A Year of Firsts (Second Chances Book) Contemporary Romance by Liz Flaherty ➱ Book Tour with Giveaway
A Year of Firsts
Second Chances Book 1
by Liz Flaherty
Genre: Contemporary Romance
PROLOGUE
Sell it and take care of the kids.
It was the decision they’d made when they were halfway through the renovation of the brick Cape Cod that proclaimed itself to be Peaceful Cottage on the sign on its picketed white gate. Syd and Paul had referred to it as the Cavanaugh Money Pit.
But now the kids were grown and gone from home. The college bills were paid off and no one slept in the bedrooms under the eaves. The house was finished to the point that it was on the home tour that took place in Peru, Indiana during the almost-annual Cole Porter Festival. It was a beautiful place.
Syd kind of hated it.
Give yourself a year to mourn if you think you need to, then put it away. Make the next year a time of firsts. Do things you’ve always wanted to but haven’t because life—or I—got in the way.
They hadn’t made that decision together, but it had been written in the last of the coil-bound notebooks with The Marriage Book printed on the covers that had diarized their lives together. You’ve taken care of me through All of This. Now it’s time to take care of you.
She hadn’t taken care of All of This, though. If she had, she’d have found a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Paul would still be with her. They’d be sharing Marriage Books and boxes of scandalously cheap wine and making plans for what they would do Someday.
Had she always thought in words that started with capital letters? She thought maybe she had.
It had been more than eleven months since Paul left them. Still smiling although he couldn’t talk, still the man she’d loved since the sixth grade. Syd had taken that eleven and a half months, every minute of it up to this very day, to learn to live without him. She’d read every book on loss the library offered, joined a grief group, and tightened the already strong bonds of her relationship with her daughters and sons-in-law.
She’d given away things Paul had loved to others who would care for them as he had. One morning, wearing disreputable jogging pants and one of her husband’s equally shabby flannel shirts, she’d packed his clothes and driven them to the veterans’ thrift store in a neighboring city, crying all the way there and singing along with Paul’s beloved Eagles on the way home. She’d given his motorcycle and his pickup to the girls’ husbands, with all five of them weeping as she handed over the keys.
And then she sold the house, standing for a long time at the sign on the gate when she left it for the last time. Peaceful Cottage. She’d loved the house for a long time, but thought Tribulation House would have been a more fitting name. Leaving it was painful because it felt almost as if she was leaving Paul, but there was respite in the move, too. That she had felt relief at her husband’s death was something she couldn’t make herself say.
She made sure her will was in order and gave lists of passwords and account numbers to the girls. She sat at the rolltop desk that had been one of the first pieces of furniture she and Paul had bought and that now lived in in Haley’s big farmhouse kitchen and made a list. The girls helped her with it, sharing memories and ideas and a bottle of the same wine their parents used to drink out of a box.
When the list was complete, she handed it to them. “What do you think? What would Daddy think?”
They pored over the handwritten sheet, Haley’s brown head and Shiloh’s blond one close together. Syd stopped for a moment, interrupting the plans that were jumbling together in her head, her heart spilling over. If she hadn’t had them when their father died, she’d have wanted to die, too. How could she leave them?
Paul had covered that question, too, in the marriage book. Don’t start feeling as if you’re deserting the family. The girls will want this for you, and you’ll always be there if they need you. Do this for you, Syd.
What will you do first?
EXCERPT 2
Within an hour and half, the newspapers were folded, the carriers had picked them up for delivery, and Clay had finished the story he was working on and edited the one the reporter sent in. “Do you miss it?” asked Syd as they left the office. She carried the empty pump pot.
He locked the door. “Miss what?”
“The city. Television. The…I don’t know…excitement.”
He looked thoughtful. “I miss some of the people I worked with, and sometimes I miss the assignments that fall outside the norm. But, no, I don’t miss being on TV. I still do commentary sometimes, remotely, and that fills that particular well. If I get a little full of myself after one of those times, someone will always mention that the tie I wore on a show was hideous or that my hair looked as if I’d taken a lawnmower to it.”
They stood outside the office. The sky was still low and gray. “I live on Cooper Lake, just a few miles out of town. We could grab an early dinner at Dockside—a bar and grill across the lake from my house—and if the rain holds off, we could go on a boat ride.” His eyes smiled into hers, and her knees got wobbly. If she’d had to walk at that moment, she’d have looked like a duck. “It’s okay to ask you for a date, isn’t it? We may have only actually spent a limited number of hours together, but we’ve known each other for two weeks.”
A date. The words hung there between them. She smiled back at him, but didn’t know how to answer.
“Too soon?” he asked quietly. “Or am I imagining something that’s not really there?”
“Oh, it’s there.” She laughed, the sound fluttery and adolescent in her ears. “But I haven’t used the word ‘date’ in connection with myself and anyone but my husband since a few ‘I hate you, never speak to me again’ breakups in high school. I guess—” She stopped, hesitating, then went on. “I don’t know how. To date, I mean. I’m forty-six years old. I fully realize how pathetic that makes me sound.”
“Is dating on your list?”
“No.”
“Is riding around a pretty lake on it? Eating the Friday special at a waterside restaurant? Going out with a has-been news anchor who has an iffy heart, an attendant nephew, and doesn’t know when to quit talking? The anchor, not the nephew.”
The words iffy heart registered, but she pushed them back, not wanting to hear them. She straightened, smiled again, and set her fisted hands lightly on his chest. Her fingers tingled. “Not too soon. Just in time.” She looked down at her decidedly dirty tee shirt. “Can we go by the hotel so I can change clothes?” She held her tingly hands up. “Maybe take a shower? I didn’t realize how dirty newspapers were.”
“Ah, you didn’t know they used ink when they printed them.” He nodded wisely.
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I am.”
“I would never do that to you.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really.”
She grinned, noticing that the tingle was affecting more than her fingers. “No. Not really.”
“Thought so.”
EXCERPT 3
If I fall in love again, this will be how it happens.
The thought came from nowhere she could identify, although she knew deep in her soul that it had to do with the tall man in shorts and a polo shirt walking up the incline of her yard to meet her. The man whose heart would likely not last as long as her own, whose every wince made her fear he was having a heart attack. His attitude toward exercise and diet was that of the middle-aged man in perfect health he appeared to be, not one who had a zipper-like scar up the center of his chest.
But just the sight of him, with his light brown hair that needed cutting blowing into his eyes even though his graying beard was as always short and neat, made her heart beat harder and faster. She smiled, remembering his explanation of why he had a beard.
At first he’d said it was because he had a weak chin he didn’t want anyone to notice, but then he’d admitted it had been an ongoing struggle between him and a producer of his show. “He was pushy and I was usually compliant. It was a great gig and I knew it. But it got to where he wanted to…create the brand he wanted me to be, I guess. I mostly went along because he was a pretty smart guy who knew his stuff, but when I came back from vacation with a beard and he gave the order to have it gone before I went on the air, it became the proverbial last straw.”
Everyone had last straws sometimes, she thought abstractedly, stopping and waiting for him to join her. “Rehearsal was okay, wasn’t it?” she said, thinking her voice sounded horrifyingly breathy. It went along with the movie scenario. “I didn’t make a complete idiot of myself, did I? Or mess things up for other people? I never want to do that. Where’s Toby?”
Of course, she didn’t. People who were pocket protectors protected not only themselves, but others from themselves.
During all the long months of his illness, Paul had never seen her angry. She’d confined that to times alone. She’d hidden her anger to protect him, yet it had probably created a chasm between them. She should have let him see her last straws sometimes.
“He’s asleep. Braxton is staying the night.” Clay didn’t hesitate as he joined her, just put his arms around her and led her into a dance. “You were great.”
Syd wasn’t a good dancer, by any means. When friends used to tell her to “listen for the beat,” she always said, “what beat?” because she could never hear it. But she’d loved to dance anyway. It was emotion in motion, and sometimes…sometimes after Paul got sick it had been better than running screaming into the woods behind the house, which had been both an alternative and a temptation. Abba and Billy Joel and Journey had often brought some semblance of peace to the crashing cacophony of her anger.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced in a man’s arms—probably at the girls’ weddings, when Paul was already having trouble moving but had been determined to dance not only with Haley and Shiloh but with Syd as well. It had been excruciating, the fear that he would fall and be injured or become so exhausted he couldn’t stay to enjoy the receptions.
The memory was fleeting, and of happy times, and then it was just Clay McAlister. Taller and more muscled than Paul had been, his arms creating a circle of light for just the two of them as they danced across the grass.
When he kissed her in the shade of the willow tree, she wasn’t sure where the stars came from, only that they filled her eyes and, for a long and tender moment, her heart. She’d been so tired when she came outside, but weariness gave way to the magic of the clear night and being in Clay McAlister’s arms. She’d set her glass down somewhere, or he had, leaving her arms free to go around him.
It couldn’t go anywhere, whatever “it,” this meeting of hearts and minds, was. She couldn’t go through it again, the caring for and ultimate losing of a man she loved. She didn’t think Clay wanted to settle into a committed relationship, either, and she didn’t know how to have any other kind.
“Boat ride?” he said quietly, meeting her gaze in the dim lights from the deck.
She nodded. That much, she could do. Saying no never even occurred to her.
Liz Flaherty spends non-writing time sewing, quilting, and thinking she should clear a path through the fabric stash that furnishes her office. She also loves to travel and spend time with the grandkids (the Magnificent Seven) and their parents. She and Duane, her husband of a really long time, live in the old farmhouse in Indiana they moved to in 1977. They've talked about moving, but really, 40 years of stuff? It's not happening!
Website * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram * Bookbub * Amazon * Goodreads
Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
Swag Pack with Notebook, pen, Starbucks gift card + more! (US only),
$10 Amazon gift card (WW)
-1 winner each!
Thank you for shining the spotlight on A Year of Firsts!
ReplyDelete