Chapter 1
Chapter One
Colleen
Ding!
Colleen Luview’s eyes flitted to her phone, secure in a dashboard holder, the text coming through loud and clear as she saw the sign for the airport exit, piles of snow under the sign but the road clear, salt and sand trucks already sprinkling the roads for the pending new snow.
Memory reminded her to stay in the right-hand lane for arrivals.
The text was from Tim, the guy she was currently dating.
It’s date four tonight. No ER. We’re good to go. Can’t wait to break the curse officially.
Her sigh stretched back at least a decade.
Ahhhhhh. Life was good.
Dating Tim Fields, the local CPA’s son and an accountant himself, was still super weird.
But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and when your nickname in your hometown was Third Date Colleen, you took what you could get. Every guy who wasn’t a transplant had been part of her life since birth, so her dating pool was more like a wide, shallow puddle.
A good dart player, strong at miniature golf, and a shockingly great kisser, Tim had surprised her.
And now, so had fate.
Her nickname started when she was twenty-one, fresh out of her two-year nursing program, her RN so new, she hadn’t even received her diploma yet.
After her third date with local handyman Jake Forsythe, she’d gone to bed, woken up the next morning, headed to work in the emergency room of Luview Medical Center–and he’d been her first patient, the victim of a hedge trimmer that flipped when he wobbled on his ladder, earning him seventeen stitches from wrist to elbow and three in his groin.
Because he’d nearly cut off his, um… root.
Jake had the dubious honor of being the first victim of the curse.
He also had a new nickname: Slicer.
It was all downhill from there.
Joe Martinez had been bitten by a timber rattlesnake.
Mike McGinty had twisted his ankle hauling stone.
Gerry Jones got food poisoning.
And so on, until old Doc Blythe had finally said, as he wrote up an anti-nausea prescription for poor Gerry, “You really have a pattern, don’t you?”
She’d been leaving, about to go off shift, and his comment had stung, though she didn’t know why. Moore and Luke were walking in, the three of them on their way to go canoeing.
“What’s that, Doc?” she’d asked, not quite sure what he meant.
“You go out with a guy on the third date and he ends up in your ER.”
Luke had snorted. Moore had started snickering. Under his breath, he’d stage-whispered, “Watch out for Third Date Colleen.”
Doc had pressed his lips together. Luke bust out laughing. Colleen whapped Moore on the arm, hard, but it didn’t matter.
“Third Date Colleen, huh? You’re cursed, young lady,” Doc had said as he finished the prescription and gave her a sympathetic look.
All it took was for her cousin Sandy to overhear that, and it spread like wildfire throughout Luview, Maine, the town founded by her ancestors, where love wasn’t just a feeling–it was a way of life.
In small towns, once you had a nickname, might as well tattoo it on your forehead.
Tim, though, she thought as she read the text again, taking the exit for the airport.
Tim was the antidote to the curse.
Was he her soulmate? No. Were they falling in love and getting married? Hell, no. Did she plan to sleep with him?
Absolutely.
Because that’s the other problem with the curse: No one was willing to have sex with her until date number four.
Which made Colleen cursed and horny.
Ding!
Another text, from Tim again.
Just got back from an unexpected business trip. At the airport, on my way to get my car. Can’t wait to see you.
Airport?
She was at the airport. Unless he meant Portland? The closest airports to Luview were Portland, Maine and Manchester, New Hampshire, which was where she was right now.
Picking up Moore Mottin.
Sure, she was dating Tim, but Colleen’s crush on her brother’s best friend had started in eleventh grade and ended, well…
Never.
It had ended never.
Which was why she drove two hours and ten minutes each way, totally out of her way, to pick him up at the Manchester airport today.
“Doesn’t matter,” she muttered to herself as she made the big loop around the arrivals section of the airport, half an eye out for him, the other half on her phone, waiting for Moore’s text.
“Tim’s an anomaly. Not getting my hopes up,” she added, as if being down on herself would magically make some other part of her life work.
Like Moore appearing so they could get home ahead of the big snowstorm the radio announcers couldn’t shut up about.
Ever since she was a junior in high school and he was a freshman, she’d found herself transfixed by the sight of him, complete in his presence and yet in a constant state of yearning for more.
For Moore.
The summer between eighth and ninth grade had been very, very good to him, the geeky, awkward boy who was her little brother’s best friend transformed into a tall, muscled, hot guy.
Young guy, and of course, still a teenager, but the first day of high school that fall had been transformative.
“But Tim,” she said aloud, with emphasis, combating the negative voice that always popped up when something good happened. She made herself smile, remembering an article she’d read about how smiling helped to reduce limbic system over-reactivity.
In other words, pretend you’re happy and biochemistry might follow.
Tim would be different.
Or at least, she’d finally have some nookie. Different nookie… but as long as it meant getting sweet between the sheets for the first time in way too long, she was happy.
And that made her truly smile.
She read Tim’s newest text again and then, with no sign of Moore, took her place in a long line of cars all doing exactly what she was doing. Once she was under the covered area, the snowflakes no longer blocking her view, everything looked grim and gray.
Airport designers must double as prison planners. Nothing but dirty concrete everywhere.
And frowns. Lots of frowns.
Fourth date magic, she texted back to Tim, adding a peach and an eggplant emoji, giggling as she did it, her smile becoming more and more genuine.
The cars were at a standstill, the smell of exhaust strong, coming in through the vent system.
Ding!
Um, don’t we need three dates before we get to peaches and eggplants? the text read.
Then she realized she’d sent the text meant for Tim to Moore.
Scrambling to cover her mortification, she replied back with, That’s my shopping list. Peaches and eggplants.
Add some jello and a mold and you’re singlehandedly bringing back 1970s cuisine, he replied, making her guffaw.
Tim asked me out for a fourth date, she typed back, heart pounding faster than it should. For all these years, she and Moore had openly talked about their respective love lives, their friendship spanning both his marriages and countless dating partners for each of them.
She’d been there when he married Cammie Forsythe when they were seniors in high school, unexpectedly pregnant and forced into matrimony by Moore’s parents.
Babysat their son, Jordy, for years while Moore busted himself to go to University of Southern Maine and get his degree, all while working as a painter, his parents forcing him to “be an adult” and banning him from the family business until he proved himself.
Proudly watched him get that degree and join Love You Jewelers with the other Mottins.
Been there when Cammie disappeared with his then five-year-old son, Jordy, not long after Moore graduated. Helped him get Jordy back, at least part time.
Been there when he’d married Gia, the sophisticated banker he’d fallen for on a business trip in New York.
Walked in on Gia banging their DJ in the coatroom during the wedding reception.
Held Moore’s head while he puked his guts out the next morning.
Nothing bonds friends like a shared trauma.
As Colleen prepared to send her text to the right guy, finding her text stream with Tim and typing, she looked up to see the cars in front of her moving forward.
But then–
SCREECH!
The car in front of her slammed on its brakes, Colleen doing the same, barely avoiding hitting the bumper.
The sight before her was impossible.
Literally impossible.
About two cars ahead, a man wearing a suit and holding a big brown leather briefcase flew up in the air, his arm first, then one leg.
The gymnastic twist made her think of Zac Efron in The Greatest Showman, except instead of a highly skilled circus performer, this was a businessman twisting midair, flailing reflexively, screaming in horror and shock.
Thump.
And now, pain.
Reflex made her turn off the truck, shove the keys in her pocket, and scramble out, running without thought, the smell of diesel and the sound of car horns fading as her nursing skills kicked in.
Luview, Maine, where she was born and raised, was a tiny little mountain town, but she’d worked the emergency room there long enough to have first responder adrenaline in her blood.
The man’s head was so vulnerable, and head trauma was bad.
When she reached the body, he was turned away, chin tucked in, his shoulders visible first. But his right foot was angled too sharply.
That was a broken tibia, at best.
“I’m an ER nurse,” she announced, the small group of people forming around him parting at her words. “Someone call 911.”
At least five people wiggled their phones in the air, the universal signal for I’m doing that now.
“Airport security?” someone shouted. “Is there an airport paramedic?”
Colleen heard muted voices, light taps on horns, then the unmistakable crackle of feedback from a walkie-talkie. As long as some chain of emergency medical services was being activated, she could administer early care, then stand down.
Reaching for the man, she said calmly, “Hi, there. I’m Colleen. I’m a nurse. You’re going to be fine. Can you tell me–”