Book Title: French Kiss (Flying into Love #1)
Author and Publisher: C F White
Cover Artist: Kelly Martin KAM Design
Release Date: May 30, 2022
Genre: Contemporary M/M Romance
Tropes: Opposites Attract, Instalust, Age Gap, Forced Proximity
Themes: Coming out, Found Family
Length: 58 000 words/232 pages
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
This is the first in a new series of standalone novels. The second book is due out in June.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
Universal Link | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Can a French kiss persuade an uptight Englishman to leave his city behind and start a new life in rural France?
Blurb
Clean-cut London businessman Dale Calverley doesn’t do relationships.
Rugged French handyman Valentin Aubrey doesn’t do city men.
When Dale hires Valentin to help him fix up his inherited farmhouse estate in rural France and sell to the highest bidder, sparks fly.
Complete opposites, can they really expect their insta-lust to last beyond the storm that forces them together?
But how can Dale walk away from a man so alluringly rogue as Valentin Aubrey?
And how can Valentin expect a man so money-orientated to throw away his career and stay in the wilderness with him?
French Kiss (Flying into Love #1) is a Contemporary, Age-Gap, Hurt/Comfort, Forced Proximity MM Romance featuring an uptight English businessman with a preference for nameless hook ups and a rugged half-French handyman with a chequered past.
“What about you?” Dale focused on the road ahead and not on Valentin.
“What about me?”
“Have you always been a recluse, or has there ever been someone you cared for other than my father?”
Valentin shifted in his seat, winding up the window and repositioning his hands on the wheel. Why had he started this? He clamped his mouth shut. What he should have done at the start of all this instead of prodding the beast.
“There have been some.” Avoiding having to elaborate, Valentin flung the truck off the road and bumped over the grassy bank, foot down on the accelerator to drive them toward the woodland ahead.
“What the—” Dale gripped the handle above. “Where an earth are you going?”
“Getting lunch.”
“I thought you bought supplies from the shop.” Dale rocked from side to side, head almost hitting the roof of the truck as Valentin hurtled them farther into no man’s land.
“I did, but fresh is far, far better.”
“Fresh what?” Dale’s head hit the roof. “Christ!”
“Careful.” Valentin chuckled, gripping the steering wheel to steady the truck as much as possible while bumping them over dirt mounds. “With how times you’ve banged your head, you’d think I might have knocked some sense into you.”
Dale splayed his palm on the roof, preventing yet another crack to his skull. He threw a narrowed glare at Valentin. “Forewarning would be helpful.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Valentin smirked.
He slowed the truck to a stop between the trees, knowing he wouldn’t be able to get any farther into the woodland. So he opened the door and jumped out. As he slammed the driver’s side, he knocked on the window. “Come on.” He angled his head to Dale. “You’ll want to see this.”
Dale slid out, concern flickering across his features. Had the suit been rumpled? Valentin hoped so. He loved a crumpled suit. On his bedroom floor preferably. But that wasn’t going to happen. Couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen. He’d sworn off city boys. Men who craved more than this—the wild. He stepped into the woodland, breathing in the sheer beauty of the wilderness, the mist, the land. Where things were simple. Where life was easy. Where he only had to rely on himself.
Valentin’s happy place.
“Is this where you’re leaving me?” Dale called over to him, reluctant to leave the side of the truck and, possibly, his escape back to the streets paved with gold. “Where I can’t even find my way back to Madam Delphine?”
“You got your card back, Dale.”
“Doesn’t mean you won’t clock me on the back of the head and leave me for dead here. No civilisation for miles, unable to find the body.”
“That head’s been through enough trauma.” Valentin twisted, rushing back to the truck and lowered the cargo bed, grabbing his old bucket. “Don’t panic. I need your help here.” He threw the bucket to Dale.
Dale caught it. “Help with what?” He glanced into the bucket, grimacing as the scent of stale fish no doubt hit him between the eyes.
“Catching dinner.” Valentin headed off into the wood.
“‘Catching’?” Dale’s voice echoed through the trees the farther Valentin scurried into the woodland.
“Your delivery apps don’t work out here, Dale,” Valentin hollered back. “You want fresh, tasty and to your door in thirty, then this is as good as it gets.”
He scaled a stray log, ducking under the combined low hanging branches from two inosculated trees to peek through the bracken. He smiled and inhaled the fresh air. The natural landscape. The beauty that was Mother Nature. How could anyone not find this view—this landscape—exhilarating? How could anyone want bustling streets, fast cars and advertising billboards over thousand-year woodland shielding the natural habitat of free ranging wildlife and gushing streams that flowed over rocky terrain into tranquil lakes?
Dale reached him, lips parting. “Wow.”
Valentin shot a look over his shoulder and marvelled at the wonder on Dale’s face. “It’s something, right?”
“It’s…” Dale closed his mouth, swallowing tightly, as though he couldn’t find the words.
So Valentin found one for him, “Beautiful.”
Dale smiled through an exhalation. “Yes. It is.”
Valentin bumped his shoulder. “You like fish?”
“Battered?” Dale’s hopeful lilt was almost adorable.
Almost.
“I can batter them for you if you like, but it’ll take all the taste out of it.” Valentin dropped to sit on the lake’s bank, tugging off his boots and socks.
Dale edged forward, tiptoeing to the edge and peering into the glassy water. “There are fish in there?”
“Of course. It’s a lake.”
Dale shot a narrowed glare down to him, which soon merged into wide-eyed realisation. “You’re going in?”
“Best way to catch them is to get in there with them.” He popped his fly open and stepped out of his jeans.
Dale flapped a hand toward the lake. “It’s got to be minus temperatures in there!”
Valentin smiled. “If it was minus, it would be ice.”
“Pedantic.” Dale glanced back down at him, a sharp, noticeable swallow as Valentin stood and whipped off his jumper.
Valentin shivered. It was cold. Freezing, in fact. And he was crazy to do this, but he had an urge to prove himself to Dale. Prove that he was something. That he could do more than make a decent loaf of bread. That the place his father had loved held beauty and temptation and more possibilities than any concrete city did. That Dale might see beyond the extremities and fall in love here.
“You’re going completely in?” Dale’s voice was shrill.
Valentin crouched and slipped down the overhanging bank, into the deepest part of the slow-moving lake. “Yes.” He did his best not to gasp as biting ice-cold water nipped him and toes scraped the squelchy bottom of the riverbed. “Coming?”
“Absolutely not!”
Brought up in a relatively small town in Hertfordshire, C F White managed to do what most other residents try to do and fail—leave.
Studying at a West London university, she realised there was a whole city out there waiting to be discovered, so, much like Dick Whittington before her, she never made it back home and still endlessly search for the streets paved with gold, slowly coming to the realisation they’re mostly paved with chewing gum. And the odd bit of graffiti. And those little circles of yellow spray paint where the council point out the pot holes to someone who is supposedly meant to fix them instead of staring at them vacantly whilst holding a polystyrene cup of watered-down coffee.
Eventually she moved West to East along that vast District Line and settled for pie and mash, cockles and winkles and a bit of Knees Up Mother Brown to live in the East End of London; securing a job and creating a life, a home and a family.
After her second son was born with a rare disability, C F White’s life changed and it brought pen back to and paper after having written stories as a child but never had the confidence to show them to the world. Now, having embarked on this writing journey, C F White can’t stop.
So strap in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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