The August Reading Trail

It's August, time for the last installment of the summer reading trail. This month, I'm offering up the opening of Love Letters, the second story in the Lilac Hour trilogy.
You can read the selection  HERE
And check out all the great summer reads HERE

The Lilac Hour is a collection of three sweet romantic stories.


Three Generations of Women          
Three Loves Meant to Last Forever

The Lilac Hour: Sara has been widowed longer than she was married. Now in her eighties, she discovers that anything is possible in the lilac hour.

Love Letters: Maggie rediscovers the letters that her husband Jake wrote long ago. Can she rekindle the passion that was once theirs?

The Road Not Taken: JoAnne meets an old love at Target. Has she made the right choice in choosing her husband David?


 

#8Sunday#SnipSunday: The Road Not Taken

The Lilac Hour, my short story trilogy, was recently released. My snippet this week are the first lines of the third story, The Road Not Taken.

Who would have thought the past could find you at Target? I was in the small appliance aisle, coffee maker in my arms, staring at the other models featured and wondering what difference it could
possibly make to my life or David’s, when I heard his voice behind me.
“Jo?” I would have known the voice anywhere, the hint of gravel mixed with a smoky kind of sadness that seemed to carry the world. I spun around, coffee maker still in hand, and there he stood, Seth O’Connor, like a consignment from my past dropped off at my feet. He hadn’t changed much in the decade since I’d seen him last. Same heartbreaking brown eyes over hair that was just this side of messy and clashed with the camel hair coat, the tie poking out under the collar, the neatly pressed slacks and polished brown oxfords.
I was rendered speechless and stood open mouthed as   Seth took the coffee maker from me and put it into my empty cart.


Thanks for stopping by! For more great snippets, be sure to visit Weekend Writing Warriors and Sunday Snippets

For more on The Lilac Hour, please visit the Lilac Hour page at my website.http://www.utecarbone.com/index.html

#8Sunday #SnipSun: The Lilac Hour

I've been busy writing and getting ready to launch new projects into the world. The Lilac Hour is the last, but not least, of four releases I've had this summer. It's a trilogy of linked short stories about three generations of women in a family. The first story, The Lilac Hour, is about Sara, a women in her eighties.
Here are the opening eight lines of "The Lilac Hour"

We called it the lilac hour. The name came from my Aunt Delilah, who had a jungle of  lilacs in her backyard near the harbor. Every spring, they would open their fragrant buds of deep purple and gentle pink. And so it was that I pointed out those same colors to Zeke as the sun  finished dipping deep into the bay and Zeke said, “Yes, the lilac hour.”
We were young then, Zeke and I, new to marriage and still a little reckless, and I thought the term highly romantic.
That spring, Zeke gathered lilacs, bushels of them, from Delilah’s garden and put the petals on our bed. Still dreaming, I awoke to the stubble of his beard grazing my neck and the delicious sweetness rising from those buds. I’ve never been able to pass a lilac bush without thinking of him, and the tenderness of early love.

The Lilac Hour will be released later this month. For more on the trilogy, click HERE

For more terrific writing snippets, please visit Weekend Writing Warriors and Sunday Snippets. 

The Honor of your reading is requested. The Wedding Day Collection

The Wedding Day Collection made its debut over the weekend.  June is the perfect season for weddings and so these stories about them come in right on time. I'm so pleased that my story, Schroedinger's cake, is included in the anthology.

The honor of your presence is requested to the pages of The Wedding Day Collection, an anthology of tales celebrating that love-inspired event. All of these short stories revolve around the romance of the wedding day. From an unexpected bump and an outspoken wedding crasher to a missing groom, we hope these stories will make you smile and warm your heart.





 Schroedinger's Cake is one of eight stories in this anthology. It's a story about a special wedding cake, the baker who created it, and the guy who bumps into her truck and nearly destroys it.
Here are some of my favorite lines from this sweet as dessert romance story--

* Something in the way he said it, like he wasn’t quite sure of himself, or maybe something in the way he stood there, his lanky body resting on one leg as though she were hanging in an art gallery and he was assessing her value, cut through Gina. She would tell him exactly how she felt about cake murder.

*Evan Dunne’s first thought, as he’d watched the compact brunette get out of the Bennetto’s bakery van, was that she was not what he expected.

*Hancock Falls was a small town. There couldn’t be that many weddings on an October Saturday. And there was only one bride in the world who could make another woman want to commit suicide over a cake.

* “Something like that. Since I’ve already made an ass of myself, I figured I could add dork to the list.” He stuck out his hand. “Evan Dunne. Dork ass extraordinaire.”


For more on the Wedding Day Collection, including how you can buy a copy, please click HERE