Welcome to the Circus

Sometimes you need to crash a funeral to experience happiness. At least Kissimmee Singh, aerial artist for Singh Circus, the most sought-after traveling circus of all time, keeps telling herself that’s why she crashes funerals. In reality, she’s lost and confused. Sometimes it’s nice to experience other people’s grief and be reminded that life isn’t as bad as it could be.

Slone Day, defensive end for the Longview professional football team, has a lot on his plate. He’s at the peak of his career, he’s a single father raising a girl who's borderline genius and can’t seem to find the time to date. Let alone see someone seriously. He’s perfectly content living his life as it is. Then he goes to a circus. There, he meets a woman who literally takes his breath away. And in one bold, crazy, this is probably going to backfire move, he not only asks the woman out...but he invites her to spend the next two weeks with him while she’s recovering from an incident.

Seventy shades of messed up. That was what she’d been told about herself for nearly her entire life. From a young age, she knew what it was like to be hated. To be loathed so much by a person that they literally resented the air you breathed. For her entire childhood, she fought to live, despite her father’s constant effort to make her life a living hell. Her sisters and brother have no clue what kind of closet psychopath their father really was, and she’ll die before she ruins their picture-perfect view of him.

It’s not every day you meet a man at the bar, stare at him for hours, and then right when you decide to make a move, he gets up to leave. Worse, when you follow him outside, you see him completely change his appearance by shucking a wig and a button down shirt, dropping them into the nearest trash can. When Crimson looks around to see who noticed the complete one-eighty that’s just taken place, not a single person notices or cares. When she looks back, he’s gone.

Five years ago when she left, she broke my heart. No warning. No hey, this isn’t working out. No nothing. Just poof. One day she’s there, in my bed, and we’re talking about our futures. The next, she’s gone. So when she shows up five years later and acts like she didn’t leave me with a broken heart, I get angry. So. Freakin’. Angry.

Nash Wilder Christopherson was the world’s golden boy. For fifteen years, she watched Nash race from the safety of her phone. Every single race, PR event, ESPN interview—she was there for it. He was the one thing that kept her sane while having to live the life her father forced her to. That was all he’d ever be to her, though. A face on the other side of the screen.

But fate is funny. Just as easily as it can bring you to a person, it can tear them away, too. And Ande Carter’s life is about to take a turn for the worse. But Keene is there for it all. The good, bad, and ugly. Whether she wants him there or not.