Review & Giveaway - Until We Fly by Courtney Cole

UNTIL WE FLY Synopsis:

Ex-Army Ranger, Brand Killien, has always been good.

A good friend, a good soldier, a good everything. .

The problem is, good hasn’t gotten him anything but a crushed heart.

So after licking his wounds, he decides to move on. And moving on doesn’t include being good anymore.

Bad sounds so much better.

Jaded and detached, Brand is determined to never open himself up to anyone again. It’s not worth the pain. Instead, he becomes closed, hardened, aloof.

But then he’s called back home for a family emergency… a family that he is estranged from. A family that he put out of his mind a long time ago for very good reasons…reasons that involve secrets and pain. Reasons he tried hard to forget.

But home is where the heart is, and it just might be where Brand finds his again.

Why? Because home is where Nora Greene is. A fiery, red-headed spitfire, Nora is a thing from his past. A beautiful, feisty thing. When Brand left, she was away at boarding school.

But she’s back now.

And she wants Brand, scars and all.

UNTIL WE FLY on Goodreads

And don’t miss the other Beautifully Broken, now available:

                    IF YOU STAY            IF YOU LEAVE         BEFORE WE FALL

Praise for the Beautifully Broken Series:

"I loved If You Stay. Like, really really loved it. The kind of love that kept me reading until 2:40 am and left me crying, smiling, devastated, and elated. The best kind of book love." - Andrea, The Bookish Babe

"Beautiful, raw, gritty, emotional and breath-taking are just a few of the words I can find to describe this book...reading this book was one of the best experiences I have had." -Amanda, Globug and Hootie Need a Book

"In If You Leave, we continue the wild ride Courtney Cole started us on in If You Stay. This raw story of heartbreak and hope solidifies Cole's standing as a rising star in hot contemporary romance." --- New York Times Bestselling author of Down to You, M. Leighton

"Another raw, gritty masterpiece with a sexy-as-hell Army Ranger to swoon over." --- K.A. Tucker, author of Ten Tiny Breaths

Excerpt

I set her phone back down, just in time for Nora to walk into the kitchen, in only her towel. 

I turn, and then freeze when I see her. 

Creamy white shoulders, soft skin, long legs. 

I swallow hard and meet her gaze.

“Who’s William?” I ask simply.   Her eyes grow guarded. 

She leans around me, purposely pressing her towel-clad front against me.  Her soft curves fold into me, sexy and warm.  I feel her nipples poke me through the towel and my groin reacts. 

The corners of her mouth turn up.  “Does it matter?”

She looks up at me, grinning impishly now, her face inches from my crotch. 

“Is there anything you need while I’m down here?”

My dick twitches. 

“No,” I tell her firmly, pulling her up by her upper arms.  “Who’s William?”

She sighs.  “Someone from work.  It’s fine.”

But it’s not fine. I can see it on her face, I can tell by the way she drains of color at the mere mention of his name.  But her shoulders are back and her chin is out.  She’s determined not to talk about him. 

That’s fine. 

We all have our secrets. 

She smiles triumphantly when I drop the subject and she grabs her phone, spins around, and drops her towel.  It falls at my feet. 

She walks confidently out the door, as naked as the day she was born. 

Her legs flex as she walks, and her ass is round and firm and my dick reacts once again. 

Fuck. 

I groan and look away. 

I can hear Nora chuckling from the other room and I roll my eyes. 

I also hear her turn off the shower. 

Apparently, she’s changed her mind about taking one. 

She pops her head back into the kitchen. 

“Want to go skinny-dipping?”

Yes. 

“No,” I tell her firmly. “I don’t swim.”

“So you said,” she nods, then struts through the kitchen naked, opens the back door, and makes her way across the lawn in the broad daylight to the private beach behind the house. 

I shake my head, unable to prevent the smile from spreading across my face. 

The girl is something, that’s for sure. 

I limp to the window and watch her. 

She’s unconcerned that someone will see her.  She simply doesn’t care as she puts on her show for me. 

And it’s for me.  I know that. 

Nora isn’t the kind of girl to strut outside nude in the daylight for any other reason than a means to her end.  For whatever reason, she’s made it her goal to get me this summer. 

I don’t know why.

But suddenly, it feels good. 

It feels fucking good to be pursued like this, after being the one who was on the giving end of unrequited affection for so long. 

She wants me. 

Through the glass, Nora’s eyes meet mine and holds my gaze.  She swims on her belly for a while, her eyes just above the surface of the water, never looking away from my own. 

She splashes and kicks at me, flipping onto her back. 

Her tits bob above the water, her nipples pointed to the sun. 

My dick twitches again.

And then when she’s finally done showing off for me, she emerges from the water, dripping wet and bathed in sunlight. 

She’s sexy as hell. 

And she knows it. 

She strides back across the lawn, watching me every step of the way.  She climbs the back steps, crosses the kitchen, and pauses in front of me, dripping on my feet. 

“I’m cold,” she murmurs into my ear, leaning up on her tiptoes.  She is.  Her cold skin grazes against me, bleeding through my shirt, as her tits press into my chest. Her nipples are hard enough to cut glass and my hands ache to slide along her skin, over her hips, down to where I’d grip her ass and…

I grit my teeth.

“Then you should get dressed,” I tell her calmly, bending to pick up the towel she’d discarded earlier and handing it to her.  I make no move to touch her, regardless of how much my traitorous fingers want to slip in between her legs and…

I grit my teeth again. 

She sees my jaw flex and grins victoriously.

She knows that she won the game she was playing… that she made me want her. 

I don’t bother telling her that I wanted her already.

What I thought about Until We Fly

Where do I start? With the swoony cover? Or maybe with a thank you to my friend, Eleanor at The Book Hammock for recommending this series to me.  I was hooked from the first book and after Jacey broke Brand's heart, I was hoping that he'd get his HEA. Until We Fly was everything I hoped for.

Brand is on his way back to Angel Bay after a death in the family and he's not too happy about it. Nora is there too, back at her parent's home for the summer, and she's not a happy camper either. Right from the start, it's clear that both of these characters are broken in some way, but we don't exactly know how or why. 

When their worlds collide in a explosion, Nora takes advantage of the opportunity to spend time with the one man she remembers and wants from the little lakeside town. The man she sees as her protector, even after all the years apart.

I loved the way Nora describes Brand when she sees  him for the first time, I could already tell  how she felt about him. 

"But that blond hair...honey blond hair that it looks like it has been kissed by the sun.  The chiseled cheekbones, cleft in the chin, the strong jawline, the proud nose.  I would recognize that profile anywhere, even through a heavily tinted windshield, even though the last time I'd seen it was almost ten years ago." 


Nora and Brand end up together in Gabe's cottage with Nora playing nurse and seductress. She wants him and isn't shy about letting him know it.  I liked that about her. It takes a little effort to get him to admit he wants her, and gradually, Brand's secrets are revealed. It broke my heart (again) to learn what happened to him as a child and the scars it left.  Nora's got secrets too and they are of the blow-your-mind variety.  I know I'm being cryptic there, but I found the way this story unfolds really very beautiful and I don't want to spoil it for you.

I really love this series and Until We Fly might even be my favorite. There's something about the writing in this series that just pulls me in--there's a level of intimacy I love. Maybe it's because there are so many feels here and those are the books I love the most -- the ones that make me feel right along with the characters. A definite stay-up-all-night read. 

Recommended.

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ABOUT COURTNEY COLE:

Courtney Cole is a novelist who would eat mythology for breakfast if she could. She has a degree in Business, but has since discovered that corporate America is not nearly as fun to live in as fictional worlds. She loves chocolate and roller coasters and hates waiting and rude people.

Courtney lives in quiet suburbia, close to Lake Michigan, with her real-life Prince Charming, her ornery kids (there is a small chance that they get their orneriness from their mother) and a small domestic zoo.

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