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Pieces of Blue
Liz Flaherty
Buy Links:
Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dt0yjU9
D2D: https://books2read.com/u/491qMp
Things happen when you don’t intend for them to. Have you noticed that?
A couple of years ago, Pieces of Blue was released by a new publishing company. Its reviews were good, its sales good—at least by my standards—and I was a happy camper writer.
I’m still grateful to that company for seeing what I did, for encouraging and promoting and being timely and author-friendly. But at the end of the day, it didn’t work out, and Pieces of Blue was in the green room again, waiting to come back out. I wrote the second and third books in the series, and then, as publishing goes, Blue and I waited some more.
But the truth is, my writing career has a sell-by date on it, and I was fearful it was going to pass. So, with the encouragement of the new publishing company, the rights were reverted and Pieces of Blue is out again. New cover by the wonderful Nancy Fraser and new beginnings for Colors, the Harper Loch Trilogy.
Blurb
Life comes in shades of blue...
Self-imposed loner, Maggie North, has worked for bestselling author Trilby Winterroad her entire adult life, starting as simply his assistant and ending up as his ghost writer. Through ups and downs--including a divorce from an abusive husband--he has been the one person on whom she could always rely. So when Trilby dies suddenly, Maggie finds herself adrift, not sure what she’ll do or where she belongs in the world any longer. And the confusion continues when she discovers he’s not only left her his beloved dachshund, Chloe, but a house she knew nothing about, on a lake she’s never heard of.
It only takes one visit for Maggie to fall in love with both the house and the small lakeside community. The longer she’s there, the safer she feels and the more her life begins to expand...as do her feelings toward her friend and Trilby’s attorney, Sam Eldridge.
But is she really safe? Or are the glistening pieces of her new life about to shatter as an old danger returns?
Excerpt
Sam, Chloe, and I went for a walk around the lake later that day. Ben had collected the cans from where Sam put them in the recycle bin and told me three times I wasn’t a bother. Ellie was having a late lunch with Sadie in Placer. As big as the Burl was, I felt confined there.
I knew Sam was disturbed because the empty cans at the fish shack hadn’t clicked with him as being of possible importance. “I’d be a failure as Finlay, wouldn’t I?”
I couldn’t see him failing at anything, although I doubted he’d been all that good at marriage. Some people just weren’t. I thought his wife was one who had likely needed patience from her partner—maybe more of it than Sam had to give.
“You don’t need to be Finlay.” I looked up at him, shaking my head. “You just need to be Sam. You’re the best Sam there is.”
Was I, right in the middle of my personal maelstrom of panic and dread and regret, flirting with Sam Eldridge? He was my friend. My lawyer. My ukulele partner—although we were admittedly better together when we confined our musical performances to instruments we could actually play. The fact that I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever met was just a late-in-friendship observation, as was the warm ripple of my long-inactive girl parts that accompanied his presence. I’m fifty-two years old, for heaven’s sake. I don’t have a flat stomach or perky boobs. My libido was …
Well, alive and well is what it was. Even with every nerve I had jangling with worry over what would happen next. Would the next kitten be dead? Would I? I thought there might be something wrong with sexual thoughts cavorting around in my head and other areas, too, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of what it could be.
We’d been playing around since I’d come to the lake, building on the feelings we were discovering—at least, I thought he was discovering them, too. But I wasn’t in a place to act on them; if Greg Mathis’s release from prison took me down a rabbit hole of horror, I couldn’t take anyone else with me.
Maybe we could … No maybe to it, I told myself forcefully. While I’d never been a fan of purely physical relationships, they did have their place. Right now, that was all Sam and I could have.
He held my gaze long enough for me to realize I was lying to myself. He took my hand. “I don’t know where we are,” he said, his voice so low I had to strain to hear, “or where we’re going, but even if all we have going is friendship, Maggie North, we’re in this together. Okay?”
“Be still, my soul, be still …” The line was from an A. E. Housman poem I’d read when Tim was alive and I thought life was full of promise. I’d memorized its first stanza and held onto the words through those days of so much love and so much loss I knew I’d never see its like again.
I hadn’t, either. But Sam’s eyes, the shade of which I’d determined from a color wheel were cerulean, made me think I should add a yet to that thought. Because together sounded more wonderful than I could have ever imagined.
Especially now.
Bio and links
Liz Flaherty has spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide most every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that. Find her on Facebook or her blog, Window Over the Sink. A girl just can’t have too many friends!
https://linktr.ee/lizflaherty
