Hot for the Ranger (Hot for Heroes #8)

162 Pages·2020·0.39 MB·english

by  Ember Flint [Flint

EMBER FLINT
CONTENTS

Hot for the Ranger
Prologue Part 1
Prologue Part 2
Prologue Part 3
Prologue Part 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Epilogue 2
Author’s note
Follow the Author
Also by Ember Flint
Click here to join Ember’s Newsletter and immediately receive a FREE copy of PhDs, a smutty
novelette that will prove to you that nerdy can definitely be hot.
Hot for the Ranger

By EMBER FLINT

What if you made the perfect love connection and then you forgot about it?

37-year-old former Army Ranger Wyatt Ridge doesn’t remember much from his past
—including that one week that had finally changed his lonely life for the better.
When he woke up, he was told he had no one, but that wasn’t true.
For seven days he had it all, then a cruel twist of fate took everything away from him.
It should be okay since he doesn’t recall a single moment of it, but it isn’t.
No one would believe that you could feel the loss of something you don’t even recollect ever
having had in the first place, but Wyatt does: he feels the loss every day and he has for five
years now, even if he has no name for his longing and the ache in his heart.

One bullet to the head should have killed him and he knows he is lucky to be alive, but he can’t
help the feeling that his injury took something far more precious than breathing from him.
Now, he is an entirely different kind of ranger and his existence is one of stubborn solitude and
hard work in the wilderness of a nature that is the one thing he does remember loving from
before.

What if you were sure to have found ‘the one’, only to end up waiting for a call that never came?

Five years ago, 26-year-old graphic designer Kenna Davis took a grudging break from studying to
go on a brief oceanside vacation with her roommate.
A whirlwind romance with a stranger was the last thing she expected, but she got it all the
same.
For seven days she had it all and everything was toe-curling kisses, fast-beating hearts, magic
nights, and a head full of a happily-ever-after that she couldn’t wait to start living. And then he
had to leave.
He told her they were each other’s forever and that she was his heart, and she believed him;
how could she not when she could feel so deeply that he was hers?
He promised he would call soon, that he would come back for her and Kenna promised she
would wait. And she did.

There are hateful days when she wishes she could forget it all, but most of the time she still
longs for him. The memories that haunt her have kept her alone all these years, but they are
still much sweeter than they are bitter, and she can’t let go of them yet, but maybe she can
start to move on now.

She’s the part of his soul he didn’t know was lost.
He’s the part of her soul she can’t bear to forget.
And maybe, just maybe, the very fate that ripped them apart will finally throw them together
again.

Dear Reader:

By saying ‘maybe’ I mean ‘sure it will': this is a full-blown HEA-guaranteed, cheesy-sweet novella
after all and Wyatt & Kenna are just too in love not to find their way into each other’s arms
again.
This NO-cheating, steamy book has it all and does away with all the unwanted annoyances you
don’t ever wanna see in your cute romantic reads.

So let’s see what exactly did I throw into this thing: amnesia, hot insta-love all over the place
and sweet second chance romance at the same time, a clueless —literally— possessive, growly,
big alpha mountain man with a beard —of course!—, a sweet curvy heroine with a heart that
needs mending, an unexpected inheritance, soap-opera-quality medical miracles, a quaint,
small town in the Rockies as a backdrop, a red-hot passion that will set your kindle on fire and
a boatload of babies.
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Ember Flint
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying,
recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. To request
permission, contact the author.

Please respect this author’s hard work and purchase or read this book through Amazon. Acquiring a copy through any other mean
is a violation of the author’s rights and supports piracy of copyrighted material.

Note from the Author: this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination.
Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to
businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental. Please note that this work is intended only for
adults over the age of 18, that it contains explicit love scenes and naughty language and that all sexually-active characters in it are
represented as 18 or over. Also, in real life, remember: always safety first.

Cover design by: Aria – Resplendent Media
Edited by: New Wave Romance
Dedicated to the people who serve their countries, the partners who love and support them, and to all the readers who adore
heroes with military backgrounds extra-specially if they happen to have a beard. This is for all of you.
Prologue Part 1
KENNA

August 9, 2015

I should have known this would be a bad idea.
‘You need a little break’, she said, ‘some quality time spent sunbathing on the beach’, she
said, ‘no boys allowed’, she said, and now… the ugly truth comes to light.
I sigh. I honestly don’t know why am I even surprised in the first place: I shouldn’t put
anything past Veronica at this point.
The fact that she was all sweet and caring when she brought it up should have been my first
warning: she’s never particularly nice to me if she can help it.
We have been roommates for the last three years or so, it was luck of the draw really: we
were randomly paired to share a room in the dorms at UNF.
We were pretty much strangers sharing living quarters, then I decided to move out and live
off-campus. Rents are pretty steep in Jacksonville if you’re a student working a low-pay part-
time job while you try to get your degree and all I could have afforded was a ratty hole-in-the-
wall shoebox too far from school, so when Veronica suggested we should pool our resources
together and get a bigger place in a nicer neighborhood, I was all for it.

For a while there, I even hoped we could really become friends despite our differences, I’m a
bookworm, she’s a party animal, I don’t date, she flits from guy to guy, and she was –and still
is– always so critical of everything I say and do that my hope soured pretty fast.
I’ve never once seen her actually studying and she’s forever jumping from job to job because
she gets fired all the time, not that she cares since her father covers all of her expenses.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that if she wasn’t such a fashionista, she could probably afford to rent
a bigger place and keep it all to herself, but she has too many ‘weaknesses’ as she calls them
and that’s why she’s stuck with me, again her words.

I’ve always kept my mouth shut no matter the way she saw fit to lead her life, I don’t like to
pry and if she’s content who am I to judge, though sometimes it’s difficult to keep a cool head
when she brings guys over and I hear them try my doorknob in the middle of the night, but I
got wise pretty fast and now when she comes home with some frat boy, I just leave the
apartment and go to the library on campus to spend the night power-studying.

And really, with the passing of years, these incidents have lessened and she rarely spends the
night in, alone or otherwise. She’s still a mess to live with and doesn’t know the meaning of the
words ‘house chores’, but our cute apartment is only a stone-throw away from campus and I’m
not prepared to leave so I make it work.

My only problem with her is how she plays the concerned friend only to be snarky and
critical of my lifestyle, my chubbiness, my choice of clothes, and pretty much everything I say
and do.
I’ve told her countless times to keep her opinions to herself, but it has yet to get through her
thick skull, she has no freaking filter whatsoever and can’t seem to understand how hurtful she
is when she stares at me with every cookie I eat and asks me if I really think it’s a good idea to
have another bite.
She actually thinks she’s helpful when she’s being a bitch to me, like if you call me ‘sweetie’
while you’re telling me that I look like a whale in my favorite blue sundress, somewhat that
makes it okay to take digs at me.

I really tried to be friends with her, especially over that first year, but it soon became clear
she had her social circle and no intention of introducing her nerdy roommate into it anytime
soon.
I’m shy and it isn’t super easy for me to be social and when I do, I have the worst luck and
only end up meeting people that want something from me and couldn’t care less about being
my friends.
My dad’s girlfriend, Melania, whenever she bothers speaking with me, says I’m too trusting
which is her ‘nice-but—not-really-’ way of telling me she thinks I’m too-stupid-to-live and that
people take advantage of my goodness, which again, in her book is code-speech for ‘you’re a
gullible idiot’.

I guess Veronica also agrees with Melania’s definition of me since she lied her ass off and
managed to drag me here under false pretenses, and maybe they are right, about me being too
naive, after all, I’m the one who really believed this mini-break was an olive branch and even if
Veronica has proven many times she can’t be trusted, I thought I would give our friendship one
final shot and went along with her plan. Big effing mistake.

She spent four days talking my ear off at any given turn about this little beautiful oceanside
town not twenty minutes away from UNF by car, Plumeria. I’d never heard of the place, but I
have to admit it’s truly lovely.
She showed me all these gorgeous pictures of the little quaint B&B we ended up booking a
room with twin beds in, and of the breathtaking beach with the white, unpolluted sand and
the crystalline azure waters, and in the end, even if I have two exams to prepare for, and tons
of research to do for a paper, I let her talk me into taking this weekend-long mini-vacay.

When I mentioned studying, she was like: ‘you need to loosen up, sweetie, you need a break
and so do I, don’t be such a stuck-up boring nerd, come on!’.
She said we would relax, catch some sun and generally have no-boys-allowed fun times, she
said she was concerned about how many migraines I’ve been getting —which really is true, I’ve
been getting a lot of them, and it totally made me feel like she really cared— and then she told
me how much she needed the downtime to recuperate after her latest breakup.
She said it had been particularly hard on her, that she really felt like she was falling for the
guy and then he cut her loose.

I really felt bad for her and in the end, I thought I could more than afford less than three
days away from textbooks and homework to help cheer her up and get some rest myself so I
said yes, even made the mini-break my treat when she told me she was broke –yet again– and