to the boat,” she whispered.
She felt rather than heard Curt laugh.
A wave crashed around their bare ankles and receded, sucking the sand around their feet out to sea.
Annalise leaned against Curt’s chest and stared out at the water. It seemed to go on forever, vast and powerful and full of possibilities.
Just like our future together, she thought, and stood on her toes to kiss him again.
The End
I hope you’ve enjoyed Curt and Annalise’s story! In case you missed it, keep reading for the first chapter of the previous release in this series, Baby Secrets in Seattle
Happy reading!
Layla x
Baby Secrets in Seattle
Chapter 1
Craig
I’d always thought that phrase, ‘seeing red,’ was just something people said when they were being dramatic. Something that they couldn’t actually mean, because what was it even supposed to refer to?
But by the time I walked out of the board meeting, I was so frustrated that I could hardly see straight. And though the world wasn’t exactly tinted red, or anything like that, not being able to see straight seemed like it could be interpreted as seeing red. Right?
Right.
So why was I so dang frustrated, you ask? Why was I so annoyed that the world was actually blurring in front of my eyes, and I thought I might just need a bar and a very, very stiff drink, like, stat?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Because the reason came down to one person. My older brother.
Look, I loved my brother. He was pretty much one of my favorite people in the entire world, and he always had been. Ever since I got old enough to know what a brother was—and that mine was just advanced enough in age to seem like an absolute god to me.
Five years old when I was born, Cole was already eight when I started being able to remember him. And by that time, he was choosing his own clothes, doing his own hair, and reading books that didn’t even have pictures in them anymore. He had a freaking girlfriend. One that sometimes even called him on the phone.
I mean, he was the coolest.
So you could definitely say that I grew up with a slight case of hero worship. Cole was old enough to seem like he was worlds ahead of me, but still close enough in age to be one of my best friends, and the person I could run to when things went wrong. Old enough that I wasn’t supposed to talk to him when we were at school… but also the first person to come to my rescue if someone was picking on me.
All of which meant it was really, really hard to see him being so freaking short-sighted right now.
I slammed my notebook down on the enormous desk in my office—which looked out over the city, courtesy of me being part-owner of the very company we’d just been meeting about—and stalked to the window, gazing out toward the water.
I didn’t see any of it, of course. Didn’t see the buildings underneath us, or the straight streets, crowded by high-rises looming up over them. Didn’t see the brilliant, deep blue ocean or the golden—actually, orange—bridge rising up over that water.
All I could see was the picture in my head of that damn board meeting.
I loved my brother. I really did. The problem was, somewhere between college and the ripe old age of thirty-eight, he had stopped acting like the coolest guy in town—the guy who got up early to go surf before school and won every race at every swim meet—to acting like he was actually sixty years old, and had ideas from the last century rather than the modern age.
Together, the two of us ran RCC Energy, the company my grandfather had started and my father had built up to behemoth-level success. When my father died five years ago, we’d taken over the running of the place, and though we’d been young at the time, we’d also been the boys who had been groomed from birth to take the place over. Our dad’s chosen successors, and therefore unassailable as far as the rest of the company (had to be) concerned.
Not that we’d been total wasters. We’d come in with a fresh vision and the motivation that came with being from a younger generation. We’d seen the world as it was now, rather than the way it had been when Grandad first started RCC, and we’d used that to move the company into more forward-thinking technologies. Sure, we’d still relied on oil