Release Date: May 31, 2018
They said I was a bad idea. Poor. Violent. Criminal.
They said I’d amount to nothing, and I believed them too.
Until I met her.
Layla saved me from my worst, but sacrificed her best to do it. Now the tables have turned, and it’s time for me to bring her back to the land of the living.
But I might be too late.
Because sometimes our worst demons are those we never expect. And sometimes getting rid of them isn’t a choice at all.
The odds have always been against us, but this time is different. But how can I be her true north if I’m still finding my own direction? I’ll never know if I don’t try. And one thing’s for sure: I’ll try anything for her.
The first book in the Bad Idea Series is only 99 cents!
Two years I’ve been gone. Two years locked in a juvenile detention facility for a crime that took seconds to commit, losing my sense of self and direction. Two years since I’ve seen my family and friends, since I’ve seen New York City and all its chaos.
Two years have passed, but some things are still the same. There are still five of us crammed in a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen––six when my mother’s boyfriend decides that he and his fists should stay the night. There are still four kids here who never have enough to eat and wannabe thugs lurking the neighborhood, trying to pull me back to a life of trouble.
But now I’m a little older. A little wiser. A little bigger. A little stronger. And if I can focus on the future instead of the past, maybe I can make things a little better.
Two years I’ve been gone. But now I’m back. It’s time to check my bearings and find the right path.
From the second she saw him, Layla Barros knew Nico Soltero was all wrong. Wrong age. Wrong education. Wrong job. Wrong everything. She had a hard enough time convincing her parents that New York really is the right place for their nineteen-year-old daughter without telling them she’s got a thing for the FedEx guy at her new part-time job. Too bad the second she saw him, Layla Barros no longer cared about right and wrong.
Raised with three siblings in Hell’s Kitchen by a single-mom, half Puerto Rican, half Italian Nico Soltero is a quintessential New York mutt who’s always had to shoulder the burdens of his family. Burdens which have cost him almost all of his dreams, like going to college or becoming an FDNY firefighter. Now, at twenty-six, he’s finally getting the chance to leave the place that’s always felt more like a dead weight than the center of the universe. Too bad the city of his birth has one last hard knock to deal: the girl of his dreams, sitting right in the middle of his delivery route, three months before his plane is supposed to take off.
As Layla and Nico find out, love isn’t always convenient, and it never happens how they planned. The choices that Nico and Layla make now will affect their lives forever. Will they make them together or apart?
Six months ago, I gave my heart to a girl.
Beautiful, kind, and sexy as sin, she’s the only person who saw past my record or the color of my skin. Who ever saw me for me.
She loved me enough to let me go, let me leave this city to find my own path.
But without her, I drift, lost without direction.
Without me, she spirals, desperate for connection.I gave my heart to a girl, and she gave hers to me.
But love shouldn’t hurt this much.
Did you see Nico’s Love Note this year?!?! Gah!
Nicole French is a East Coast/West Coast hybrid creature, Springsteen fanatic, hopeless romantic, and total bookworm. When not writing fiction or teaching writing classes, she is hanging out with her family, playing soccer with the rest of the thirty-plus crowd in Seattle, or going on dates with her husband. In her spare time, she likes to go running with her dog, Greta, or practice the piano, but never seems to do either one of these things as much as she should.
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