Hearts on Fire (The Hunter Family)
Read Hearts on Fire (The Hunter Family) Online
Authors: Ashley Blake
Kisses on Fire:
Reeling from a broken heart, the last thing Abby Hunter, twin daughter of billionaire Joshua Hunter, ever wanted on her vacation was to meet Zane Andrews. He was tall, sexy, and mysterious…everything her parents warned her about. He chases her and she runs, but with her vacation coming to an end Abby wonders if it’s time to stop running and time to start healing.
Hearts on Fire:
Tall, dark and sexy Zane Andrews seems too good to be true. When they get back to New York he says all the right things, knows how to touch Abby in all the right places, and makes her feel special. But the girls, the girls…they are everywhere. Can he really be trusted or is he just playing with her heart?
Hearts on Fire
Kisses on Fire
Intro Short Included
The Hunter Family, Vol. 10
by
Ashley Blake
New Adult Romance
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Copyright, 2014 by Ashley Blake.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. No portion of this work may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
Table of Contents
The plane back to New York had just taken off, and as I looked out the window I thought about how much my life had changed in the last five days. If you had told me at the beginning of our trip that I would be leaving so much happier, in such a short time, than when I arrived, I would have said you were nuts. When we planned the trip, it was for me to get away and nurse my broken heart. Lying on the beach and reading; that was all I had planned to do. The day after we got there, everything changed. As the plane climbed higher into the sky, I thought about the day we left.
“Abby, hurry up we’re going to miss our flight!”
“I’m coming Claire, I just have to grab my e-reader!” A pile of clothes spilled out of my chair and each piece landed on the floor as I hurriedly searched for my tablet. I had to find it because all I wanted to do on vacation was lay on the beach and get lost in someone else’s life. I couldn’t get Scott out of my mind and I had to figure out a way to move on.
“Are you planning to just read the entire time we’re there?” My twin sister almost sounded like she was whining.
“No, of course not, just
most
of the time we’re there!”
“Abby! You have to come out with me while we’re there, I’m not going to go out by myself!”
Yep, she was definitely whining. Claire and I were identical twins and we were as different as night and day. I mean, okay, we did have a few things in common, but our personalities, our taste in clothes, our taste in music and our taste in guys was completely opposite. We were strikingly pretty girls and we both had dark hair, mine was really long, down my back, and Claire’s hair brushed her shoulders. We had perfectly toned bodies from years of dancing, but that was where the similarities stopped.
When we were younger we were really competitive, each of us trying so hard to have our own identity, and as we got older that competitiveness turned into unfailing support for each other. We were both professional ballerinas but Claire was always the star of the troupe. I kept telling myself that one day I would be the star, so I was okay with taking a back seat to my sister, for a little while. We had just finished our first tour, with me as Claire’s understudy, and this vacation was exactly what we needed.
I was almost working up a sweat rushing around my room looking for the tablet and then I saw the corner of it peeking out at me underneath my chair.
“Found it!” I grabbed it, grabbed my suitcase and rushed into the hall where Claire was waiting for me by the door.
“Finally! Come on, the jet has probably been waiting for us at the airport for a half hour.”
We hurried downstairs to the town car and off we went to the airport. Claire and I had just graduated from college and we hadn’t taken a vacation yet. She was my best friend and we were inseparable. I couldn’t wait to feel the cool sand between my toes and the warm sun wrapping its rays around me. I wanted to put hundreds of miles between me and Scott Dawson and I wanted to forget I had ever known him.
Scott and I met during our junior year of college and had dated for two years. He made me believe that we would get married after we graduated and I was so in love, or at least I thought I was. A week before Claire and I left for our trip, I went over to Scott’s place to surprise him with his favorite pudding. He’d had a really bad day at work and he told me that he was just going to crawl into bed and shut out the world when he got home that night. Ever since he tried my pudding the first time, he told me that it was so delicious it could make any bad day better. Wanting to be a sweet girlfriend, I made him some pudding that day and went over to his place around 8:00 that night.
I had a key to his place so I quietly went inside not wanting to wake him if he was sleeping. I tiptoed to the kitchen to put the pudding in the fridge and as soon as I closed the door I could have sworn I heard a female giggle. I froze in my tracks when I heard it again followed by a soft moan.
What the hell?
Nerves kicked in as I quietly made my way to Scott’s bedroom and as I opened the door I saw what no girlfriend ever wants to see. Some big-boobed redhead had her legs in the air and Scott’s face was buried between them. I thought I was going to throw up. I slammed the door against the wall and they both turned to look in my direction, completely startled. Scott quickly grabbed his shorts from the floor and was blabbering something about being sorry and it didn’t mean anything.
I was so angry I was numb and I didn’t say a word as I glared and Scott and then turned to leave. He reached out and grabbed me, begging me to hear him out and I quickly snatched my arm from his grip. With eyes that were steely and cold I looked at him and it took everything in me not to slap him across his face.
“Don’t you ever call me again!”
“Abby, give me a chance to explain! I made a mistake, come on, you have to let me make it up to you!”
I was completely disgusted as I watched him groveling for my forgiveness. My lip curled up in a snarl as I spat my words at him.
“Don’t call me, don’t text me, don’t email me, and forget you ever met me!”
The tears wanted to come but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I narrowed my eyes at him and with a voice filled with dead calm I said the last words I would ever speak to Scott. “You don’t exist to me anymore.”
He was shocked and speechless as I turned away from him and went to the kitchen to get my pudding. He didn’t deserve it so I took it back and planned to enjoy it myself. The tears silently rolled down my cheeks as I went back home and cried myself to sleep. Scott had ruined everything.
He tried to contact me every single day, multiple times a day, but I refused to communicate with him in any way. I had found out through the grapevine that big boobs wasn’t the first girl he had cheated with. I felt so dumb that I had ignored all the signs. We hadn’t had sex in five months, but he kept saying it was because work was stressing him out. I believed him because I had seen some documentary that said men’s stress levels directly affect their desire for sex. Scott also worked late a lot, but I didn’t notice because so did I. I would be at the dance studio until 10:00 many nights. Silly me thought how great it was that my boyfriend and I both had late schedules and how perfect it was because I didn’t have to worry about him being upset that he couldn’t spend time with me. I never really doubted him and that was my first mistake. I really thought that we were going to get married one day.
I couldn’t stop crying so I asked Claire to take a quick vacation with me so that I could get away from him and get him out of my mind. She was always up for a vacation so we booked a trip to Cancun the following week.
We took our family’s private jet to Cancun and someone from the hotel met us at the airport when we landed. Our bodyguards were with us and they blended into the crowd but they were never very far from us. Yes, we had bodyguards. Claire and I’d had bodyguards all of our lives so it was second nature for us to have them around. We used to complain about our lack of privacy and we begged our dad to let us travel without them but he wouldn’t even entertain the idea.
I remembered his words very clearly. “Girls, the attempted kidnapping of billionaire’s children happens way too often. As my children, you will always be a target.” It was true, as the offspring of Joshua Hunter, we learned at a very young age that we were not like other children. So, even though we didn’t always see them, our bodyguards were always around.
When we arrived at our hotel it was around 2:00 p.m. and Claire and I immediately changed into our bikinis and went to the beach. Our bodyguards were able to take a break for a few hours because the only people allowed on the private beach were guests of the hotel, and my father made sure that all of the guests were checked before the travel agent made our reservation. Daddy never let us stay anywhere without knowing who would be around us.
Our room was about 500 feet from the gorgeous white sand so we were there in less than two minutes. I settled into a lounge chair and closed my eyes, listening to the waves crash against the shore, the sun beating down on me as Claire went to dip her toes in the water.
I took a deep breath and smiled to myself.
This is more like it.
A few minutes later Claire went back to the room to get more sunscreen and as I turned over on my stomach I heard the most delicious male voice.
“Can I get you something to drink, ma’am?”
I glanced up and peered over the top of my sunglasses at the sexiest man I had ever seen. His dark hair fell lazily over his eye and his tan muscular arms begged to be touched. I wanted to run my fingers along his skin, up over his toned biceps and glide my fingers through his hair. I was instantly mesmerized. Never before had I had this type of reaction to a man.
I sat up so that I could get a better look at him.
Oh yeah, that’s what I would call smokin’ hot.
His dark eyes roamed over my bikini clad body and I could tell that he liked what he saw.
“I didn’t realize that the hotel sent someone to the beach to get refreshments for us.”
Tall, dark and sexy gave me a little smile. “Yes, ma’am, we want to make your stay here as pleasant as possible.”
“Please don’t call me ma’am, my name is Abby. And you are?”
“My apologies, Abby. My name is Zane, so if you need anything just ask for me. I am at your beck and call.”
“Hmmm, beck and call, I like the sound of that.” I could feel that my cheeks were turning bright red as soon as the words slipped out of my mouth. I normally was not so forward but I couldn’t help it, this guy was hot!
Zane looked at me and I could tell that he wanted to say something but thought twice before opening his mouth.
“I’ll have a sparkling water, for now. Are you around all day, Zane?”
“Yes, my shift is over at 6:00. I’ll be right back with your water.”
I watched him walk away and just as he rounded the corner out of my line if sight, Claire came sashaying over to me.
“You look like a dog in heat! Who was that?”
My hands immediately flew to my cheeks. “You don’t think he noticed, do you?”
