Stephanie Bond

So Carlotta Wren's life hasn't turned out as she'd planned. She didn't plan for her parents to skip bail for a white-collar crime, leaving her to raise her brother. She didn't plan on having the silver spoon ripped from her mouth and forgoing college to work retail. She didn't plan on her blue-blood fiancé dumping her. And she didn't plan on still being single ten years later, working at Neiman Marcus, with no idea where her fugitive parents are....

"Carlotta Wren's world is crumbling beneath her well-shod feet. One of her closest friends has been arrested as the Charmed Killer, but Carlotta refuses to believe it. And to prove her friend's innocence, Carlotta goes against her boyfriend Peter's wishes and resumes her after-hours body-moving duties. And then... Peter pressures her for an answer to his proposal... Her troubled brother Wesley goes missing... And the madman stalking the city strikes...

Rebuilding their tornado-ravaged hometown, the Armstrong brothers place an ad in a northern newspaper seeking single women and when Amy Bradwell, a civil engineer and Kendell Armstrong's ex-fiancée, arrives, intending to keep her relationship to the Armstrongs strictly professional, Kendell makes plans to win her back.

The body count keeps rising ... The Charmed Killer is on the loose in Atlanta and Carlotta Wren is caught up in the terror-especially when her body-moving side business brings her dangerously close to the action. And then ... She's forced to take refuge in her former fiancé's house-much to the chagrin of other interested parties ... Her brother Wesley begins to behave as if he has his own death wish ... And someone close to her is implicated in...

With fugitive parents, a brother dodging loan sharks, a hunky cop who's made her outlaw family his business, a buff body mover looking to make a move on her and her ex-fiancé back in the picture, Carlotta Wren thought her life couldn't get any more complicated. And then ... Her best friend jumps on the body-moving bandwagon. Her fugitive parents phone home. Her identity is stolen by a look-alike. Her look-alike is found, well ... dead. Under suspicion...

Sisters share everything in their closets, including the skeletons… Twenty years ago, the Metcalf sisters witnessed a murder and formed a pact of silence. Now they're estranged and scattered because they all fell in love with the same man-fiery older sister Justine was engaged to handsome Dean Haviland; at the same time Dean was trying to bed mousy Regina, then jilted Justine at the altar to elope with their younger sister Mica. When unrelated...

The two works included in this collection--"Bluebird Winter" by Howard and "Naughty or Nice?" by Bond--bring together the joy of Christmas and the wonder of love.