Dearest Ronan

Dearest Ronan,

My glittering purple heart has beaten for you since I showed up on your doorstep as a fifteen-year-old lost girl.

Well, I’m no longer that teenager, and I’m no longer lost.

I don’t care that you’re my former guardian, that you’re fifteen years my senior, nor that you’re newly single and broken.

Make me yours. Love me how I love you.

Forever your butterfly,

Anika.

Tropes:

• Age gap of twenty years
• Virgin heroine
• Secret relationship
• Forbidden relationship (guardian and his former ward. No blood relation, and their intimate relationship isn’t until Anika is of legal age and out of the home).
• Plenty of steam and spice
• Angsty
• Both FMC and MMC are single at time of relationship and do not cheat.
• MMC calls FMC butterfly

Excerpt:

Mom always told me I feel too much. Her hazels implored into my matching own, begging me to love as deeply as I feel.

She nurtured my heart like growing plants and gave me the tools to cultivate my own emotions into good.

So what I cry during the sad parts of movies, whether they’re cartoons or live action? There was this one time she, me, and dad watched that third Disney-Pixar movie featuring toys that come to life when humans aren’t around. Anyway, I totally cried when the cowboy and all the other toys held hands as they were about to be crushed into a trash incinerator. These cartoon characters deserved the tears that blinded me.

From that point forward I squeezed my eyes closed until my dad had to shake me and point at the miraculous save moments later. If he hadn’t pulled me out my grief, I never would have seen the hope and eventual rescue.

Imagine if I had shut down the movie and refused to watch the rest! I would have gone my entire life thinking the toys had died in that incinerator.

Dad taught me this.

That’s exactly why I still open myself up to love. My parents passed in tragedy, but I can’t keep my eyes closed and miss out on the love that still exists.

Even so, just like back then, sometimes it feels like my heart drips into my bones, and I’m always looking for something to absorb the blood.

Pushing an unruly curl from my face, I pace around my apartment. I’m an adult now, but I still keep in contact with my ex-guardian—Ronan Steele.

Though I restrained my feelings for him by running from his home in the middle of the night, just a day after my eighteenth birthday, I still couldn’t force myself to cut him from my life completely.

My phone buzzes, and I pause. It’s six pm and Ronan always texts at six on Fridays.

Dearest Ronan is 125 PDF pages, or about 31,000 words.