BABY FOR THE BRUTE

“Pretend you’re my boyfriend. Please.”

She’s a stranger. Big blue eyes. Innocent.
Way too pure for my dirty hands.
I should tell her to run. I’m bad news. The worst kind.
But I’ve never made a habit of doing the right thing.

I kiss her because I want her.
I want those cherry lips tangled up with mine.
I want to claim her. Own her.
I want her to learn that she doesn’t make the rules.

She doesn’t get to decide what’s pretend and what’s real.
I do.
But she’ll have plenty of time to learn to obey me. To surrender.
I’ll enjoy every pleasure-soaked minute of teaching her.

But she has no idea who I am.
I’m Angelo Luciani. Head of the Luciani crime family.
It turns out I’m not the only one with a secret.
She’s the daughter of my most bitter rival: Rosiano Torretti.
They say nothing can come between a man and his daughter.
But they’re wrong, I did one better…
I knocked her up.

HATE AT FIRST SIGHT BY PENELOPE BLOOM

Aribelle: He was my own personal apocalypse,
But I moved on. I healed. I built a new life.
It took me eight years, but I did it.
Then he came back.
He came into my life just like the last time.
Other guys wanted my heart to make their own,
But Zach wasn’t like them. He wanted my heart for a trophy.
Like a prize to hang on his mantle.
And I’d be damned if he was going to get it.
It would’ve been easier if the years had been hard on him,
But nothing was easy with him.
Zach is a rock star now.
Household name. Sex symbol. Filthy rich.
It’s not long before I’m sucked back into his life,
And a six-month blackmail contract that says I have to tag along on his tour.
He thinks he can walk over me like the old days,
He thinks this is going to be easy.
But I’m going to enjoy proving him wrong.

Zach: I met Aribelle while she was trimming my hedges.
And no, that’s not a euphemism.
She was a gardener’s daughter,
and she should’ve been invisible to me.
She wasn’t.
She looked at me like she had a right to,
Like she was the one who should look at me with pity,
Like she somehow knew I was broken inside.
That wasn’t why I decided to ruin her life.
She dated one of my best friends and learned my darkest secret.
But eight years is a long time.
I never got what I wanted back then, and now’s my chance.
She’s back, and I’m not stopping until claim her heart.
She’s still not over what happened.
Tough luck, Gardener Girl.
I don’t lose, and the game is on.

HIS BANANA BY PENELOPE BLOOM

My new boss likes rules, but there’s one nobody dares to break…
No touching his banana.
Seriously. The guy is like a potassium addict.
Of course, I touched it.
If you want to get technical, I actually put it in my mouth.
I chewed it up, too… I even swallowed.
I know. Bad, bad, girl.
Then I saw him, and believe it or not, choking on a guy’s banana does not make the best first impression.
I should backtrack a little here. Before I ever touched a billionaire’s banana, I got my first real assignment as a business reporter. This wasn’t the same old bottom-of-the-barrel assignment I always got. I wasn’t going to interview a garbage man about his favorite routes or write a piece on how picking up dog poop from people’s yards is the next big thing.
Nope. None of the above, thank you very much.

This was my big break. My chance to prove I wasn’t a bumbling, clumsy, accident-prone walking disaster. I was infiltrating Galleon Enterprises to follow up on suspicions of corruption.
Cue the James Bond music.
I could do this. All I had to do was land the position as an intern and nail my interview with Bruce Chamberson.
Forget the fact that he looked like somebody carved him out of liquid female desire, then sprinkled on some “makes men question their sexuality” for good measure. I needed to make this work. No accidents. No disasters. No clumsiness. All I needed to do was hold it together for less than an hour.
Fast forward to the conference room before the interview, and that’s where you would find me with a banana in my hand. A banana that literally had his name on it in big, black sharpie. It was a few seconds later when he walked in and caught me yellow-handed. A few seconds after that was when he hired me.
Yeah. I know. It didn’t seem like a good sign to me, either.