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Hey, there.

We all have fears, and usually they're closely tied to the things we value most. Here are a few of mine.

1. Juggling family, career, and a passion for horses leaves me constantly afraid that I've prioritized the wrong thing.
2. I never know if I'm giving my kids enough of myself, and yet sometimes I worry I'm giving them too much.
3. Since I was thrown from my horse and suffered a concussion a few years ago, fear of injury has made me a less bold rider.

In all of these ways, my fear feeds into the thing I'm afraid of and makes it worse. Worrying that I'm doing the wrong thing with my time means I'm spending some of that precious time worrying, which is a waste of minutes I'll never get back. Second-guessing where to set boundaries with my kids increases the friction that those boundaries are supposed to prevent. And feeling a rush of anxiety when unexpected things happen in the saddle makes me less quick, confident, and effective in my reactions, and therefore less safe.

I was an imaginative kid, and had a lot of big fears. Spending time with my grandparents and great aunts and uncles, I sensed a calm and peace of mind possessed by these older generations that mesmerized me. I wanted to fast forward a few decades so that I could be like them, seemingly anxiety-free. But as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's not that easy. My worries are still there, ready to pounce if I let them. The trick isn't shedding your awareness of risks and dangers, I don't think, but learning to only give them only the amount of space inside you that they truly deserve, and no more.

Easier said than done, right?

😅 Wow, that got heavy!

Honestly, sending such a personal email is pretty scary. But the example of a few other authors inspired me to make myself vulnerable. If you didn't like it, don't worry, I won't work up the courage to send this kind of email again for months, if ever. ;) If it did resonate with you, and you want to tell me a little about your fears, or a battle tip on how to face them, I'd love to hear from you.

And the big, heavy subjects are pretty relevant to what brought us together: love stories. After all, aren't life's difficulties the reason we want to escape to other worlds and fall in love with new characters?

Fall into love with 12 brand-new, exclusive stories. From contemporary to fantasy to paranormal, there's a love story for every reader in this collection!

Falling Into Love LBTQ+ Romance Giveaway

My submission is The Claim, an mm romantic fantasy with a Romeo & Juliette style family feud that stands in the way of young lovers Bram and Noa, who must work together in order to find a ruin full of priceless treasures. For those who enjoyed the last newsletter serial, Undertow, I think you'll love Bram and Noa, as well as seeing a glimpse of the sunken cities of Sihr.

Another day, another word count goal. 💫

What I'm writing

I've been plugging away at Night & Day! I'm writing the chapters on Friday mornings over on Discord. This Friday, I'll be starting Chapter 7. For those who aren't on Discord and don't want to be, or who would rather see a more polished version of each installment, you can find Chapter One, Chapter Two and Chapter Three in my past emails to you, and scroll to the bottom of this email for Chapter Four!

Have a great week!

xo,

Rachel

Website | Rachel's Party Barn on Facebook | Instagram | Discord

Books by Rachel Ember

Long Winter | Signs of Spring | Burning Season

Jaywalking | Sleepwalker

***

NIGHT & DAY

Chapter Four

Jonathan

Landry, Jonathan's paralegal, leaned through the doorway of his office at a quarter to ten and tapped an invisible watch on his wrist. "It's almost time for the Donaldson closing. I just saw three of them in the waiting room."

Jonathan sighed and leaned back in his desk chair. "Thank you. That gives me at least ten minutes to bolster my mood with coffee." He'd be able to get a cup of something from the espresso machine...maybe even two, if there wasn't a line.

Landry stepped into his office, and with a magician-style flourish, revealed a coffee cup in his right hand. "Just in case you'd forgotten how indispensable I am, I went ahead and brought one to get you started."

"Thank you," Jonathan said with feeling, gesturing toward one of the chairs across his desk. The office was larger than it needed to be, and considerably more spacious than the one a floor below where he’d started out. The firm’s managing partner, Roy, liked to joke that it made sense for attorneys who specialized in land transactions to measure status inside their building in terms of real estate, too. Landry sat in one of the leather-upholstered side chairs with a low, ebony coffee table between them that matched the barrister's book shelves on the far wall.

“Are you ever going to settle in? This place looks just as soulless as it did the day you moved in.”

Jonathan looked up from his coffee at Landry’s comment and reflexively glanced around at the office. He could see Landry’s point. There were a couple pieces of original art hung on the wall that the firm had provided along with the furniture. Jonathan’s only personal contributions to the decor—his framed college and law school degrees—were still propped against the wall in one corner, where they’d been since he’d moved offices a full year before. And he didn't have a single knick knack or framed photo on his desk.

“I don’t have a good sense for decor,” he admitted with a frown, thinking of his similarly sterile townhouse. He’d always thought Natalie would be the one to decorate, but she had no interest, which was ironic considering she was an artist. So long as her studio was outfitted with what she needed, she didn’t have a care for her physical surroundings. The aesthetics that concerned her were all within the corners of a canvas.

“There are people you could hire, you know,” Landry said with amusement.

Jonathan shrugged and took a deep draw of his coffee. “Maybe,” he said when he’d swallowed, noncommittal. He hated the idea. What if he hired someone, spent all that money, and hated what they came up with? Because unlike Natalie, Jonathan did like to be in comfortable spaces. He knew them what he liked when he saw it, he just wasn’t any good at creating it for himself. He’d loved the way his mother had set up their home when he was growing up, curating an eclectic collection of furniture and art from flea markets and estate sales. He hadn’t inherited her talent, apparently.

“You look a lot better this week,” Landry said, and Jonathan glanced up to find Landry studying him with clinical interest as he crossed his legs. "Obviously you're still a caffeine addict, but at least it seems to be doing its job when you drink it. This time last week, I thought you were going to fall asleep at your desk."

"I did fall asleep at my desk." Jonathan grimaced. "And unfortunately, it was Greg who caught me doing it instead of you."

Landry winced. "Yeah, now that you mention it, I heard Greg's assistant say something about that. If only you'd had the good sense to do it while I was here instead of during my lunch break."

"I don’t distinguish between the lunch hour and any other hour of the day where you’re concerned, because you never take a break, anyway," Jonathan pointed out with a half-smile.

"Well, I do occasionally, such as when I have an important shopping emergency. Yesterday was the day that Nordstrom restocked Fendi wallets."

"How could I have forgotten?" Jonathan murmured, polishing off the last of the contents of the cup in a few long swallows.

Landry snorted and carefully pushed back his coiffed forelock of dark red hair. "So, I take it things are working out with the night nanny?"

Wondering why the back of his neck was suddenly warm, Jonathan set down the empty coffee cup and turned it around on the desk a few times with his thumb and ring finger. "Yes. I'm still more tired than I imagined I could be before Isabel, but I'm getting some sleep." Seven uninterrupted hours of sleep felt downright luxurious after two weeks of waking throughout the night. He'd never paid much attention to his allotted sleep time, another thing he now realized he'd taken for granted before he became a parent.

"I know you weren’t sure about having someone you didn't know in the house while you slept, but I’m glad it hasn’t been an issue," Landry went on. Jonathan grimaced, still slightly stunned that in his stressed and sleep-deprived state the other day, he’d spilled so much of his feelings to someone at work. Even if it had been to Landry, who was the only person at the office who Jonathan considered anything resembling a friend, it felt inappropriate.

“It hasn’t been so bad,” Jonathan admitted. In truth, it hadn’t been bad in the last. Having Ty around was oddly comfortable, and had been even the very first evening. Ty put Jonathan at ease as effortlessly as he did Isabel. The first night—Sunday, the day he'd interviewed, which was somehow already four days ago—Jonathan had been on edge waiting for Ty to arrive for his first shift. Despite his own tiredness he’d been unable to rest while Isabel slept that afternoon, instead wandering around the house.

Then, Ty had arrived, with his easy smile, and had engaged immediately with Isabel. He hadn’t drawn Jonathan into conversation or peppered him with meaningless questions. Being around him hadn’t exhausted Jonathan the way being around people he didn’t know well usually did. Instead, Jonathan had felt all the tension of the prior hours wash away, and he'd showered and fallen asleep by eight-thirty for some much needed rest. He couldn't remember the last time he'd fallen asleep while it was still light outside.

Stolen naps with his head on his desk notwithstanding, that is.

He glanced up to find Landry still watching him, apparently waiting for an answer. "He's very good at his job. The baby loves him, and he's…easy to be around."

"He?" Landry echoed, raising an eyebrow. "I thought you were only interviewing women."

"I got a last-minute application that I decided to add in." It had been so last-minute, Jonathan hadn't gotten an opportunity to do more than glance over Ty’s profile on the childcare app he’d used to post the job and receive applications. If he'd had more time, he probably wouldn't have interviewed Ty at all, as he'd realized later to his own surprise. For one thing, there had been no relevant listed references, and for another, Ty hadn't studied or worked in childcare before. 

Landry looked past Jonathan at the wall clock. "You'd better get in there. Do you want me to ask Lindsay to show them into the conference room in about five minutes? I left everything laid out for you."

"Sure. Thanks, Landry."

"Yep. I'll join you on the hour."

While Jonathan was on his way to the conference room, nodding to the colleagues he passed in the generous hallways, he found his thoughts drifting back to Ty. Sure, Ty had a few deficiencies on paper that Jonathan was glad the circumstances had allowed him to overlook. But on a gut level, Jonathan trusted him, and had since he’d first watched him interact with Isabel.

The one and only time Jonathan had been the least bit unsettled by Ty had actually been that morning. And he wasn't even sure "unsettled" described the way he’d felt..

He recalled the moment again as he stepped into the still-empty conference room and closed the door behind him, his eyes scanning the folders placed neatly in front of each chair, absently confirming that everything was in place.

That morning, Jonathan had come downstairs to find Ty sitting at the kitchen table as usual, Isabel bundled into her stroller, because at the end of his shift Ty walked her the six blocks to her daycare and checked her in there before going home himself. The scene was just like that of each of the four mornings since Ty had begun work, except that Jonathan had a little extra time and had asked if Ty wanted a cup of coffee before they went their respective ways.

“Sure,” Ty had said, instantly rising from his chair. “Where are your mugs?” Jonathan had pointed to a cabinet, stepping over to the espresso maker on the counter to begin programming it, and out of the corner of his eye he’d happened to see that as Ty had reached for the mugs, his shirt had ridden up, revealing a flash of his lean white stomach, his worn jeans sagging low enough that the view included the hollow place in his abdomen above the sharp ridge of his right hip bone.

It shouldn't have mattered. Jonathan shouldn't even have noticed. And when he had noticed, he shouldn’t have been so riveted. 

But he was riveted by the sight of that soft skin, and the suggestion of a tattoo—one sharp line of ink, extending just past the frayed denim waist of his jeans.

Ty had caught him looking before he could politely avert his stare, and he’d gone motionless, still raised onto his toes with one hand braced on the countertop, surprise widening his green-brown-gold eyes, while their gazes had met. Neither one of them had looked away for a few, long seconds, and then Jonathan had abruptly turned away, announced that he’d forgotten he had to make a stop on the way to work, and that he couldn’t stay for coffee after all.

Even the memory sent a wash of heat through Jonathan's body, one part shame and one part a pulse of lust from the remembered sensation of their eye contact.

He hadn't expected to be attracted to Ty, but maybe he should have seen his growing fascination coming. There had been something about Ty from the start, hadn't there? Long before the coffee cup, the glimpse of his pale, inked skin, and the locked stares. 

The feeling of sincere interest in another person, a sense that they were a mystery that it would intrigue him to explore, was rare in Jonathan's life but hardly unprecedented. He’d once felt the same way about the person he went on to marry. 

The conference room door opened again behind him, startling him out of his thoughts. He quickly recollected himself into his polite-but-reserved professional mask as the clients began filing in, followed by Landry, who sat quietly in the back with a notepad. 

Jonathan did his best to focus, but still felt like he was going through the motions through the entire signing, and luckily for him, Landry had everything so impeccably prepared, Jonathan couldn't have screwed it up if he actively tried.

Still, his detachment hadn't gone unnoticed. Though the clients looked contented enough as they left after the transaction was completed, and four of them had divested themselves of a two-million-dollar family vacation home, and the other three had acquired it, Landry caught his eye and frowned, one ruddy eyebrow arched in question.

Jonathan just shrugged, which happened to be the most honest answer he had. Landry wondered why he was distracted, and even if Jonathan had tried to tell him—you see, I think I’m a little infatuated with my nanny—he couldn’t have explained how it had happened. He'd never connected well with people. And yet he he felt connected to Ty, a stranger he’d only spent perhaps an hour with, and that time spread into handfuls of minutes over four days.

The therapist he used to see would probably tell him he was projecting feelings onto Ty to distract himself from the shit show of Natalie leaving, and the overwhelm of adjusting to parenting an infant, alone. Maybe Jonathan should call and see if she was still practicing in the area, and had capacity for an emergency appointment.

He forced his thoughts to stay on track for the rest of the afternoon. His commute, and gathering Isabel from her infant care program, were a genuine distraction until he got home.

But of course, his earlier musings, and the memory of the moment between him and Ty that morning, returned full-force when the doorbell rang, announcing that Ty himself was once again waiting on Jonathan's stoop, ready to start his shift.