully young to take on such a big job.”
“If I’d wanted to work in a state-of-the-art hospital, I could have, but I wanted to go where I could really help people.” She didn’t want to throw charity events or expensive dinners just to “Save the Otters,” like her parents did. “As for my qualifications, I have a double major in business and nursing, with a master’s degree in hospital administration. I may look young, but I have experience. I know what I’m doing, Mr. Belmont.”
When she turned back toward the door, his arm shot out, blocking her way. He leaned down until their faces were only a few inches apart, and her palms started sweating as her heart thumped.
“Why don’t you just call me Dex?”
DEX BELMONT WAITED for Allie to hightail it back into her car and take off, but she just stood there, her pretty brown eyes never flickering away. He could tell he affected her, but he didn’t know whether it was because he pissed her off or because she was attracted to him, and he was more than tempted to find out which.
That wouldn’t be a smart move on his part, especially since she would be living next door. She’d get attached, and once she found out he wasn’t the kind of guy for a long-term relationship, drama would ensue.
And he was over drama.
“Are you going to show me the cabin or kiss me, Dex?”
Her question sent a shock wave of awareness through him, and for a second, he thought it was a proposition. Until …
“Fair warning: if you attempt the latter, I know six easy moves that will leave you broken and bleeding on the floor.”
Picturing this short, curvy woman bringing him low made him burst out laughing. He dropped his arm and let her pass. “I like the brass on you, Allie.”
She frowned as she surveyed the kitchen, and he could tell she wasn’t happy with its current state. Hell, he couldn’t blame her one bit. The place did look like shit, but he was supposed to have had more time. She’d called him a week ago and said she wouldn’t be arriving until the first week of November. Then two days ago, she’d called again from Nebraska to let him know she’d be there two weeks ahead of schedule.
“I know it looks bad, but really, there are no leaks and I’ll have it looking brand new in just a few weeks. You know, the few weeks I would have had if you’d given me more notice?”
some