CHAPTER ONE
AURELIA LOOKED LONGINGLY at the muscular arm circling her waist and the large hand cupping her breast over her shirt and promptly closed her eyes, chastising herself for doing it again. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride was beginning to ring too true, and it was all Ben Dalton’s fault. She’d had a ridiculous crush on her Henry Cavill–lookalike best friend for far too long, and it was getting in the way of her life, her thoughts, her everything. Every time she went out with a guy, she compared him to Ben, who looked rugged and yummy in jeans that hugged his thick thighs and perfect ass and could rock a suit like he’d strutted off a runway. He even owned a pair of black-framed glasses he sometimes wore for reading, which took him from Superman to Clark Kent in a heartbeat. What woman wasn’t turned on by a stud in glasses? But it wasn’t just his looks. She quickly bored of every date, waiting for them to be quippy, fun, and unknowingly seductive like Ben. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up the spinster of Sweetwater, New York. Harmony Pointe, she corrected herself. Though she’d grown up in Sweetwater and moved back to reopen her grandmother’s bookstore and combine it with Ben’s sister Willow’s business, Sweetie Pie Bakery, Aurelia had recently changed directions. In an effort to stop waking up in Friendsville, she’d bought an adorable bookstore with an apartment above it on the corner of Main Street and West Avenue in the next town over, Harmony Pointe.
She allowed herself another minute to enjoy the feel of Ben’s broad chest against her back, his titillating breath warming her neck, and yes, even his morning wood pressing into her bottom. The situation would be sexier if the man-child wrapped around her wasn’t also drooling on her shirt.
That was about all the action she’d ever see from him.
She’d spent the last month swearing she was done doing this with him. But when he’d called her last night and said, “Come on, Rels, hang out with me. I miss you,” that was all it had taken. The way he said Rels always made her stupid heart melt. She’d been called Aurelia since the day she was born—the day her mother had died—by everyone except Ben. He had coined the nickname Rels—or Relsy if he was in a particularly sweet mood—and he only seemed to use it when they were alone. It was ridiculous that a secret nickname could make her feel special, but it did. She knew she was important to him. She was the first person he called to share any kind of news, and they were known in their circle of friends as Ben and Aurelia—always linked, like Ben and Jerry. Two people who seemed to exist as one perfect combination.
Except she didn’t want to be Ben and Jerry.
She wanted to be the perfect combination of man and woman, like Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. The type of couple who had wild, crazy sex and woke up naked, tangled in each other’s sticky body parts, not clothed on a chaise lounge in the middle of Benjamin Unable-to-Commit Dalton’s living room with drool on their shoulders.
She huffed out a breath and peeled his long fingers off her breast, reminding herself this was exactly why she’d taken her grandmother Flossie’s words to heart after her grandfather had passed away last month. She’d heard stories about couples like her grandparents who had been together for more than fifty years dying within weeks of each other, and she’d been petrified that she’d lose her grandmother, too. As they’d driven back to the Long Island assisted-living facility where her grandparents had lived for the past several years, Aurelia had begged her grandmother to move back to Sweetwater and let her care for her. But her bright-eyed grandmother—the woman who had taught her to tie her shoes and speak her mind, the woman who had owned a bookstore in Sweetwater for forty-plus years and instilled a love of all things literary in Aurelia—had said, This isn’t the end of my story, bubbelah. Your grandfather and I could fill a library with books about our love. We had our happily ever after, and we shared a beautiful, spectacular life. But as your grandpa would say, now it’s time to start a new adventure—my next chapter.
Ben murmured, holding Aurelia tighter and pressing his all-too-tempting arousal harder against her jeans, tearing her from the pages of her past—and thrusting