Tuesday 16 June 2015

Release Day: Accidentally In Love by Laura Drewry



Accidentally In Love
Friends First # 3
By: Laura Drewry
Releasing June 16, 2015
Loveswept



Accidentally In Love

Friends First Series


Fans of Jill Shalvis and Susan Mallery will love Laura Drewry’s warm and humorous new Friends First romance, a sexy romp about a good cop and a bad girl playing hard to get.

Ellie Palmer and cops don’t mix, and getting pulled over by Officer Brett Hale—again—doesn’t help. Neither does being forced to take a safe-driving course with him. Brett’s by-the-book attitude leaves Ellie ice-cold, and his rock-hard body won’t change that. Still, the more time she spends with the guy, the more she finds herself warming up to his unexpected charms.

Even though Brett comes off like a boy scout, Ellie has sparked something he wants badly enough to get him to rethink his past mistakes. But when her ex shows up, Brett makes it his mission to keep Ellie safe in the here and now. His gut tells him the guy’s trouble, and Ellie must agree, because she doesn’t complain when Brett pulls her close. To keep her safe, though, he’ll have to choose between breaking her heart . . . and breaking the rules.


Every cop had at least one unsolved case sitting on his desk, and Brett was no different. For a year now he’d doggedly followed every tiny lead he could dig up on the hit-and-run, but he always ended up at the same place: nowhere.
The suspect vehicle, reported stolen a few days before the accident, had been found easily enough, but the driver had vanished. IDENT had been all over the truck and had ruled out as suspect every print they’d found. Painstaking dissections of the scene and both vehicles, as well as interviewing the victim and reviewing surveillance tapes, had given him nothing.
Bupkis. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
And if that wasn’t annoying enough, the victim in the incident was Ellie, and the lack of movement in the case had only fueled her contempt for the police department. Pulling her over today hadn’t helped matters, but she’d been doing almost twenty clicks over the speed limit.
She was lucky it was him who’d pulled her over and not Constable Hudak, who would have been too happy to not only ticket Ellie but to impound her vehicle without so much as a second thought. He could have written her up today—hell, he probably should have—but a couple things changed his mind.
The first was that she’d just lost her license, and even though that was her own damn fault, he didn’t kick people when they were down. The second was that he knew she expected him to write her up. In fact, she wanted him to do it, because then she could keep on believing he was a prick, and by not meeting her low expectations, he was proving her wrong.
And yeah, okay, after all the guff she’d given him over the last few years, he liked the fact that his being a good guy and cutting her some slack would piss her off a hell of a lot more than his issuing her another ticket.
So maybe Ellie wasn’t far wrong; maybe he was a bit of a prick after all.
He waited until her old blue Beetle disappeared around the curve near the bridge, then slowly got back into his patrol car and turned off the flashing lights. A small part of him would kill to be a fly on the wall when her letter from the Motor Vehicle Branch finally arrived and she saw the list of driving instructors in the area.
Until the MVB found a replacement for Larsen, Brett was the only one in a fifty-kilometer radius, and maybe if she hadn’t called him “Poncherello” he might have warned her about that.
“Seriously,” he grumbled. “Anyone who’s ever seen a single rerun of CHiPs knows I’m way more Baker than Ponch.”
But Ponch was better than some of the other names she called him, like Dudley Do-Right or Barney Fife.
Ellie’s past brush with the Ontario police was no secret to him; he’d known about it since the first time he pulled her over and ran her name through the system. It didn’t surprise him to see drug charges attached to anyone’s name, not with the number of cases he saw day to day, but after getting to know Ellie a little, none of that made sense. Hell, so far as he knew, the only time she’d even been intoxicated in the last four years was the night she, Regan, and Maya threw a post-wedding bachelorette party for Jayne.
She liked her wine, there was no question about that, but heroin? No way. And if she’d been wrongly charged and dragged through the courts, he couldn’t really blame her for having such a hate-on for law enforcement, especially after her stalking complaints against her ex, Kurt Neill, seemed to have gone nowhere. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy to Brett, but even if the cops hadn’t been able to help her with Kurt, surely her dad, some big hotshot attorney, would have been able to secure a restraining order against him. Yet there was no record of that having been done, either.
Given her complaints against Kurt, Brett had added him to the list of suspects in the hit-and- run but had crossed him off when the info from Toronto came in stating that Kurt had been on probation at the time, part of which included restricted travel. According to the Toronto detachment, Kurt had spoken to his probation officer on the phone the day of the accident, just like he’d done every week, as required.
One thing about Ellie: she didn’t seem to lie about anything, so it didn’t surprise him to hear bits of her past come out in conversations when they were all together. Regardless, it wasn’t his place to comment on any of it. What had happened was her business, and as far as Brett was concerned, the case had to have been thrown out for one of two reasons: either she was innocent or the cop assigned to the case hadn’t done his job properly.
Brett slipped his notebook into his vest pocket, making sure her license was still tucked inside. Jayne wasn’t wrong about him having Ellie’s info memorized. He only asked for her license and registration every time because it was procedure, but he’d long since stopped needing it in order to fill out her tickets.
Palmer, Elleanor Grace, DL #4885210, date of birth 1983-12-05, eyes brown, hair brown, weight 59.4 kg, height 171.5 cm, address 2649 Graemsay Road, Class 5 license with Restriction 21.
Technically, her hair was more of a chestnut shade, her eyes weren’t just brown; they were . . . well, brown brown, and the right one had a tiny gold speck near the bottom of her pupil. The only reason he knew that was because he’d once questioned her on the corrective lenses restriction and she’d responded in typical Ellie fashion; instead of simply telling him she wore contacts, she’d opened her eyes as wide as she could, pointed toward her lenses, and given him one of her all-too-familiar “dumbass” looks. It was his job to make sure she was actually wearing them, and in the time it took to actually spot the right one, he’d noticed the speck.
It’d taken him two seconds, maybe three, but it was long enough for Ellie to call him Mr. Magoo and make a crack about him being the one needing corrective lenses. He shouldn’t think it was funny when she took shots at him like that, yet every single time it happened, he had to work on keeping a straight face.
Sarcasm and honesty weren’t for everyone, though, and maybe that was why she didn’t date much; maybe the guys she met didn’t like the way she just laid everything out there. But still, a good-looking woman like that who was smart and funny . . . didn’t seem right that she didn’t go out more. Regan had laughed about it while she trimmed Brett’s hair a while back, telling him that Ellie’s idea of a date was the half hour it took to meet a guy for coffee.

Weird.

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Laura Drewry had been scribbling things for years before she decided to seriously sit down and write. After spending eight years in the Canadian north, Laura now lives back home in southwestern British Columbia with her husband, three sons, a turtle named Sheldon, and an extremely energetic German shepherd. She loves old tattered books, good movies, country music, and the New York Yankees.
Author Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

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