Serena is between a rock and a hard place. A military experiment gone wrong has sent her world crashing down—along with everybody else's—as a mysterious disease turns living, breathing, red-blooded people into mindless weapons of destruction. Supplies have run so low that her husband leaves to find food for them and never returns. Serena finds herself alone and preparing for inevitable death from starvation when her husband's best friend, Steven, shows up to her rescue. After seeing his best friend turn, Steven knows what he must do: protect and save his old buddy's wife, the only person he has left now that his whole family and everyone else he cared about is gone. Only Serena is not just his undead best friend's girl—Steven has had a secret crush on Serena for almost as long as he's known her, doing everything in his power to hide it from his buddy while he was alive. And now, at the horrible price of losing his best friend, he has a chance to be with her. But would Serena ever give him a chance, given their circumstances?

Regina Hartley has had enough. The demands of life have taken a toll on her, and no longer feeling equipped to endure the strain, she decides to end it all in watery surrender. But instead of drowning to death, she finds herself being revived on shore by a concerned, handsome stranger, and after saving her, the stranger refuses to leave her alone. She realizes she doesn’t mind his attention so much, and she finds herself more interested in what else life has to offer overall. But after saving her spirit, will the handsome stranger eventually disappear? Gabriel finds himself in the right place at the right time. He pushes everything—even his own life—aside when he notices a damsel in distress, and pulls her lifeless body to shore. To his relief, the beauty resuscitates, and he is compelled to stay with her, convinced she shouldn’t be left alone again. She accepts his offer of friendship, but will it help save her? Or will he end up devastated if she decides to slip away from everyone’s grasp after all? “The Lifeguard” is a clean romance novelette, and the third story in the speculative Bite-Sized Romance series.

Lisa Kelly is making her way through college, hanging on to a codependent relationship she no longer really wants to be in for the sake of its familiarity. Daniel is a fellow student—a stranger and nothing more than a blip on her radar until one day, she discovers something about him that makes him more than a blip, and she starts wondering what it would be like to be with him. She is terrified to even think about leaving her possessive boyfriend and losing all that comes with him: the easy companionship, their mutual friends, and her carefully constructed social life. But thoughts of Daniel consume her so much, that she writes a passionate poem about it to purge, hoping that putting her feelings and confusion out into the universe will help bring clarity. The morning after she writes her poem, however, she realizes something odd: she starts hearing things as if by telepathy—a voice seeming to come from Daniel, telling her how much he wants her and letting her know it’s safe to leave her boyfriend and try her luck with him. She wonders if Daniel is there just to remind her that there is life beyond her dead relationship, that possibilities abound in the real world. But what about the voice she has started hearing? Is her mind playing tricks on her? Has wanting Daniel made her fool herself into thinking what she wishes he would say is what he is actually thinking? Or is Daniel really the one, and the universe has found an odd way to get the message to her? A BWWM interracial romance, “Leap of Faith” is a novelette (short novella) of about 14,000 words. It is a light tale of budding romance with a dash of telepathy.