Page 11 of Falling for the Enemy

“I am reading them. I like variety. Committing to just one story at a time gives me anxiety. I’ll bring them back when they’re all done. That way, the family sticks together.”

“They’re books, Jocelyn, not children.”

“Thank Odin for that. My fiction babies are all I can handle.”

“Sounds like commitment issues if you ask me.”

It was too early to get psychoanalyzed, especially after last night, so she simply smiled and hooked her tote back over her shoulder. The canvas bag was much lighter now. “Have a beautiful day, Ellen.”

“You stay out of trouble, now, Miss Collins.”

“Never.” Jocelyn smiled and left the library.

Maybe she did have commitment issues. Or maybe she preferred her freedom. She liked her bookshelves full and her options open.

Besides, why should she want to be contractually obligated to change her name and spend her life relying on someone else when she’d proven she was perfectly capable of supporting herself? She might be Hideaway Bay’s longest-standing bachelorette, but she was far from the most desirable one. Staying unattached meant not having to reshape her life or personality to fit someone else’s expectations. Her single lifestyle was by design, not consequence. And she preferred to keep it that way.

Just like she preferred to keep her borrowed books as long as it took her to finish them at her own pace.

Other people always wanted to change her or tell her how to live her life better. She was just fine living her life exactly as she damn well pleased. And being single certainly didn’t mean she was celibate—especially not lately.

Even now, her body held the ache of Soren’s presence from last night. She bet he did that on purpose, fucked her so hard the sensation lingered for days. She wished she could say it was awful, but the truth was, he was the best she’d ever had.

Damn him.

Refusing to spend one more second thinking about the one man who drove her insane for over two decades, she concentrated on her list. She had a lot to do in preparation for her best friend’s upcoming baby shower, and Main Street was her preferred place to shop.

Hideaway Bay was the quintessential small town, with plenty of small businesses to support and enough charm to even put the legendary Stars Hollow to shame. And living in such a small town provided all the found-family vibes a single gal could need.

Jocelyn loved her home, every predictable, gossipy, salt-corroded inch of it. It had everything she needed—friends, bookstores, libraries, bars, even a place to buy her vibrators. As a single gal, that last one was important.

Survival of the fittest, she thought with a giggle.

She had a roster of maintenance men she called whenever she needed a…fixin’. But she hadn’t called any of those men since her whole situation-ship started with the one who shall remain unnamed.

Damnit, she was thinking of him again. Go away! She pictured a broom and tried to mentally sweep Soren out of her head.

Just the thought of him made her shut her eyes in... Shame? Who knew what she was feeling when it came to Soren Hawthorne? Their relationship bounced between childhood nemeses and phenomenal fuck-friends, far too complex to take apart in one sitting, therefore permanently deemed a topic for another time, never to be examined too closely.

She simply didn’t have the strength to psychoanalyze why she would sleep with the one man who drove her more insane than any other penis-toting moron in Hideaway Bay, yet here she was—a year and a half after the fact—still letting him through her front door. Still letting him into her body.

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath, disappointed in herself at the mere thought. Every time she looked at their situation dead-on, she became more aware that such an arrangement could only end in disaster.

Jocelyn was never going to change, and neither was he. Soren would always be the bossy, tight-assed control freak he’d always been.

Her parents had moved south ten years ago, chasing a sense of belonging her mother had hungered for her whole life, a place to finally fold herself into something larger than the family she already had. Her father followed the way he always did, content to want whatever his wife wanted. They expected Jocelyn to come along, to become the kind of daughter who fit the restrictive life they’d craved. She was twenty-one and already allergic to conformity, so she stayed in Hideaway Bay where her unshakable independence was born of sheer desperation and a need to survive.

It had been the best decision of her life. Her friends were here. Her roots were here. She didn’t want to rearrange her life around someone else’s idea of happiness, even her mother’s, so she chose independence, and it suited her.

Thank Odin she’d stayed, because now that Wren married that wondrously horny, emotionally constipated mountain man Greyson Hawthorne, things were getting very real. Wren was already pregnant with their first little belly goblin, and lots of additional babies were sure to follow.

Which led Jocelyn to her next stop…

She and Wren had been best friends since the moment Jocelyn transferred into the third grade. Now was her shot to play the cool, eccentric aunt, which was possibly the closest to motherhood Jocelyn would ever get.

Wren’s pregnancy was lifting the ban on Jocelyn’s soft, squishy side—but only slightly because she had a reputation to keep.

She’d always thought the biological clock thing was bullshit, but her damn clock had been clanking ever since Wren announced her pregnancy. Not cool, since Jocelyn thought it best not to have kids—a decision she’d based on her own insecurities about motherhood and the knowledge that anything long-term scared the ever-loving shit out of her.