Dragon Awakened
Page 29
I often get asked which of my books or characters are my favorites. This is an impossible question to answer and I usually answer with something like, “The ones I’m with.”
See, every time I write a book, I lose myself in the world I’m creating so completely, I usually do nothing but sit at my computer—from morning until night—immersed in the characters and stories. I so love being with them and want to see what happens next, I can’t tear myself away. In fact, I now have to plan my life and make sure everything that needs to get done, gets done; everyone whom I need to connect with, I connect with; because for the coming weeks, I’ll check out and struggle to get the laundry done!
Back in the day, regularly, I often didn’t finish books, mostly because I didn’t want to say good-bye. And this is one reason why my characters cross over in different series, just so I can spend time with them.
Although I absolutely “love the ones I’m with,” I will say that only twice did I end a book and feel such longing and loss that I found it difficult to get over. This happened with At Peace and also, and maybe especially, with LAW MAN.
I have contemplated why my emotion after completing these books ran so deep. And the answer I’ve come up with is that I so thoroughly enjoyed spending time with heroes who didn’t simply fall in love with their heroines. They fell in love with and built families with their heroines.
In the case of LAW MAN, Mara’s young cousins, Bud and Billie, badly needed a family. They needed to be protected and loved. They needed to feel safe. They needed role models and an education. As any child does. And further, they deserved it. Loyal and loving, I felt those two kids in my soul.
So when Mitch Lawson entered their lives through Mara, and he led Mara to realizations about herself, at the same time providing all these things to Bud and Billie and building a family, I was so deep in that, stuck in the honey of creating a home and a cocoon of love for two really good (albeit fictional) kids, I didn’t want to surface.
I remember standing at the sink doing dishes after putting the finishing touches on that book and being near tears, because I so desperately wanted to spend the next weeks (months, years?) writing every detail in the lives of Mitch, Mara, Bud, and Billie. Bud making the baseball team. Billie going to prom. Mitch giving Bud “the talk” and giving Billie’s friends the stink-eye. Scraped knees. Broken hearts. Homework. Christmases. Thanksgivings. I wanted to be a fly on the wall for it all, seeing how Mitch and Mara took Bud’s and Billie’s precarious beginnings on this Earth and gave them stability and affection, taught them trust, and showed them what love means.
Even now, when I reread LAW MAN, the beginning of the epilogue makes my heart start to get heavy. Because I know it’s almost done.
And I don’t want it to be.
From the desk of Kristen Callihan
Dear Reader,
In SHADOWDANCE, heroine Mary Chase asks hero Jack Talent what it’s like to fly. After all, Jack, who has the ability to shift into any creature, including a raven in Moonglow, has cause to know. He tells her that it is lovely.
I have to agree. When I was fifteen, I read Judith Krantz’s Till We Meet Again. The story features a heroine named Frederique who loves to fly more than anything on Earth. Set in the 1940s, Freddy eventually gets to fly for the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron in Britain. I cannot tell you how cool I found this. The idea of women not only risking their lives for their country but being able to do so in a job usually reserved for men was inspiring.
So, of course, I had to learn how to fly. Luckily, my dad had been a navigator in the Air Force, which made him much more sympathetic to my cause. He gave me flying lessons as a sixteenth birthday present.
I still remember the first day I walked out onto that small airfield in rural Maryland. It was a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, where massive cargo planes rode heavy in the sky while fighter jets zipped past. But my little plane was a Cessna 152, a tiny thing with an overhead wing, two seats, and one propeller to keep us aloft.
The sun was shining, the sky cornflower blue, and the air redolent with the sharp smell of aviation gas and motor oil. I was in heaven. Here I was, sixteen, barely legal to drive a car, and I was going to take a plane up in the sky.
Sitting in the close, warm cockpit with my instructor, I went through my checklist with single-minded determination and then powered my little plane up. I wasn’t nervous; I was humming with anticipation.
Being in a single-engine prop is a sensory experience. The engine buzzes so loud that you need headphones to hear your instructor. The cockpit vibrates, and you feel each and every bump through the seat of your pants as you taxi right to the runway.
It only takes about sixty miles per hour to achieve liftoff, but the sensation of suddenly going weightless put my heart in my throat. I let out a giddy laugh as the ground dropped away and the sky rushed to meet me. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
And all because I read a book.
Now that I am an author, I think of the power in my hands, to transport readers to another life and perhaps inspire someone to try something new. And while Mary and Jack do not take off in a plane—they live in 1885, after all—there might be a dirigible in their future.
From the desk of Anna Sullivan
Dear Reader,
I grew up in a big family—eight brothers and sisters—so you can imagine how crowded and noisy, quarrelsome and fun it was. We all have different distinct personalities, of course, and it made for some interesting moments. Add in a couple of dogs, friends in and out, and, well, you get the picture.
I was the shy kid taking it all in, not watching from the sidelines, but often content to sit on them with a good book in my hands. Sometimes I’d climb a big old elm tree behind our house, cradle safely in the branches, and lose myself in another world while the wind rustled in the leaves and the tree creaked and swayed.
Looking back, it’s no wonder how I ended up a writer, and it’s not hard to understand why my stories seem to need a village to come to life. For me, the journey always starts with the voices of the hero and heroine talking incessantly in my head, but what fun would they have without a whole cast of characters to light up their world?
The people of Windfall Island are a big, extended family, one where all the relatives are eccentric and none of them are kept out of sight. No, they bring the crazy right out and put it on display. They’re gossip-obsessed, contentious, and just as apt to pick your pocket as save your life—always with a wink and a smile.
Maggie Solomon didn’t grow up there, but the Wind-fallers took her in, gave her a home, made her part of their large, boisterous family when her own parents turned their backs on her. So when Dex Keegan shows up, trying to enlist her help without revealing his secrets, she’s not about to pitch in just because she finds him… tempting. Being as suspicious and standoffish as the rest of the Windfallers, Maggie won’t cooperate until she knows why Dex is there, and what he wants.
What he wants, Dex realizes almost immediately, is Maggie Solomon. Sure, she’s hard-headed, sharp-tongued, and infuriatingly resistant to his charms, but she appeals to him on every level. There must be something perverse, he decides, about a man who keeps coming back for more when a woman rejects him. He enjoys their verbal sparring, though, and one kiss is all it takes for him to know he won’t stop until she surrenders.
But Maggie can’t give in until he tells her the truth, and it’s even more incredible—and potentially explosive to the Windfall community—than she ever could have imagined.
There’s an eighty-year-old mystery to solve, a huge inheritance at stake, and a villain who’s willing to kill to keep the secret, and the money, from ever seeing the light of day.
The Windfallers would love for you to join them as they watch Dex and Maggie fall in love—despite themselves—and begin the journey to find a truth that’s been waiting decades for those with enough heart and courage to reveal.
I really had a great time telling De
x and Maggie’s story, and I hope you enjoy reading about them, and all the characters of my first Windfall Island novel.
Happy reading,
www.AnnaSulivanBooks.com
Twitter @ASullivanBooks
Facebook.com/AnnaSullivanBooks
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
A Preview of Magic Possessed
The Dish
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Tina Wainscott
Excerpt from Magic Possessed copyright © 2013 by Tina Wainscott
Design by Christine Foltzer
Cover photograph by Claudio Marinesco
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-2321-4
E3
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
A Preview of “Magic Possessed”
The Dish
Newsletters
Table of Contents
Copyright