✰ Bianca ✰ Janeane ✰
OLD BLURB
My name is Ruffian. To remember my mom, I want to change the world.
I’m going to do things wrong to make things right.
That’s okay, because I’m going to jail.
I know it.
I’ve planned for it. I was always going to end up there.
For now, I need a cover story.
A cover family.
A way to hide from the suspicion that always finds me.
Teddi Burathon is the perfect shield.
Popular, friendly, sassy. Good.
She’s everything I’m not.
And I’ll use her as a pretty distraction so no one sees me coming.
My heart is dead and I’m a bomb waiting to detonate.
Most people want to build a future.
Me?
I'm going to rob a bank.
NEW BLURB
I had the perfect friends, the perfect family.
The perfect everything.
We were a greeting card you wanted to frame.
And then he showed up on our doorstep looking like the
aftermath of a rock concert, claiming to be my adopted brother’s half-brother.
Sounds like trouble, right?
He looked like trouble.
Hell, his name defined trouble.
Ruffian had bad news and heartbreak written all over him.
But
knowing he would break my heart didn’t stop me from falling.
You don't have to remember Drowning in Stars to enjoy this book. But it was such a beautiful story - so if you're reading both, please read DIS first, especially because Pixie and Gaze are in here a lot!!
Will there be a HEA?
READ THE BOOK TO FIND OUT ☺
Ugh! Debra and her super emotional books!
But I loved this book.
I won't say more than that. I don't want to spoil anything.
It was a beautiful love story.
A beautiful and heartbreaking story about two young people - who had a very different start to life - fighting their way to a happily ever after!
It was maybe a tiny bit long. It took me forever to read it. No idea why. I guess it's just one of those slow-flowing stories. Still amazing, but it could've been a bit shorter, or a tiny bit more exciting in the middle parts.
I just realized that I haven't talked much - or at all - about Teddi. What she does and what her hopes and dreams are. And that's not fair. Yes, she's a happy upper middle class girl. A rich girl really. But she has her own problems. And dreams. She wants to help people. She goes to school but she also throws parties for terminal ill or very sick children. Like kids who won't be able to go to their own prom in five years, because they won't be alive anymore. Things like that. I think that's amazingly brave and beautiful. But it gets a bit lost in the story, because Ruffian is our troubled hero and we just want him to get his happy end! But Teddi obviously plays the most important part in his story. She's his sparkles and we love her! ♥
So if you're extremely weird like I am - I would suggest you first read Mercy - Havoc - Lock - Drowning in Stars and then Stealing The Stars! 😉
Also - I still need a spin-off for Austin!!
I flopped around until I really, really wanted a glass of
water. Or a bottle. Just anything to get me hydrated. I stood and went to my
door, squeaking it open slowly.
No one told me I had to stay in my room, but that was a
sense I was getting. I should be settled for the evening. Rocket the dog was
nowhere to be found, so I assumed she was with one of the family members. The
young cat that Gaze and Pixie had claimed was theirs was on the couch and
covered his eyes with his paws when I walked past him.
In the kitchen I had to open three different cabinets until
I found some glasses. They were all special liquor glasses. Wine, rocks, beer
glasses—they would suffice, but their normal cups weren’t in an obvious spot.
I went to the fridge and skipped the ice so I wouldn’ make a
racket. When my glass was halfway full, a person lurking in the doorway caught
my eye. I started and my hand jumped, the glass shooting up out of my hand.
Teddi lurched forward and put out her hand. I did the same. I managed to get a
grip on the glass as Teddi’s arm swung wildly and she poked me in the eye with
her pinkie.
“Oh shit.” I slapped my left hand over my throbbing eye
while catching the glass with my other hand.
“Oh my God. I am so sorry. Are you okay? It felt like I
stuck my finger in Jell-O right then.” She shivered and closed her eyes.
I opened my other eye while squeezing the injured one
tightly. “It’s okay. I have two. And I like a challenge.”
“Seriously? Like, I can drive you to Urgent Care or
wherever. You might have a scratched cornea and that blows. I hated when it
happened to me.”
“Someone poked you in the eye in the middle of the night?”
“No. I had an accident in cheer. Our bottom was a little off
her game and I wound up knowing what four inches of her finger felt like in my
brain.”
“Man, that’s not the sentence I want to hear wrapped around
the words of four inches of finger in.” I staggered over to the counter and set
down my glass.
“What did you want to hear?” She was smokin’. Forcing me to
tell her about my dirty mind.
“Nothing. No worries. Why are you up in the middle of the
night?” I slumped against the counter.
“It’s time for my two a.m. fudge bar.” She moved to the freezer
part of the fridge and yanked it open. She had the ice cream she sought set up
like a dispenser. She plucked out a cold one and had the paper off of it in a
practiced motion.
Here I was feeling spoiled for having water from the
dispenser. Girlfriend had her own private ice cream truck in her kitchen.
“You set an alarm for that or something?” I lifted my chin
in her direction.
“It’s a built-in notification” She tapped her temple with
her phone. “How’s your room downstairs?”
Stupid luxurious. Spacious. Private. Alone. Sad.
“Great. Bed’s a little soft.” I attempted to open my poked
eye. Couldn’t do it.
I watched as concern zipped her smile into a straight line.
“You really might have some damage there.” She took a step toward me.
If she only knew. The damage I had and the damage I intended
to do.
“Let me see.” She popped the whole ice cream into her mouth
and clamped her lips around it. Then she was in my space on her tiptoes. She
put her hands on my face like we’d known each other our whole lives. I flinched
a little and she settled a hand behind my neck. She pried my closed eye open
with her fingers. In the meantime, she made sucking noises around the ice
cream. It seemed like she might actually be in distress, so I grabbed the
Fudgsicle out of her mouth. She licked around her lips and squinted some more.
“I can’t tell crap. It's too dark.” She stepped back and
took her ice cream from my hands.
She did some very thorough licking of the melting parts as
she made her way to the light switch. She turned it on and returned to me. “I
need to set this down.”
She opened the cabinet next to my head and took out a bowl,
setting the fudge bar in it.
Then she resumed her position and clamped onto my neck and
eye again. “Sorry, I am so used to being in people’s personal space between
makeup and cheer.”
She seemed to be apologizing for putting her chest against
me and blowing her sweet breath onto my face.
It was all making things happen in my pants. Too much. As
she looked intently at my eye, interrogation-style, I had to stare at her. She
had to be the prettiest human I’d ever seen in person. Her eyes were set up
like blue starbursts and her skin was beautifully smooth. I wanted to lick it
like she was my ice cream treat. She let go of my eyelid and it snapped shut.
“It’s red and bloodshot.” She pointed to the kitchen chair.
I lumbered over and sat down, grateful for a place to hunch
over my growing problem.
Teddi went back to the freezer and came back with a cold
pack. “Tilt your head back a little.”
I did as she asked again, and she straddled my leg, again
holding my neck. Sure, my eye felt like it still had her finger in it, but all
this closeness was really having me and my pants hoping she was going to kiss
everything and make it better.
She gently pressed the ice on my closed eye. “Keep it
closed. The eye really does heal itself a lot. You just need to give it time.”
I grunted in acknowledgment. As I peered at her through my
working eye, she rooted around in the kitchen. Her tiny sleep shorts and tank
top were my own personal cable channel. She used the water from my
glass—whatever was left—and then refilled a water bottle with a straw in it.
“Here, now you can drink easier while your eye does what it
has to do.” She held the bottle near my face. I took it out of her hand.
“Thanks. You send mixed messages to weirdos in your kitchen.
Attack, first aid, apply water.” I took a deep suck and realized I was super
thirsty.
She went back to her ice cream and opened a drawer until she
came up with a spoon. Her snack had become a cold soup and she ate it as such.
I hit the bottom of the bottle with a loud slurp.
Teddi grimaced. “Damn, son. You were parched.”
She grabbed my bottle and filled it again. The little
kindnesses she was showing me were getting embedded into my skin. Where I was
from, how I was raised, kindness was hard to find. I could go whole days
without getting treated like a person by anyone besides my mom.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And I’m sorry I turned you into a pirate.
The good news is, I have an eye patch from last Halloween for you.” She pointed
at my eye with her spoon.
↓ LINKS TO THE BOOK AND AUTHOR ↓
Book #1
Other Books by Debra Anastasia:
Check out For All The Evers:
Debra creates pretend people in her head and paints them on the giant, beautiful canvas of your imagination. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in political science and writes new adult angst and romantic comedies. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two amazing children.
