NOT ANOTHER NEW YEAR'S The thing that Hannah Davis hates most about this New Year's? Falling in love with a man who has a secret agenda...

Excerpt from NOT ANOTHER NEW YEAR'S:

The cabdriver turned out to be even more like Hannah’s paternal principal than she’d first thought, she realized, listening to his grumbles as they reached their destination. She took a swift glance at the anonymous-looking, innocuous-appearing, stucco storefront that was the entrance to Hart’s. To be honest—and to some comfort—it appeared a lot less foreign and exotic than her first glimpse of Coronado itself.

The establishment took up one end of a small, utilitarian strip mall. There was a darkened nail place next door and a filled parking lot out front.

“Should I really be worrying?” she asked, looking over at the older man.

“I don’t like to see any young lady traipsing into a bar alone,” he said.

“But I know people in there,” she assured him. Not really. Her uncle knew people in there. A man who used to work for him, a man named Tanner Hart, had returned to his hometown of Coronado and was employed at the bar. Uncle Geoff had given this Tanner the head’s up and she’d been told to meet him there the next morning. To keep the family off her back about her solo vacation, she’d agreed to a little face-time with a Coronado native.

Now she hoped she’d find Tanner Hart here tonight. Maybe he could help her solve her no-luggage, no-ID, not-much-money dilemma.

“Still,” her self-appointed protector muttered from the front seat of the cab as he put together her change. “You look so…so…I don’t know. Wholesome.”

Hannah wanted to cry. Wholesome were cows in the pasture. Wheat fields. Women who patiently waited for their playing-around fiancé.

Her fingers went to the first button of her staid, starched shirt and flicked it open to reveal the notch at her throat. “I don’t know how you could tell such a thing about me during a short car ride,” she declared.

“I don’t know either,” the cabbie replied, handing some bills over the seat. “But you sure do seem like a schoolteacher.”

Hannah crumpled the money in her hand. Having grown up, gone to college, and got employed within a forty-mile radius, she’d always assumed people knew she was a teacher because…because they knew she was a teacher. They knew her. But now she lifted her left wrist and gave a tentative sniff. Was there Crayola in her pores? Did she smell like construction paper and glue sticks?

Yes, she had precise D’Nealian handwriting, but that didn’t show on her face, did it?

Giving up on the depressing analysis, she climbed out of the car. Then she stood on the empty walkway outside the bar and waved as the cab drove away. She took a moment to breathe in the damp, salty air, so different from the earthy alfalfa and manure scents of home.

After another minute she turned toward Hart’s no-nonsense storefront. And stalled some more. She had the oddest feeling that once she opened the metal door in front of her she would never be the same again.

Silly. That was part of the plan, wasn’t it?

Still, she hesitated, until the darkness of the parking lot seemed to creep toward her. Her scalp prickled, as if some unseen hand approached from behind—

The bar’s door popped open.

Light shot out.

Music swamped the sidewalk.

That reaching hand at her back caught her shirt between her shoulder blades.

Pulse jolting, Hannah gasped. Wrenched away. Fell to her hands and knees for the second time that night.

Looked up and between legs—male, female, and those belonging to the bar’s chairs and tables—glimpsed the most beautiful man she’d ever seen in her life.