Nameless Series Bundle

Before the afternoon of Mac’s funeral, Erin’s longest interaction with Seth Thomas was over a volume of Byron’s poetry.

Erin Marshall had been in middle school when sixteen-year-old Seth showed up in town to live with Mac, who was some sort of distant cousin and the closest surviving relative he had.

According to Mac, Seth was orphaned early and raised by his grandfather, who’d owned a car dealership a few counties away and had left him to the care of a nanny. The small town was predisposed to welcome the boy after his grandfather died, but his sullen, hostile attitude hadn’t won him any friends.

She’d been a hopeless bookworm and spent hours in the library after school. Often she’d look up from where she read in her favorite chair to see Seth scouring the stacks.

He’d always worn the same beat-up Army jacket, and he would read everything from Roman military history to biographies of business tycoons. He never spoke—not to her or anyone else.

That month she’d been trying to be artsy and poetic, one of her many flights of fancy as a kid, so she decided to read and sigh over Lord Byron, although she didn’t understand much of the poetry.

Seth already had the book off the shelf when she approached with the call numbers written down on a slip of paper.

She’d been painfully shy back then, so when she realized this good-looking teenage boy was holding the book she needed, she’d dropped her eyes and prepared to slink away.

Seth didn’t say a word, but he reached out and put the book in her hands. When she raised her gaze to meet his, he gave her a little half smile.

It was an unexpected moment of kinship over a book no one had checked out in over thirty years.

Erin might have had a little crush on him after that.

Irrationally, she’d felt betrayed when he stopped coming to the library later that year and then started getting in trouble for reckless driving, drugs, and underage drinking.

Mac did the best he could, but he was a lifelong bachelor and was very far out of his depth. Everyone in town was relieved when Seth graduated from high school early and went off to college.

Despite his rocky start, Seth made a success of himself in the fifteen years since—college, law school, associate at a prestigious law firm. He’d made partner a few months ago, after earning a lot of attention from the press when he helped successfully defend a pro basketball player in a trial that made national headlines.

When he came to Mac’s funeral that Saturday afternoon, he wasn’t the same solitary boy who’d haunted the library so long ago.

And that was just fine with Erin.

At twelve, she had been bashful, fed on romantic fantasies, convinced her dreams might one day come true.

She wasn’t anymore.

***

“I thought it was a really nice service,” Erin said, leaning forward from the backseat of the car.

Her father was driving in the long line of vehicles headed from the Methodist church to the cemetery, but he glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “Yeah. Mac would have liked it.”

“It was packed. I can’t believe how many people showed up to pay their respects.” Erin’s older sister, Liz, had always been the outgoing and popular one. Like Erin, she lived in Atlanta now, but they’d both come out to support their widowed father, who’d been friends for fifty years with the man who’d died.

“Everyone in town loved him,” Erin added, trying to hide how exhausted she was so her father wouldn’t worry.

She’d been on vacation in the Caribbean with friends and had just flown back to Atlanta the day before. She’d planned to use the weekend to recover before going back to work as a judicial assistant for a superior court judge, but instead she’d driven an hour outside the city to the small town she’d grown up in to attend the funeral.

She’d known Mac all her life, and she’d loved him too.

“I can’t believe Seth Thomas had the gall to show up,” Liz muttered. “He did nothing but make Mac miserable, and he obviously didn’t want to be family.”

“It would have been pretty rude for Seth not to come, since Mac left him everything.” Erin thought about the handsome, stoic man who’d attended the funeral—a far cry from the boy she remembered and just as far from the charismatic defense attorney she saw around the courthouse on a semi-regular basis. “Maybe he cared about Mac more than it seemed.”

“Mac was really proud of him,” her father said, turning into the cemetery drive in the line of cars. “He blamed himself for not getting through to Seth, and he never stopped talking about how he got that scholarship to college and then got into a top-rated law school and was hired by that fancy law firm.”

“It is pretty impressive, I guess,” Liz admitted.

Erin made a face. “Maybe he wears power suits now, but he’s not really that different than he used to be. He’s just as selfish as he was back then, doing whatever he wants, taking whatever he wants, walking over anyone who gets in his way.”

They parked halfway on the drive and halfway on the grass, like everyone else, and the conversation lagged as they climbed out of the car and headed for the tent set up at the grave.

“You mean with women?” Liz asked, falling in step beside Erin. “If Mary Carlyle’s blog is to be believed, he dates a different gorgeous woman every few weeks.”

When the basketball player’s trial had made the national news, there was a lot of media attention surrounding the sexy young attorney who’d begun as second chair on the defense team but had taken the lead halfway through and won a brilliant victory in what should have been a losing case. Even now, cable news shows regularly brought Seth on to comment on legal issues.

Liz’s college nemesis, a woman named Mary Carlyle, ran a tabloid-style blog. At Seth’s temporary notoriety, she had leveraged her location in Atlanta to uncover more gossip on him than anyone else. Evidently, the blog’s readership had skyrocketed in the weeks surrounding the trial, and it was still more popular than it had ever been before.

“I don’t care who he dates,” Erin said, answering her sister’s question. “I just mean with his general attitude. They’ve called him the Bulldozer at the courthouse for years because he just plows through people to get what he wants. Even before he became a hotshot, he was like that.”

Erin’s job as judicial assistant was part secretary, part paralegal, and part law clerk. It wasn’t anywhere close to the career she’d dreamed of in high school and college, but it was sure as hell better than being married to Marcus, her controlling ass of an ex-husband.

“You should see him break down a witness on the stand,” Erin added. “It’s brutal. He’s brutal. It’s like he doesn’t have normal human feelings.”

“It doesn’t seem to be a turnoff to women. Of course, some women like the alpha-male type.”

“Some women haven’t been married to one.”

Liz snorted in amusement. “I wonder what he’s like in bed.”

“Girls, please. I’m right behind you.”

Erin and Liz smiled at their father’s aggrieved voice, but they would have stopped talking anyway since they were approaching the graveside.

The service was brief and traditional, and Erin and Liz lingered afterward since their father wanted to speak to some people before he left.

As they waited, Erin’s eyes landed on an isolated figure wearing an expensive black suit standing slightly away from everyone else.

Seth Thomas was definitely hot. He had a tall, lean body and medium brown hair that sometimes looked almost auburn. His features were well chiseled, and on the rare occasions he smiled, it transformed his face in a breathtaking way.

He could control a room merely by the force of his personality. She’d seen him in court, where his charisma was astonishing. Even when he was just walking down the hall though, he commanded attention. People turned, moved out the way, yielded to his presence.

She wasn’t sure how the boy she remembered from the library had turned into this man.