Melanie Schuster - Poetry Man

Romantic days. Passionate nights.

After trying everything from blind dates to online matchmaking to speed dating, Alexis Sharp has given up finding Mr. Right. Or even Mr. Almost Right. Until the stormy night when the South Carolina spa owner gets a flat…and a hunky stranger comes to her rescue.

Sexy, sensitive, supersuccessful Chicago chef Jared VanBuren is everything Alexis could want in a man. There’s only one thing standing in the way of their budding romance—Jared isn’t black.

To her surprise, Alexis discovers she and Jared aren’t as different as she thinks. As desire melts their barriers, Jared vows to prove to Alexis that they belong together. When it comes to affairs of the heart, what will it take to convince the woman who fills his life with passionate poetry that love is color-blind?

He looked at her in a way she didn’t recognize; she had nothing with which to compare it. Finally he spoke, and she recognized his words immediately.

Jared was reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, a poem called “When Sue Wears Red,” and he did it perfectly. He looked at her with all the reverence the great poet had intended, walking around her and taking in every detail of her essence; it was way beyond just her appearance, and she knew it. How he knew a poem by Langston Hughes she didn’t know, but there was something else she knew for sure. When Jared finished the poem their fingers slid together and neither of them said anything for a moment until Alexis broke the silence.

“We’re not going out, are we?”

Jared had pulled her into his arms and was holding her close when he answered. “Probably not.”

She melted against him, her arms going around him trustingly as she tilted her head back to receive his kiss. “What do you want to do?”

He took his time answering because he was engrossed in the feel of her taut, sexy body against his own. “Everything.”

MELANIE SCHUSTER

started reading when she was four and believes that’s why she’s a writer today. She was always fascinated with books and loved telling stories. From the time she was very small she wanted to be a writer. She fell in love with romances when she began reading the ones her mother would bring home. She would go to any store that sold paperbacks and load up! When she had a spare moment she was reading. Schuster loves romance because it’s always so hopeful. Despite the harsh realities of life, romance always brings to mind the wonderful, exciting adventure of falling in love and meeting your soul mate. She believes in love and romance with all her heart, and she finds fulfillment in writing stories about compelling couples who find true, lasting love in the face of all the obstacles out there. She hopes all her readers find their true love. If they’ve already been lucky enough to find love, she hopes that they never forget what it felt like to fall in love.

Poetry Man

Melanie Schuster

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Dear Reader,

Thanks for coming along on another installment of Friends & Lovers. If you started with Working Man, then you know how the series got started with Nick Hunter and Dakota Phillips. It was followed by Model Perfect Passion (Billie Phillips and Jason Wainwright), A Case for Romance (Ayanna Walker and Johnny Phillips) and Chemistry of Desire (Emily Porter and Todd Wainwright). Now in Poetry Man, we have Emily’s ride-or-die girlfriend Alexis Sharp’s story of finding love with Jared VanBuren, finding true love in the most unlikely way.

Next March you’ll find out all about Emily and Alexis’s BFF, Dr. Sherri Stratton. As you saw in Poetry Man, Sherri has sworn off men until her precocious little girl, Sydney, is at least fifteen. But there are two people who have other ideas about the situation. One is Sydney, who’s decided that her mommy needs a husband. And the other person is Lucas VanBuren, Jared’s handsome younger brother, who agrees with Sydney that he’d make a perfect mate for Sherri. When these two put their heads and hearts together, Sherri won’t stand a chance.

And yes, Alexis’s sisters will find love in the near future because with these friends, love is never far away!

By the way, The Nero Wolfe Cookbook mentioned in my book is real; I’m a huge fan of the series by the esteemed Mr. Rex Stout and I use the cookbook regularly.

Stay blessed,

Melanie

melanieschuster@sbcglobal.net

I Chronicles 4:10

To all the DIVAS who have come before me and on whose shoulders I stand; all the magnificent and generous writers who have encouraged me along the way and made me believe that I could do it, too.

A special thanks to Evette Porter, Gwen Osborne,

Sha-Shana Crichton and as always to Jamil, who

still makes me laugh. And a very special thanks to

Pam Beasley, who’s my own ride-or-die BFF.

Everybody should be blessed with a friend like Pam.

To all my faithful readers

who keep their love on top for me!

I love and appreciate you all.

And a special dedication to my brother Dwight Woods.

Thanks for being my rock and for giving me

the most beautiful nieces in the world.

Stay blessed!

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

Alexis Sharp took a deep breath before plunging into the empty pool at her health club. Alexis preferred to get her daily swim in early, before she went to work. She’d often wished she had a pool at one of her two beauty spas, but reality would kick in and she knew it was too expensive to install and not really what her customer base wanted. Her clients wanted top-notch hair care, facials, massages, mani-pedis and the like. What they didn’t want was to get their expensive hairdos wet. So, she made do with a daily swim that was as necessary to her as breathing.

The cool water stimulated her and gave her a chance to think. She was so busy running the spas, her volunteer work teaching water aerobics and being a swim instructor on the weekend that she often felt as if she was treading water when she was on dry land. She used her schedule as the reason why she didn’t date; she was just too busy. However, she and her closest friends knew that wasn’t the real reason she didn’t make room for social interaction in her life. She’d had a normal dating life at one time. She’d been engaged, in fact; right up until the night she’d found her fiancé in bed with his ex-girlfriend. That had put a crimp in her feelings about men for quite a while. Plus the tales of romantic woe she’d heard from the women of her family since she was a small child. Her mother insisted that all the women of their family were doomed to never have a successful relationship with a man. If it was just her mother talking, Alexis could have overlooked it, but her grandmother, her aunts, cousins and her sisters all agreed that there was no point in any women in the family woman trying to fall in love because they had a love curse on them. It was all nonsense, of course, but when Alexis was adding up the reasons that men were off-limits in her current life, she’d think about her mother’s pontificating with a grim smile.