Category: Romance Publisher: Sayword B. Eller
Type: Fiction
Pages: 180
Copyright: June 15, 2009
Fifteen short stories to get your heart in a romantic kind of mood!
Kali Douglas is disenchanted with life, and why shouldn't she be? She's newly divorced from her husband of over ten years- with an extra fifteen pounds to prove it- and he is newly engaged to a stick-figure, her sister is back in town with a less-than-stellar makeover and a devastating secret, and her mother is playing at matchmaker again. With all these complications it's a wonder she can be at all distracted by Jake Templeton, but what a distraction he is! She's got one chance at a second chance, but can she get over the pain of the past to take it?
In addition to the title story, Second Chances offers fourteen stories to get you caught up in the utterly fantastic and unpredictable thing that is love!
Also included: Check out the first chapter of SHADOWS, coming 2010!
Excerpt
An excerpt from the story Promises...
Married. Just saying the word was like being beaten with a mace. How could he be getting married?
The day had begun so simply; wake up, get the kids ready for school and John ready for work, make eggs, shove everyone out the door, collect the mail, and open the overly optimistic yellow envelope that had the audacity to announce the blasphemous event.
How dare he!
With the envelope in slivers on the cherry-stained floor John and I had picked out the year before, I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew to dial.
“Can you believe this?” I screamed at Dakota, my best friend of forever. “Can you? Did you get one too?”
“Of course I did,” she said, her tone unaffected.
“Well?”
“Well what, Janey?”
“Can you believe it?” I was pacing my dining room, going back and forth from the window that looked out onto our sleepy street to the super-happy invitation that had obviously been picked out by a moron. “I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?”
“It was bound to happen at some point,” was all she offered.
I could imagine her piddling around her tiny two-bedroom apartment, scooping up toy cars left out by her six-year-old son, and wads of paper courtesy of her husband.
“What did you think?” she was saying. “He would pine over your for the rest of his life?”
I picked up the card, my eyes roaming over the swirling letters that announced the nuptials of two people who shouldn’t be together. “I think I’m going to vomit,” I muttered.
Dakota laughed, a loud quip meant to shake me out of my funk. Apparently she had no idea just how deep it went.
“What?” I snipped.
“Are we really going to do this again?” she asked. After a pause from my end she sighed.
I didn’t need her to tell me how pathetic I was being. I would have to be a complete moron not to realize that ten years after a breakup I shouldn’t still be stalker-girl or miss obsess-much, but that didn’t stop it from being so.
“Janey, why do you keep doing this to yourself?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
Of course it was a lie. I knew exactly why I kept going on and on about him. Why I couldn’t let him go. At least I thought I did. It all seems to get so muddled where Ryan Foust is concerned.
“You’ve got John,” she said.
“I know,” my lips said, but my mind couldn’t keep from screaming at her; thanks for making me feel worse!
My story was supposed to be like Jane Austen’s Persuasion. We were supposed to be apart for a while, but eventually we would fulfill fate and be together. We had a forever thing. Or so I thought.
“I don’t know what’s going on with me!” I shouted. “Every time I think I’m past him I find out I’m not!”
“So what now? Are you going to the wedding?”
“Don’t we have to?”
“No!” she screeched. “This is so not good for you!”
“John might want to go,” I tried.
She laughed. I could always count on her to call me on my bullshit. “Yeah sure!” she cackled. “John and Ryan are such great friends!”
“Dakota,”
She continued to laugh, that puttering half-laugh a person gives when they’re slowing down.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I know,” was her saddened reply.
~*~*~ The Wedding ~*~*~
I had worn my best dress, a brown halter that dropped just below the knee. It was tasteful, but at the same time it was hopeful....
Check out the rest in Second Chances; and other tales of love
