A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family, #1)

by Kath Richards

Punctuality is important to me, it really is. I’m just not always very good at it.

I did not account for the spirit of Satan being in the entirety of the city’s driving population today, so now I’m going to be late.

Her smile is everything to me, like it might make my brain melt the way her cheeks push up her eyelids and she tries to keep her lips closed.

Ranger has not aged all that gracefully. I can admit, even, that he is a bit ugly, but I think he’s ugly in the way that makes him all the more endearing and precious.

Come celebrate with us afterward. Food, sweets, dancing, an open bar, and love in the air. Gag.

I’m even worse than what he thinks. I’m not just a criminal, I’m in charge.

She doesn’t hear me when I come in, but how could she over the 2000s divorced dad rock playing over the speakers?

In my fantasies, my perfect day looked like this: I had no alarm set on my phone—it was charging in the kitchen, not even on my nightstand—and I would wake slowly, after fourteen hours of sleep.

I am like a malfunctioning machine, unable to think of anything other than Vanessa, Vanessa, Vanessa,

If I’m too pleasant, I may be seen as weak, and if I’m not pleasant enough, I’m a shrew bitch. A bulldog.

There’s not a man on this planet good enough for you, not me, not even the Russian, but I want to try.”

While all of us have been doing our part to not make it look like we aren’t chickens with our heads cut off,

You are the strongest, scariest woman I know, you don’t need to marry anyone.”

I’ve never been one to bite my tongue, though sometimes I wish I could.

I want to keep him.

“I love you,” he says, pauses, then rushes on, “I am criminally, fatally in love with you, and you can try to marry someone else, but I’m not going to leave. I like your house too much and I like you too much to ever be away from you.”

It still thrills me that I’m the man she kisses in front of everyone—the one she calls her husband, the one who will be the father of her children. I am the single most lucky man in the state of Massachusetts, and beyond.

I will never not be thrilled to follow where she goes.