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from the back cover...
Ellie Connor is a biographer with
a special talent for piecing together fragments of the past.
Her latest project, though, promises to be her most challenging--and
personal. Not only is she researching the life of a blues
singer who disappeared mysteriously forty years ago, but Ellie
is also trying to find the truth about the parents she never
knew. The love child of a restless woman who died young and
an anonymous father, Ellie has little to go on but a faded
postcard her mother sent from a small, East Texas town--the
hometown of her latest subject.
It is there that Ellie meets Blue Reynard, a man with deep
roots and wide connections who may help her find answers.
With a piercing gaze and cool grin, Blue is as sultry and
seductive as the Southern night air. Beneath his charming
surface, however, lies as soul damaged by loss. Despite her
better judgment, Ellie finds herself irresistibly drawn to
Blue's passion--and his pain. But Ellie's been lured by sweet
talk and hot kisses before. How can she possibly stay with
Blue when every instinct tells her to run?
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here to read the full excerpt >
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
My grandmother has been telling me stories as along as I
can remember, and the weft and warp of those stories was never
woven in fairy tales or proverbs. Her method of instruction
has always been tales of sin and redemption from real life--the
triumphs and falls of women and men who were tempted and seduced
by the wide array of sins--and how they paid if they fell,
or how they triumphed if they resisted.
She never hurried through them--they're laced with details
as rich as one of her pecan pies--washed with a moody Southern
quality and a thick kind of light. As a child, I loved doing
any kind of kitchen chore with her because I knew she'd start
telling stories. I lived for that sudden shift in her cornflower
blue eyes, that slight unfocusing on the present as she looked
the past and she would begin, "I remember when..."
Even better than the stories of sin and temptation, I loved
the ones about people who had tried to do the right thing,
and only made things worse. My grandma would say it was the
finger of God, teaching a lesson, and we should be thankful,
but I always privately wondered just exactly how you could
manage to be thankful if God kept knocking you over with that
finger.
There's plenty of sin and redemption, temptation and triumph,
in MIDNIGHT RAIN, which was born out of those long hours doing
chores at my grandma's side. Ellie Connor, tough and earnest,
smart and vulnerable, arrives in the little East Texas town
of Pine Bend to uncover the secrets of a mysterious and beautiful
woman who disappeared more than a generation ago--and also
do a little poking around about the mysteries of her own life.
It's there, in the sleepy, haunted little town that Ellie
also finds Blue Reynard, a man as beautiful as he is lost,
with a whisky-dark voice and a dangerously seductive understanding
of the secrets of a woman's heart. Blue is everything Ellie
has vowed to avoid, and everything she can't resist.
This is a story about community, about discovery and loss
and the way we each find a way to get through those long rainy
nights that fall in every life. It's most especially a very
sexy, emotional romance, and I hope you'll enjoy as much I
enjoyed writing it.
Oh, and by the way, Grandma makes an appearance. Bet you
won't have any trouble at all recognizing her.
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