Stone cold, p.1
Stone Cold, page 1
Stone Cold
Winter Renshaw
Contents
Copyright
Also By Winter Renshaw
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
SAMPLE - Whiskey Moon
About the Author
Copyright
COPYRIGHT 2022 WINTER RENSHAW
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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COVER DESIGN: Louisa Maggio, LM Book Creations
EDITING: Wendy Chan, The Passionate Proofreader
BETA READER: Ashley Cestra
PHOTOGRAPHER: Wander Aguiar
MODEL: Phillipe B.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or, if an actual place, are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
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Also By Winter Renshaw
THE NEVER SERIES
Never Kiss a Stranger
Never is a Promise
Never Say Never
Bitter Rivals
* * *
THE ARROGANT SERIES
Arrogant Bastard
Arrogant Master
Arrogant Playboy
* * *
THE RIXTON FALLS SERIES
Royal
Bachelor
Filthy
Priceless (Amato Brothers crossover)
* * *
THE AMATO BROTHERS SERIES
Heartless
Reckless
Priceless
* * *
THE P.S. SERIES
P.S. I Hate You
P.S. I Miss You
P.S. I Dare You
* * *
THE MONTGOMERY BROTHERS DUET
Dark Paradise
Dark Promises
* * *
STANDALONES
Single Dad Next Door
Cold Hearted
The Perfect Illusion
Country Nights
Absinthe
The Rebound
Love and Other Lies
The Executive
Pricked
For Lila, Forever
The Marriage Pact
Hate the Game
The Cruelest Stranger
The Best Man
Trillion
Enemy Dearest
The Match
Whiskey Moon
The Dirty Truth (June 2022)
Love and Kerosene (Oct 2022)
All Books Available here!
Free Content Available here!
* * *
DESCRIPTION
From #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Winter Renshaw comes a scorching hot forbidden romance.
* * *
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* * *
The most humiliating moment of my life begins with an early morning message from my ex’s notoriously heartless best friend.
* * *
Jovie—
* * *
In no way does this mean my opinion of you has changed.
* * *
I’m reaching out because sometime in the middle of last night you tagged yourself in Jude and Stassi’s engagement photo.
* * *
I don’t care if you were drunk or it was unintentional. I suggest you remove it immediately since the wedding is in two months (which I’m sure you know since you were clearly FB stalking them). The damage is done, but no reason to make things more awkward.
* * *
You’re welcome.
* * *
Stone
* * *
I waste no time removing my humiliatingly accidental tag before the sharp-tongued novelist in me fires off a response to the man who harbored extreme and inexplicable hatred of me during the three years I dated his best friend in college.
* * *
Only I didn’t expect him to respond.
* * *
And nothing could have prepared me for what he would say …
* * *
… or for all the ways this gorgeous villain with cruel icy blues would become the biggest plot twist my life had ever known.
For those who saw them first.
If someone doesn’t have a heart
you can’t go around
offering them yours
—Rupi Kaur, Home Body
Chapter One
Jovie
* * *
Three back-to-back text message chimes wrench me from the deepest sleep I’ve ever known. My head throbs as I lift my cheek from the pillow and squint toward my nightstand where my phone glows in the early morning darkness of my room. Heaviness sinks into my bones and my vision is bleary, but I grow more awake with each passing second.
A fourth chime beckons me, followed by a fifth.
Inching across my bed, my legs tangled in hot sheets, I grab the electronic banshee, tap in my code, and attempt to find out what all the fuss is about.
MONICA: Jovie … omg!
MONICA: Girl, wake up. It’s urgent …
MONICA: Seriously. This. Is. Not. Good.
MONICA: Okay, you really need to wake up now. Everyone is seeing this.
MONICA: This is legit a personal emergency of the worst imaginable kind. If I don’t hear back in two minutes, I’m coming over.
Monica is my best friend and I love her dearly, but she’s also the queen of personal emergencies. Everything is urgent in her world.
I tap her name and lift my phone to my hear.
“Oh, my god, you’re awake,” she says in one long gasping breath.
“What’s going on?” I ask, glancing at the time and wondering if she realizes it’s not even 6 AM. I attempt to pull in a long, deep breath only to forget that my nostrils aren’t working thanks to this nasty head cold I’ve been battling all week.
After several days of not getting an ounce of sleep, I make an executive decision to down some heavy-duty cold medicine I found in the back of my cabinet and slept like a log … until now.
“I tried signing on to your Facebook account but you must have changed your password,” she says, which only begs an entirely different realm of questions.
“Why would you need to log into my account? Is it Chauncy?” I ask. Her husband is a bona fide ladies’ man with a shameless wandering eye, and she is equal parts jealous and loyal. It’s a toxic combination and this wouldn’t be the first time she’s needed to do some internet sleuthing via my account.
“No, no. Jovie, this isn’t about me,” she says. “It’s about you.”
I sit up, my heart inching up the back of my throat. “Wait … I’m confused.”
“So you didn’t do it on purp ose?”
“Do what?”
“Tag yourself in Jude and Stassi’s engagement photo.” Her words blur together and sound far away at the same time.
“Mon, I would never,” I say with a chuckle. While last night is a bit of a Nyquil-induced haze—and I’ve been known to social media creep my exes out of sheer boredom—tagging myself in my college boyfriend’s engagement photo is the last thing I’d do.
“But you did,” she says. “It’s there. It’s there for all the world to see. Well, at least his eleven hundred twenty-seven friends, her six hundred and two friends, and your seven-hundred eighty-nine friends. “Hang on.”
My phone buzzes five seconds later, gifting me with a screenshot of a smiling Jude looking down at his blushing-bride-to-be, his arms wrapped around her whittled waist as she gazes up at him with stars for eyes.
I put the call on speaker.
“Zoom in,” Monica says.
I pinch and zoom, inspecting the image.
And then I see it.
My name in the upper lefthand corner of the image, parallel to the orange-sicle sunset in the background.
“H … how?” I manage. “This is … I didn’t do this.”
“Then who would?” she asks.
“I … I don’t know?” I sit up, brushing the hair from my face as I study the image. I haven’t spoken to Jude in years.
Five years, to be precise—not that I’m counting. It’s basic math.
He dumped me shortly after our college graduation, after going on a guys’ trip to Tulum with ten of his closest friends. While most of them came back with things like suntans and gift shop t-shirts and hangovers … Jude came back with her.
Stassi Guinness.
They met at a bar the second night of the trip (she was there for her sister’s bachelorette party) and they were inseparable from that point on (or so I’m told). In the blink of an eye, our three-year relationship came to a screeching, grinding halt. My place in Jude’s heart was replaced by a head-turning leggy blonde with family money and access to her daddy’s private jet at all times.
Not that I’m bitter.
I just didn’t expect for my steady, no-frills, drama-free college relationship to go down in a blaze of humiliating glory accented by every cliché in the book.
Two months before his trip, we were ambling through the local mall, hand in hand, sipping matching matcha lattes, window shopping for engagement rings, and talking about what our next move was going to be.
And then … plot twist … Stassi happened.
No one saw it coming—but once it did, it was all anyone could talk about in our overlapping social circles. For months, my inbox blew up with messages from people I hadn’t talked to in years. The worst ones were from friends who thought they were doing me a favor by sending me screenshotted photos from Stassi’s private Instagram account. They’d always come with a message like, “Ugh, she’s insufferable” or “if she were any more plastic she’d be a human Barbie.” They meant well, but after a while I had to ask them to stop sending me those.
Jude had moved on, and I was trying to.
“Can you remove the tag?” Monica asks.
“Yeah, of course.” I place the phone aside and grab my laptop off the nightstand. Only when I crack the lid open, the screen stays black and the password prompt doesn’t appear. “Shit. I think my computer’s dead.”
“Just do it from your phone,” she says.
“I deleted the app on my phone when I did that social media fast last month,” I say. If I install it, I’ll have to re-enter my password using one of those code generator authenticator app things and to be honest, I’m not even entirely sure how those work. I just know that I made my account so insanely secure that I basically made it impossible for me to get back in—at least on my phone. Everything’s good to go on my laptop … if it would just start. “Hang on. I need to find my charger.”
Untangling myself from my sheets, I all but trip to the door, burst down the hall, and locate my laptop cord in my office.
“Okay, I’m back,” I say as I finagle the plugs. A minute later, I’m logged into my computer.
Double-clicking on the web browser, I clamp my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp when I realize I’m already logged into Facebook … and the last image pulled up is the very same one I’m tagged in. There’s no denying I did this.
“You’re quiet,” Monica says. “Everything okay?”
It’s true.
It’s real.
It happened.
“How would I … why would I … I don’t understand …” I can’t finish my sentence. If I could crawl into a hole right now and die, I would.
“Can you remove the tag?” Her question is frantic. She fully understands the nature of this grave mistake.
“I’m trying.” I’m terrified to click anywhere on the image, worried I’ll somehow tag myself again, but I hover my mouse above the sunset corner of the image anyway and give it a right click. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I say when the option to remove the tag pops up.
I can’t click it fast enough.
“All right. It’s gone,” I say.
But the damage is done.
Glancing at the upper right hand corner of the screen, I spot twelve new messages waiting for me.
I’m guessing Monica wasn’t the only one who noticed the tag …
“This is mortifying,” I say.
“I’ll be honest, my secondhand embarrassment is going strong right now,” she asks. “How did this even happen?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I say, “I don’t know. I’ve been sick lately. I took something to help me sleep last night … it made me a little loopy … I must have been out of it?”
Years ago, I was prescribed a sleep aid that used to give me mild amnesia and eventually led to me sleepwalking. One morning I woke up to find an empty can of tomato soup in the kitchen, next to a bowl and spoon, and my tongue and the roof of my mouth were both raw, as if I’d scalded them. I never took another pill again after that, but I figured I’d be safe with some over-the-counter NyQuil …
Apparently not.
“What are you going to say if someone asks you about it?” she asks.
“Nothing. I’ll probably just pretend like it didn’t happen.” Odds are the twelve people who saw it and reached out to me will forget about it soon enough.
“Oh,” she says. “You could always say, like, you were on your second bottle of wine when your old song started playing on your favorite Spotify station, which made you nostalgic, so you took a glimpse at his profile just to reminisce for a moment, but then you saw their engagement photo and accidentally clicked something—”
“—I don’t owe anyone an explanation.”
