Your Love Is Mine

  YOUR LOVE IS MINE

  The Maine Sullivans

  Cassie Sullivan and Flynn Stewart

  Bella Andre

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  A note from Bella

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Bella Andre Booklist

  About the Author

  YOUR LOVE IS MINE

  The Maine Sullivans

  Cassie Sullivan and Flynn Stewart

  © 2019 Bella Andre

  Sign up for Bella’s New Release Newsletter

  [email protected]

  www.BellaAndre.com

  Bella on Twitter

  Bella on Facebook

  Flynn Stewart, an award-winning screenwriter, seems to have the perfect Hollywood life. Until his dark past comes crashing back when he learns his long-lost sister has passed away—and he has a six-month-old niece named Ruby. Flynn vows to give the little girl who now means everything to him a better childhood than he or his sister ever had. So when he finds out that Ruby’s nanny is trying to sell their story to the press, he takes his niece as far from Hollywood as he can.

  One of seven siblings in Bar Harbor, Maine, Cassie Sullivan has always been grateful for the love and support of her tight-knit family. Because of them, she had the courage to create a successful candy confection business. When a friend of her cousin needs a place to stay with his baby for a few weeks, she’s happy to offer him her cabin in the woods. And from the moment she meets Flynn and Ruby, her heart is lost to the gorgeous man and his adorable little girl.

  Flynn has never met anyone as cheerful and open as Cassie. Instantly drawn to her, he finds himself telling her things about his past that he’s never spoken of to anyone—things that make him certain he could never be worthy of her. Only, Cassie isn’t about to let the pair who have stolen her heart go without a fight—using all the light, love, and laughter she can give them. Will the nightmares from Flynn’s past continue to haunt him and steal away the joy of a future with Cassie? Or will Cassie’s love, and the support of her big family, be powerful enough to help him face his long-buried demons and conquer them at last?

  A note from Bella

  Welcome to the Maine branch of the Sullivan family!

  Your Love Is Mine was an absolute joy to write, not only because I adore Cassie and Flynn as a couple, but also because I am beyond thrilled to finally get to write about Ethan Sullivan, his wife, Beth, and their seven children. I can’t wait to watch sparks fly as each of the seven siblings falls in love!

  If this is your first time reading about the Sullivans, you can easily read each book as a stand-alone—and there is a Sullivan family tree available on my website (www.bellaandre.com/sullivan-family-tree) so you can see how the books are connected!

  Happy reading,

  Bella Andre

  P.S. More stories about the Maine Sullivans are coming soon! Please be sure to sign up for my newsletter (bellaandre.com/newsletter) so that you don’t miss out on any new book announcements.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Oh my gosh, she’s gorgeous.”

  The words spilled from Cassie’s lips the moment she saw the man standing on the front porch of her cabin—and the baby he was holding.

  Instinctively, Cassie reached out to stroke the baby’s soft hair, the same way she might with her sister’s and cousins’ young children. But before she could make contact, the little girl buried her face in the man’s neck and held on tight, while he gathered her closer, clearly intent on protecting her.

  Feeling like she’d made a huge misstep within seconds of meeting her new tenants, Cassie dropped her arm to her side and stepped back. “You must be Flynn and Ruby. Come on in.”

  Slowly, Flynn walked inside the cabin, and she got the sense that he was assessing whether he wanted to stay or not. The baby lifted her head briefly at the sound of her name before burying it again in the crook of his neck.

  “I’m Cassie. It’s nice to meet you. How was your trip? You must be exhausted from the flights and layovers and the drive from the airport.”

  Ruby rubbed her eyes as though she was ready for a nap. Though Flynn looked like he could use one too, he simply replied, “We’re fine.”

  “Great!” Cassie smiled at him even though she had a feeling any hope of an answering smile was slim to none. “I hope my cabin will work out for you. I’ve stocked the fridge. I wasn’t sure about what kind of food Ruby eats, or if she’s even on solids yet, so I got one jar of everything, from pureed carrots to peas to potatoes.” When she was nervous, Cassie talked. A lot. Unfortunately, the fewer responses she got, the more she rambled to fill the empty space. “I also found a crib for you to use, along with a changing table and a few stuffed animals and a rubber ducky for the bath, plus some soft baby blankets and diapers in a range of sizes. The crib is set up in the master bedroom for now, but I can help you move it into the guest bedroom if that’s where you’d rather have it.”

  “The master is fine.”

  There was that word again. Fine. Which, in her experience, usually meant anything but.

  “Honestly,” she told him, “I’d like to help. If you want to check out the cabin to see if there’s anything else you need for tonight, or would like help moving things around, I can pitch in while I’m still here.”

  For a long moment, he simply stared at her. Almost like she was speaking a foreign language. Or, maybe, all foreign languages at once.

  Finally, he nodded. “We’ll be right back.”

  Once they had disappeared down the hall and into the master bedroom, Cassie let out a long breath. She’d made a fool of herself with all that inane chatter. If only she didn’t feel so nervous.

  Part of the problem was that she’d never known how to act around good-looking men she wasn’t related to. It didn’t help that Flynn Stewart took good-looking to another level entirely.

  She knew who he was, of course. An award-winning screenwriter who had recently dated one of People magazine’s “Most Beautiful” women, Flynn was nearly as famous as the actors who played the starring roles in his movies. But there was a big difference between seeing his photo online and meeting him in person.

  Flynn was broader, bigger, and altogether more imposing live and in the flesh.

  Since he was going to be living in her cabin for the next few weeks, it was high time to pull herself together and stop acting like a bumbling fool around him. So what if he was staggeringly good-looking? And brilliantly talented? She was simply offering him a place to stay, far from the glare of the Hollywood spotlight. Cassie doubted the two of them would see much of each other once he and Ruby settled in.

  Her heart softened as she thought about the sweet baby in Flynn’s arms. Cassie’s cousin Smith, who was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, had given her the bare bones of Flynn and Ruby’s story
. Evidently, one of Flynn’s relatives had recently passed away, and he had adopted the little girl. Now, due to his fame, they needed to go somewhere remote and private to escape the endless camera flashes and questions from the paparazzi. Smith and Valentina had loved spending their honeymoon in Cassie’s cabin earlier that year, so they’d immediately thought of it as a refuge for Flynn. Of course, any friend of Smith’s was a friend of Cassie’s, so she was more than happy to offer it.

  She’d bought the cabin a few years back with the intention of renovating and flipping the run-down building set in the middle of a hundred wooded acres. But after she had put in the sweat equity of sanding and varnishing the floors, installing new kitchen cupboards, and painting each room the perfect color, she’d fallen too much in love with it to sell it. She was toying with the idea of leaving downtown Bar Harbor and living in it full time, but until it felt like the right time to make the leap, she was happy to lend it out to friends and family.

  Flynn came back into the living room emptyhanded. “Ruby took one look at the crib and pretty much made a dive for it. She didn’t sleep well on the plane.” Looking utterly exhausted himself, he ran a hand over the heavy stubble on his chin. At a glance, he was rugged enough to be an outdoor adventurer, rather than someone who sat at a computer for hours on end spinning stories. “Thank you for everything you’ve done to set up your cabin for her.” His voice was slightly gruff as he added, “For both of us.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” She smiled again, happy that she could help in some small way. She sincerely hoped they would be happy in this peaceful spot. “If there is anything else you need, just ask.”

  “There won’t be.”

  She couldn’t keep her eyebrows from rising at his definitive statement made in a rather gruff tone. “Okay.” She backed toward the door. “I’ll get out of your way.” He remained silent while she grabbed her bag and car keys. “My phone number is on the counter.” She didn’t know what else there was to say. Especially when he wasn’t adding anything into the mix. She opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, feeling more awkward by the second. “Bye.” She pulled the door closed behind her and headed to her car.

  Sliding behind the wheel, she pulled out her phone to text Smith: Flynn and Ruby are here and settling in.

  His response was lightning fast: Thanks again for letting them use your cabin. I know it will make a huge difference in their lives.

  Cassie sent back a smiley face: Happy to help!

  And she truly was, even if Flynn obviously wanted to be left alone.

  * * *

  In his early twenties, Flynn had done an eighty-mile solo trek to Everest Base Camp wearing a fifty-pound backpack. He’d slept on the ground most nights and topped fifteen thousand feet in altitude.

  Even then he couldn’t remember feeling as tired as he did now. So exhausted that once he went into the bedroom to check on Ruby and sat in the armchair next to the crib, he could easily have closed his eyes and fallen asleep if he hadn’t been so concerned about his niece waking up frightened in another strange bedroom.

  Good thing he was used to surviving on little sleep. Until he was seventeen, he’d slept with one eye open, never sure what state his father would be in when he got home from the bar. After that, though he’d gotten away from his dad, Flynn still stayed awake at night, sure that it was only a matter of time before he was exposed as a lying fraud, certain that someone would surely realize Flynn Stewart was a character he had created out of thin air…and desperation.

  Fifteen minutes after he’d settled Ruby in the crib, just as he’d expected, she woke up with a loud wail. By the time he reached in to pick her up, she was holding on to the bars like a little prisoner, tear tracks wet on her rosy cheeks.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly. “I’m here.”

  She didn’t smile as he picked her up, simply let out a jagged sigh of relief as he drew her close against him.

  Catching sight of their reflection in a full-length mirror on the back of the door, he noted that this was how the two of them had been connected since he’d taken custody of her three weeks ago. Apart from Ruby’s sporadic naps, and when she settled into her crib for, at best, six hours each night, he was tethered to his six-month-old niece around the clock.

  She was the only person on earth who truly mattered to him…even though he hadn’t known she existed three weeks ago.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three weeks earlier…

  Flynn didn’t recognize the number of the caller who had been trying to reach him for the past hour. He always turned his phone to do-not-disturb mode while he wrote, to minimize distractions, so he hadn’t realized anyone had been calling until he took his first break. After a handful of brushes with the paparazzi a few years back, he no longer accepted voice mail from numbers that weren’t in his contacts list.

  As he stared at the area code from the town where he’d grown up, his chest tightened. Had it finally happened? Had someone put two and two together and realized that Flynn Stewart wasn’t who he claimed to be?

  He’d run from his past for nearly two decades, but he’d always known he wouldn’t be able to run forever. No one could—not even a man who was a master at creating fictional stories that seemed more true than real life.

  Flynn closed his laptop on his screenplay in progress and took a deep breath before hitting the redial button. Only, when the woman with the cigarette-worn voice began speaking, there was no relief in realizing she wasn’t calling to expose him—she didn’t even know his name, calling him Fred instead of Flynn. Instead, what she told him stunned him speechless.

  His long-lost sister had not only died of an overdose, she’d also given birth to a daughter a little more than five months before.

  Grief and guilt pummeled him, harder than any of his father’s blows ever had.

  All his life, Flynn had tried to protect his sister from their parents. When Flynn had left for Los Angeles at seventeen, he’d begged Sarah to come with him. But at sixteen, she’d already been lost to him, deep-diving into the same world of drugs and alcohol as their parents.

  A year later—after their father had died in jail, with their mother subsequently drinking herself into an early grave—Flynn went back to Centertown, Illinois, to see Sarah. He pleaded with her to start over, to let him stage an intervention, to help her create a new and better life. He told her she could start over in Los Angeles, that she could be anyone she wanted to be, that she could shed her past like it was nothing more than a torn, dirty coat. But though she took the money he offered, she said she couldn’t leave her friends or her boyfriend.

  Every year he came back to try again to persuade her to leave, until a little over a year ago, when Sarah had told him that she knew how much he hated coming back to their hometown and that he didn’t need to make the trip anymore. She’d sworn that his secrets were safe with her. She’d told him she was happy all his dreams had come true when he’d become Flynn Stewart. But she’d insisted she didn’t have it in her to change herself and her life the way he had. She’d claimed they would both be better off apart, because then he would stop hoping fruitlessly for her to leave her life behind, and she would stop hating herself for disappointing him.

  If only he’d guessed that she’d been hiding her pregnancy from him…

  She must have known if he’d learned she was going to have a baby, he would never have taken no for an answer. He would have made her leave Centertown once and for all. He would have forced her to get the help she needed with her addictions. He would have shown her and her child that there was a world out there beyond her wildest dreams.

  Flynn took the next flight out of LAX, careful once he landed to alter his look with dark-framed glasses, a baseball cap, and a worn pair of jeans and a faded T-shirt so that no one would recognize him.

  It didn’t matter how many years had passed, Centertown looked no different than it had when he was a kid. Despair lingered in the air, especially on the street co
rners where people were either looking for their next hit, or had already passed out from their last one.

  Flynn stopped dead in his tracks when he looked through the window of the run-down, greasy diner and caught sight of Ruby sitting in a worn, dirty stroller.

  She was the spitting image of his sister when she’d been a baby, with curly brown hair and big brown eyes. His chest clenched hard. Sarah was the only person Flynn had ever loved with his whole heart, holding nothing back.

  Now, Ruby was the second.

  As he slid into the booth across from Sarah’s “friend,” he knew from one look at her calculating, heavily made-up eyes made it clear that she wasn’t simply going to hand Ruby over out of the goodness of her heart.

  “Sarah said if anything ever happened to her, to call the name and number on this.” It was a takeout menu from Pizza Peddler, the restaurant where Flynn and Sarah had had their last meal together. “She tried hard to stay clean while she was pregnant,” the woman said with a shrug. He guessed Sarah wasn’t the first person this woman knew who had overdosed. “Who are you anyway?” she asked. “You don’t look like her usual type.”

  Flynn knew exactly what his sister’s usual type was. A strung-out bully, just like their father. “I’m a friend from a while back,” was all he said. Wanting to get Ruby away from her—and this place—as quickly as possible, he covertly slid over an envelope containing five thousand dollars in hundreds. “Thank you for calling me.” Just thinking of what might have happened to Ruby if the woman had called anyone else made his stomach turn. Thank God she’d followed his sister’s instructions.

  Frankly, he would have paid any amount to get his niece the hell away from this woman, which was why he had plenty of backup bills ready to hand over if necessary. But five grand was more than enough to put skates on the woman’s feet. She was gone so fast with his money, her seat at the diner practically smoked after she left.