When college student Kasey Whitton takes a job babysitting for single dad Jian Li, she doesn't expect to fall in love with the newborn baby -- or with Jian. ***** Love is the last thing on Kasey Whitton's mind when she agrees to take an overnight babysitting job to help support her struggling family. But as her business relationship with single dad Jian Li slowly develops into something more, Kasey is surprised to find herself falling in love with him despite his hot-and-cold attitude towards her -- and the fact that she has a long-term high school boyfriend. Will her growing feelings for Jian and his newborn son be enough to convince her to risk everything stable in her life? Or will Jian's fear of commitment -- and his belief all the women in his life are cursed -- be enough to keep them apart? [[Best Diverse Story, The Fiction Awards]] [[word count: 100,000-150,000 words]]

~ COMPLETE AND NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON ~ In the Five Kingdoms of Saol Eile, magic is the only currency and those who have the most cast long shadows across the land. Amidst lavish parties, sumptuous banquets, and sprawling castles, despicable tyrants have risen, calling themselves kings by right; emperors, by the laws of old magic, and monarchs, by the wealth they've procured. When it's rumored that an army of flesh-eating monsters has risen from the shadows, tyrant-kings are forced to submit to a far more dangerous power - the sorcerer standing at the head of it all: The Cursed One. Orphaned and penniless, eighteen-year-old Cecily Trask's magic has always been reluctant to emerge. But with the kingdoms at the brink of war, she vows to do whatever it takes to keep her people safe-even if it means breaking all the rules, reaching into the depths of her soul to unravel the bindings around her true power, and allying with the potentially dangerous prince, Daire Niadh, to do it. In a landscape thick with mistrust, desire, and incipient hope, Cecily and Daire cross paths in an unfamiliar world forever changed by violent forces neither of them understand. They should hate each other. They should want each other dead. But their grief both draws them together and breaks them down, until all they have left is their shared goal - to defeat The Cursed One, even though for Cecily, the journey means almost certain death. ❧ Copyright © Marcella Colavecchio, 2014 - 2020.