A peek at The Blue Dragon

The Blue Dragon, my newest romance, is in this month’s books fair sponsored by Australian Author, Iris Blobel, All of the info you need can be found by clicking on the link: https://livingthedream941447545.wordpress.com/2020/10/03/awesome-romance-novels-at-a-great-price/

The Blue Dragon is a modern historical romance, set in 2006.

True love never dies.

Gravely wounded in Afghanistan, Samantha Collins returns to Canada to discover a previously unknown relative has died and made her heir to the family estate. The bequest consists of a century-old farmhouse and an orange tabby. Alone, having given up on love, marriage, and children, facing a grim future, Sam opts to move into the house until she decides what to do with it. When she opens the door, she gets more than she bargained for. Nobody mentioned Great-aunt Esther was a hoarder.

Following his divorce, Phil Austin returns to South Creek. An architect who prefers restoring old buildings to designing new ones, he’s intrigued to learn one of the area’s century-old houses may be sold. Picturing the house converted to an inn, when Phil knocks on the door, he gets more than he expected. The new owner is the woman he loved and lost fifteen years ago.

Stunned to find the only man she ever loved on her doorstep, Sam is carried away by his ideas for the house. Torn between hope and despair, she agrees to his business proposal. As they renew their friendship and they sift through the trash and treasures Esther Cohen left behind, can they find the courage to open their hearts to one another again?

Here’s a taste of what’s inside!

The hot water cascading over her shoulders and sluicing down her back eased Sam’s pain as had the two extra-strength analgesics and the muscle relaxant she’d taken. Occasionally, her sleep was interrupted by dreams recalling the mortar attack that had claimed Keisha, Grady, and Russell, leaving his fiancée and baby girl to plan a funeral rather than a wedding. Spasms of pain, like she’d experienced last week after her flight from Paris, brought back the memories, too—and then there were loud noises.

Corporal Newman had lived. They’d even shared the physio room at the US Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. Fortune had certainly made a mess of things. Newman now walked on artificial legs, she’d gotten a medal, more pain than she could ever have imagined, and an iffy future, while three others who’d had so much to live for had died.

The doctors in Germany had prescribed antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and had recommended something stronger for pain, but she’d seen too many soldiers hooked on those drugs. As soon as the pain was tolerable, she’d refused them and had gone with something non-addictive. It had taken months of rehab before she’d been able to walk again, her hips and femurs more metal than bone. If she had problems down the line, she would consider more surgery, but for now, she’d make do with things as they were. Sometimes the analgesics helped, sometimes they didn’t, but at least she was in control—and when the pain got too bad … well, that’s what wine was for.

Turning off the tap, she stepped out of the shower stall, dried off, making sure not to look at the angry scars crisscrossing her abdomen, back, and legs. The doctors claimed they would fade in time, but from what she could see that might be decades. She grabbed a second towel, rubbed her short hair dry, and pulled on the hotel’s terry robe. Going into the room, she opened the bottle of merlot she’d picked up on the way home, poured herself a glass, and sat on the leather chair.

When she’d checked in, still in full dress uniform, new medal pinned to her chest, she’d requested an easy chair for her room, explaining about her injuries. Within an hour, a leather recliner with all the bells and whistles had been delivered with a “Thanks for your service” note.

Too bad her service hadn’t been enough to save the others, but she’d done her duty to her patient. Wasn’t that all that really mattered?

The heavily French-accented words her grandmother had said to her more than twenty-five years ago echoed inside her head as loudly as if she were standing next to her.

“Ma pauvre petite. You are always so hard on yourself. You are one little girl. You can’t save the world. That’s for the Bon Dieu.”

Why had she never considered how hard life must’ve been for her? Marie-Hélène Leclerc Cowan, a Creole with café au lait colored skin slightly darker than her own, would’ve suffered from racism, too.

“Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.”

Sighing, Sam reached for Aunt Esther’s letter, ripped open one end of the envelope, and slipped out the sheet of thin blue paper. No, she couldn’t save the world, but maybe she could do something for a lonely, old lady who’d died heartbroken and alone.

The onion skin paper was brittle. People had stopped using this stuff when she’d still been a kid. The ink was light, hard to read as if the writer had barely had the strength to pen the letter, the script spidery, but by turning on the lamp closest to her, Sam was able to decipher it.

Dear Samantha,

Not a Jewish name, nor a French one, but one considered the feminine version of Samuel which is. I do not suppose that mattered to your mother or grandfather, although Elizabeth was our mother’s name. Today, it does not matter to anyone. How the times have changed, but the hatred is still there, as you well know. I fear nothing will ever change that. Too many have died in the name of God or greed, humanity’s new God of choice. Perhaps someday, things will change, but not I fear in my lifetime.

Imagine my surprise at discovering I not only had a grandniece, but one who chose to follow in my beloved Ezekiel’s footsteps, although he was in the navy not the army, but service is service. When I saw you on that television program, I recognized you instantly. You resemble my mother—not completely since your complexion is darker—but enough for me to see the family connection. The private investigator confirmed my suspicions. Like myself, your life has not been an easy one, losing those you loved at a young age.

If you are reading this, it is because I never got up the nerve to contact you before my death. You see, I did not know what you might know about me or whether you would somehow blame me for your grandfather’s alienation from the family. I will admit I was angry with him for choosing an outsider over his heritage, but when I met Ezekiel, I finally understood what he meant when he said, “The heart wants what it wants, kleyne shvester.” No one, not even Charles who was a good, loyal friend, could ever replace Zeke. I have mourned him most of my life. I was thirty when his ship sank, all hands aboard lost, the bodies never recovered.

I am returning to you what should have been Ezra’s in the first place, although I have sold most of the land. I kept our special places—the woods where Zeke and I loved to walk, with the pond and the stream running through it where we used to wade after our picnics. That is where he first kissed me, where he asked me to wait for him and marry him when he came home from the war. He carved our initials in the oak tree. I visited the tree every day, until my heart started acting up. Then, I went as often as these old bones would allow until I had to stop.

Charles will have given you my ashes. I broke with tradition by requesting cremation. You would have received a lovely urn, but I have no desire to stay in a flower vase. I want you to take my ashes and return them to the earth by scattering them under a small stone cairn I built next to the tree with our initials on it. Knock down the stones, mix my ashes with the earth where I buried the lock of hair we exchanged the day he left, and let us be together at last. Do it on September third, the day he proposed. That’s all I ask of you. In exchange, I have left you all of my greatest treasures. Treat them kindly, especially the blue dragon. It’s the last thing he ever gave me.

Esther Cohen

Sam dropped the paper onto the table and swiped at her eyes. Why the hell was she crying this time? Weeping served no purpose. It didn’t fix anything—never had, never would—and yet there was no way she could prevent herself from giving in to despair. She’d done too damn much of it this past year, and now she was all blubbery over an old lady’s letter.

“Face it. You get weepy over a damn television commercial,” she muttered. “A living example of Thalia and Melpomene, the Greek muses of comedy and tragedy, laughing one minute, crying the next. Just like that damn mask you’ve dragged all over the bloody world because he gave it to you!”

Standing, she limped over to the floor to ceiling window overlooking the town square, unable once again to stop the tears dribbling down her cheeks. Fifteen years of suppressed emotions let loose at last. What did she expect? Sooner or later, you had to pay for your mistakes.

She wrapped her arms around herself. How long had it been since there had been a special someone in her life? How long since she’d had a shoulder to cry on? Arms to comfort her? Someone to sit by the bed and care whether she lived or died? The flowers she’d received on her birthday—Christmas Day, a holiday she’d stopped celebrating long ago—had come as a surprise, but there’d been nothing since then, not even a good luck message when she’d finally been released from the rehab center. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Ryerson’s letter sent in March that had reached her last month, she would’ve had no place to go. Now, she had a house, but how long would she be able to live there before Fate exacted her final revenge?

Shoving aside the sheer curtain, she looked down at the main street of the strange town, a place she’d heard of once before but never expected to visit. South Creek, population twenty-one thousand, was a bedroom community for Ottawa, the nation’s capital. At one time, it had been a dairy farming area, but one by one the family farms had given way to progress. What would it have been like eighty-five years ago when her grandfather had left?

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