Between Hearts: A Romance Anthology

  Between Hearts

  A Romance Anthology

  Erica Alexander

  Katharine Leigh

  Keller Ramsey

  TJ Branham

  KC Maxwell

  Megan Matthews

  Kata Čuić

  Parker St. Rose

  KA Stalter

  Catherine Mae Brown

  Micki Woodfield

  HL Miller

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title Page

  A Story For Everyone…

  Erica Alexander

  Seventeen Wishes

  Katharine Leigh

  Locked In

  Keller Ramsey

  Snapback

  TJ Branham

  Never Sorry

  KC Maxwell

  Beginning of the Storm

  Megan Matthews

  Lag - On the Island

  Kata Čuić

  Spaghetti and Roses

  Parker St. Rose

  The Tryout

  KA Stalter

  Promises Broken

  Catherine Mae Brown

  Flight of Destiny

  Micki Woodfield

  Penelope Discovers the World

  HL Miller

  Off the Playbook

  Between the Hearts Playlist

  Copyright © 2016 by:

  Erica Alexander, TJ Branham, Cathy M. Brown, Kata Čuić, Kristy DeBoer, Parker Evangeline, Katharine Leigh, Megan Matthews, KC Maxwell, HL Miller, Keller Ramsey, Micki Woodfield.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic content. It is intended only for those aged 17 and older.

  A Story For Everyone…

  Read in order or jump around. Make sure to check them all.

  Seventeen Wishes

  Zac and Lilly are best friends and he loves her more than life itself. But Zac is keeping a secret. Both his struggles and love are unknown to Lilly. When secrets turn into a life and death choice are they still secrets or just plain lies?

  Heat index: 3

  Locked In

  A missing young woman. An out of options mathematician. A less than conventional investigator. Can Delaney Stark find Benjamin’s sister before it’s too late? The clock’s ticking…

  Heat index: 1

  Snapback

  Having a gay best friend has never been an issue for Jamie, but an innocent touch has him questioning what he really feels for Adam. He's figured out the answer, but is it too late?

  Heat index: 2

  Never Sorry

  Melissa is bent on telling Dean exactly what she thinks of him. Will either of them be sorry?

  Heat index: 2

  Beginning of the Storm

  Ophelia Warren's heart has been broken. Owen King keeps his pain inside of himself. Together they form a friendship that neither are ready for but can't resist.

  Heat index: 1

  Lag - On the Island

  Simone is on the beach for one reason—to get a tan. Plans change when she meets Trey Good. Will their fling fizzle out when vacation ends or will fate intervene?

  Heat index: 2

  Spaghetti And Roses

  Boy and girl run in circles around each other. Nothing is resolved. The end.

  Heat index: 4

  The Tryout

  When Declan McCoy tries out for the high school triathlon club, he has one thing in mind: He wants Liv Samuels to notice him. What he doesn't expect is that she and one of her best friends will do just that... and more.

  Heat index: 5

  Promises Broken

  At fifteen, Briggs was forced to leave town and break a promise to his best friend, Paige. Nearly three years later, with Paige never far from his mind, he revisits his past and discovers she is no longer the kid he remembers. And his feelings for her are anything but friendly.

  Heat index: 1

  Flight of Destiny

  Cassandra Devane will never regret giving up her aisle seat to the handsome British giant.

  Heat index: 4

  Penelope Discovers the World

  Penelope meets Ren in a whirlwind of good music and good drinks. He's barely a memory from her past but affects her present in the most unexpected ways.

  Heat index: 2

  Off the Playbook

  After a disappointment at work, Jana turns to Gavin, a cocky, brash, intense football player for distraction and gets more than she expected from her former hookup.

  Heat index: 4

  Seventeen Wishes

  Erica Alexander

  Edited by

  Valorie Clifton

  Prologue

  Zac

  The thing about being born with an expiration date is you learn to appreciate life a little more than the average person. You pack a lot of living into your days. Shit that other people take for granted, you are most thankful for, like your next breath or your next heartbeat. For most people that expectation is granted. For me, it’s a guessing game. I never know when the next thump-thump of my heart will be its last, so I appreciate each and every beat. I don’t savor it too much since I’m not supposed to exert myself or do anything remotely fun.

  You’d think being dealt this crappy hand, I’d be pissed, but I’m not. When fate gave me a heart that doesn’t know how to keep me alive, it also gave me a reason to keep it beating. And that reason is smiling at me right now.

  Lilly’s big, brown eyes sparkle with mischief. For most people, she would be average—average brown eyes, average brown hair, average height. She’s just another seventeen-year-old girl in her senior year of high school. But for me, she’s a partner in crime. A confidant. A shoulder to lean on. An ear to listen. My best friend. My reason to keep breathing. And unknown to her, the love of my life.

  Wish #1

  Zac

  It’s Lilly’s seventeenth birthday, and we celebrate by hiding in our favorite spot in her backyard. There is no fence between our houses, and the tree that sits right in the middle of the two property lines has stood over the years as witness to all the secrets we shared. I consider the tree to be in her backyard, because her dad built the treehouse. I still remember that day. It was a gift for her on her seventh birthday. We climbed up the ladder that early summer day—Lilly a lot faster than me—and spent all afternoon playing in it. Her mom and dad had brought up all-weather cushions and a small table. Her mom even added a cooler with snacks and drinks. Over the last ten years, we spent more time together in this treehouse than just about anywhere else. It had to be repainted a few times and the cushions replaced. Her dad eventually rigged it with electricity, so we even had light and a space heater on cold winter nights—not that it gets that cold in South Carolina.

  But today, June 7th, the day she turns seventeen, is a warm eighty-two degrees and the sky is a perfect blue. Summer vacation just started. In the fall, Lilly will rejoin our friends back in school as a senior. I hope to as well.

  She sighs, lying next to me on the cushions, breaking our comfort
able silence. I can’t hold back my grin. She smiles back.

  “Happy Birthday, Lilly.” I wait until we are alone in our favorite place to wish her a happy birthday. We’ll go out with friends to celebrate over the weekend, but right now, it’s just us. My parents are at work, and her parents are taking her out to dinner tonight.

  Her smile gets bigger. “I knew you wouldn’t forget it.”

  “Never!”

  She turns to me, props herself on an elbow, and brushes my hair away from my face. It’s long and annoying at times, but she likes it long. She keeps on playing with it, brushing this way and that, so who am I to complain? My father hates it. He says I look like a beach bum surfer. Since we live three blocks from the ocean and it’s summer, beach bum it is. Not the surfer part, though. That would take more effort than my body can handle.

  “I got you something, but you’ll probably think it’s silly.”

  “What? Let me see it!” She jumps to her knees in excitement. I love this about her. She loves surprises. Surprises in life have always been kind to her.

  Not so for me. I hate surprises. For me, they come in the form of doctor’s visits disguised as trips. When I was little, my parents took me on long road trips that seemed fun until I found out it was yet another doctor, another hospital. More tests. For me, surprises always come in the shape of bad news.

  I reach into my backpack on the floor, pull out a brown paper bag, and hand it to her. She peeks into the bag and pulls out a small glass jar.

  She looks at the jar and turns it this way and that. It’s a small mason jar filled with folded pieces of colored paper. She shakes it and looks at me with a smile on her face.

  “What is it?”

  “Seventeen wishes,” I reply. “One for each year of your life.”

  Her smile grows bigger. “Can I open it?”

  “Yes, but” —I cover her hand with mine, stopping her from opening the jar just yet— “you can’t read them all at once. You have to read them in order. They have numbers on them.” I point at a folded paper with the number nine on it showing through the glass. “And you can only open and read it when I tell you to.”

  Her smile fades and a pout forms.

  I laugh.

  “Nope. No amount of pouting will work. If you can’t promise to follow the rules, I’ll have to take it away and just give you the wishes whenever I want.”

  She pulls the jar away and hugs it to her body.

  “No way! It’s mine. My wishes. I’m not giving them up.”

  Her reaction makes me laugh.

  “You don’t even know what the wishes are.”

  “You made them, so that’s good enough for me.”

  She puts the jar on the floor next to her, leans over, kisses me on the cheek, and brushes the hair away from my eyes again. She sighs. “I wish I had your hair.” She plays with it, running her fingers through. “It’s not fair that you get the blond hair with all those golden highlights and I get plain, mousy brown,” she complains.

  I reach for her and tug at a strand. “I love your hair. It’s so rich and shiny. You’re crazy. Your hair is beautiful. You’re just fishing for a compliment, aren’t you?”

  She grins, but I know she isn’t. Lilly is the most confident person I know.

  “Do you want to go to the beach?” I ask. An advantage of living just three blocks away from the ocean is that we can just go any time we want. As it’s summer vacation for us, we are left alone to do as we please while our parents work.

  “Yes! Give me five to change and grab some stuff.”

  She gets up and gives me her hand to pull me up with her. When she does, my heart beats erratically and dizziness overcomes me. I hold on to the wall and she looks at me, alarmed. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just a little dizzy. I got up too fast.” I smile at her to dispel her worry. Tick, tock goes the clock. How much time ’til I die?

  To distract her, I ask, “Do you want to read your first wish now?”

  “Yes!” She claps her hands like an excited little kid.

  “Okay, find number one.”

  She picks up the jar from the floor and shakes it around until she sees #1 showing through the side of the jar. She opens it, fishes for the pink folded square of paper, and closes the jar again.

  #1: I wish that you will always have

  something to smile about.

  Wish #2

  Zac

  She takes the sunblock from my hand and smooths it over my back and arms, being especially careful with my shoulders. I have a tendency to burn, and my mother won’t be too happy if I come home looking like a cooked lobster.

  This small stretch of beach is hidden from the tourists. Only the locals know it, and it’s mostly empty since one has to walk through a path of rocks and thorny bushes to reach it. Today, I see a napping old lady under an umbrella, book in hand, and a woman with two young kids is in the distance.

  Lilly moves around me and starts on my chest, her fingers tracing the thin line down the center of it. The scar that will forever be there. Proof that I have a heart after all. A bad, defective heart, but still a heart. My first corrective surgery was done just a few days after I was born, the second at five years old, and the last one when I was twelve.

  At my last appointment six months ago, the doctor was concerned. He did not exactly say it out loud. Doctors don’t like to give expiration dates, but I can read between the lines. If I don’t receive a donor heart by the time I’m eighteen, I’ll die. My heart is failing. It just can’t keep going much longer. I’m seventeen and a half now. Time is not my friend. Knocking on heaven’s door.

  I’m a Status 2 patient, so the urgency of my case is not enough to push me to the top of the waiting list. Status 1 patients, those who are bed-bound and in twenty-four-hour hospital care, take precedence. I’m not there yet. The waiting list is long, and there aren’t enough donors. People die everyday, hoping for one more day. My chances are not good. Knowing that someone else has to die so I can live makes me feel awful. Why is my life any more important than anyone else’s?

  I’m happy despite it all. Happy because of Lilly.

  I know it would kill my mother to lose her only child. She’s always so careful with me, and I know that she blames herself for my being born this way. She didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the hand of fate. I believe in fate. I need to. I need to believe that everything happens for a reason and that fate has given me a crappy heart for a reason.

  Sometimes, I think the reason is Lilly. Everything has a price, right? Maybe the price I have to pay for having this girl in my life from the moment she was born, is a defective heart. Had I been born with a normal heart, I might have been a different person. I might have chosen different friends and not been so close to Lilly. Nah. I dismiss the thought as soon as it pops in my head. I’d love her a thousand times over, broken heart or not.

  I don’t believe in chance or coincidences. Fate made us neighbors and born just a few months apart. Fate gave me Lilly.

  My heart may be physically broken, but it loves her like no other. There is nothing I won’t do for Lilly. She is my reason. All of my reasons start and end with her. She’s the reason I hold on and hope that someone else will die so I can live to see her smile again. To lose myself in her voice, in her smell, in her touch.

  Because when I’m with her, I don’t feel broken. She makes me whole in a way no one else can.

  So I fight and hope and hate myself sometimes because someone has to die so I can live. Some days, the guilt is more than I can take, but one look into her big, brown eyes and I forgive myself.

  “Do you want to open your second wish now?” I ask her to distract myself from my line of thought. I don’t want to bring us down.

  She gets all excited, drops to the towel, and grabs her tote bag, taking the jar out and opening it to find wish two.

  #2: I wish to be the one putting those

  smiles on your face.

  Wish #3

 
Zac

  She smiles big when she reads it, looks back at me, and carefully puts the paper in a zipped pocket on her bag with the first wish. She grabs the sunblock and returns to smoothing it over my chest.

  Her eyes turn a little sad when she traces the scar, but she quickly covers it with a teasing smile. “Yoga does a boy’s body good.”

  I laugh. Yeah, I take yoga classes with her. We’ve been doing it since we were thirteen. She took a class, and I followed her. I liked it, and she was there with me, so one more reason to do it. I can’t play any sports. The risk is too great. I can’t exert myself, and I have to be careful with any kind of impact to my chest. Yoga allows me to stay strong and flexible putting no extra stress on my heart. At first, Mom freaked, but the doctor green-lighted it and she relented. The lean muscles I get out of it are a plus.

  I love Lilly’s touch. Her hands on my skin make me tremble. My body responds to her touch and hardens in all the right places. I step around her and walk to the water to cool off. Can’t she see the effect she has on me? Maybe she does and just ignores it. I don’t know which is worse.

  It’s always been the two of us. We have other friends we hang out with, but it’s always us and them. Now that school is over for the year, it really is just the two of us. I know that our parents are starting to worry about how close we are.