Marley Valentine

From USA Today bestselling author Marley Valentine comes an all new emotional, friends-to lovers gay romance standalone. I couldn’t tell you when I fell in love with Gael Herrera, but I wish I knew how to make it stop. Falling in love with a straight man is a rookie mistake. But falling in love with my soon-to-be-married-to-a-woman best friend is nothing but heartache. Through all the years, and all the men I’ve fooled around with, he’s always been at the back of my mind. An unrequited crush I wish I could shake. A dream that was never going to come true. When I whisk him off to a surprise bachelor party weekend in Vegas, I surrender to the idea that this is an opportunity for me to finally let go of my feelings for him and say goodbye. But after a heated exchange and an even hotter kiss, everything I thought I knew about our friendship changed. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe, after all this time, we were more than best friends. Maybe, just maybe, he felt it too.

At twenty-four, I’d already lived a thousand lives. I was a daughter. An orphan. A foster kid. A sister. Someone to everyone, and yet I was unrecognizable to myself. I spent my time keeping everybody else afloat, while I was slowly drowning. Until I met her. The first time she walked into my life, I was mesmerized by the mysterious stranger. When I came face-to-face with her a second time, I was being introduced to my best friend’s mother. We were worlds and experiences apart, unlikely in every sense of the word. Everything between us was unexpected. Our attraction to one another, the secrets I shared, and the cracked pieces of her I so badly wanted to put back together. We broke. We healed. We loved. Desperately. But I didn’t know how to love her without losing myself, and if she discovered the cost, I knew she wouldn’t let me

“Tragedy brought us together, but something stronger made me want to stay.” Julian was the boy next door. My brother’s best friend, he fit with my family in ways I never could. While he and Rhett went on to play house, I left the only life I knew, desperate for a fresh start. Until everything changed. Heartache came along, and the aftermath of my brother’s death was here to stay. I was now face to face with Julian more than I ever wanted to be. Being around him brought up all my insecurities, forced me to deal with hard truths, and conjured up feelings I had no business entertaining. He wasn’t the man I thought I knew. He was complex and layered, and inherently beautiful in all the ways I’d never noticed. Not on another person. Not on another man. Not until him.

We longed. We lost. We loved. Desperately. I thought I had my life all figured out. But after a college football accident leaves me deaf, I was learning how to live all over again. I expected the anger, the frustration, and the struggle to readjust, but what I didn’t expect to happen amongst the chaos, was to fall in love. Especially not with two men. Rough-edged puzzle pieces, Rhys, Samuel, and I were nothing but aching memories, painful realities, and hidden scars. We were products of our pasts, abandoned and unloved, messy and complicated. Individually we had baggage; together we had mountains to climb. But when the three of us were tangled up in one another, spilling secrets in the dark, hearts beating in sync, nothing else mattered but them. We needed to break the cycle, because they deserved love… And who knows, maybe I finally did too. UNLOVED is book two in Marley Valentine's emotional LGBTQ+ series that follows a group of foster siblings, who are banded together by their pasts. Each book can be read as a COMPLETE standalone.

Attending King University was at the top of my bucket list. Falling in love with my Professor wasn’t. Earning a full scholarship to King University was my hard earned ticket out of hell. I'm happy to be away from the small town I grew up in and all the equally small minded people who live there. King was going to be my safe haven. A place where I could leave the old me behind and finally grow into the young man my family had desperately tried to hide away. Diving head first into new experiences, new friends, and parties, I didn’t expect to run straight into the one thing I wasn’t ready for. His arms are welcoming, his body is addictive and his lips are heaven. Cole Huxley is everything I could fall in love with, except for one problem ... I never wanted to fall for my Professor.