While I gear up for my next blog tour for The Duplicitous Debutante (stops appear on the right side of this page), I'm joined today by the talented Leslie Garcia. She writes about one of my favorite topics--horses. And love. Her new book, A Love Beyond, will be released Monday, October 6. But rather than me expounding on her work, I'll let her tell you. Take it away, Leslie!
When You Love Anyway…
Love isn’t
always smart. Lord, how many of us know that. In fact—who among us doesn’t?
Case in
point, health problems when I was still a pre-teen almost took my life. Without
going into gory details, this lovely nurse drew a picture of a palomino, and
finding out that my father had been transferred to Texas and I didn’t want to
go, she made up a song about San Antonio and falling in love.
A few years
later, I sneaked across a cactus-studded pasture to elope with an illegal alien
from the interior of Mexico. Weeks later, holed up in a hotel room in San
Antonio, I saw my grandmother—my father’s mother—waiting at a bus stop down
below and remembered the night she’d turned up at my husband’s dude ranch,
trying to kill us both.
Love isn’t
always smart. I was an 18 year old who’d been socially isolated all my life,
“book smart,” as my brother said, but otherwise—not so much. Yet we thought we
should have a happily ever after. It’s how love works, right?
Right. And
love is a force that binds not just loving souls in the here and now, but that
can reach tentacles through time. Love can fashion a future from nothing. But
it also can be the tentacles of evil reaching through time and ensnaring new
victims whose only crime is trying to be happy together.
An example
that struck me hard when I entered the Hispanic culture through marriage is the
legendary wraith, La Llorona. Although the literal translation would be the
“crying” woman, the more accurate
translation would be “wailing” woman. Many cultures use formalized wailing as
part of the ceremony of death, and a wail is the demented scream you will hear
along the riverbanks of the Rio Grande—if you listen carefully.
What kind
of a woman drowns her children? We have flesh and blood examples far too
often. But it is the story of a poor
woman, devastated by betrayal, who surrendered her little ones to the river,
who haunts my romantic suspense, A Love
Beyond.
AJ Owens
returns to south Texas after her sister’s death, determined to recover the
Thoroughbred stallion being held by her sister’s widower. The task would be difficult under the best of
circumstances—but a devastatingly handsome head of security seems to have his
own agenda—one that involves keeping AJ away from her own horse. The grown-up
game of seduction, secrecy, and villainy brings AJ close to the edge of
sanity—whose unearthly presence stalks her—her sister’s, or the centuries old Llorona?
Suspense
draws into a story; romance makes us hold our breath and maybe whisper a prayer
that the romance lingers and cements a relationship into something permanent
and beautiful. Romance lets us believe that love might not always seem
smart—but love knows what it’s doing with us.
No, love
isn’t always smart. But forty years into the marriage that should not have
been, I still like to tell stories about loves that just are…even from beyond.
Want to have a taste of this book? Read on.
Chance
nodded. “Magnificent animal. I’ve only seen him a couple of times, though. Mike
has him standing at his ranch in Nuevo Laredo this season.” He turned back
toward the door, waving her ahead of him.
Almost
halfway back to the house, a long, plaintive wail sliced through the night air.
Unending,
a cry of unbearable pain and grief that raised the hair on AJ’s arms. She
shivered
again, hard this time. Beside her, Chance tensed, looking around intently, and
from
somewhere nearby, large dogs barked threateningly.
“Probably
a coyote,” Chance murmured, and in spite of his dislike for her, he laid a
comforting
hand on her shoulder. Warm and heavy, his hand evoked another shudder of an
entirely different kind. Whether he realized the difference, she didn’t know,
but he
slowly
removed his hand.
“I’ve
heard coyotes,” AJ retorted, her head cocked, listening for any other faint
sounds
in the
night around them. “Not recently, of course, but I don’t remember them sounding
like
that. Mountain lion, maybe—but not here. Not in Laredo.”
Chance
shrugged. “Then?”
AJ
looked up at him. “La Llorona?”
she suggested, teasingly, although the wail could
well
have come from some poor, deranged soul. From a woman who’d bet everything on love
and lost. Like Gina.
She
expected him to laugh. Or scoff. Instead, he stared down at her, his face
hard,dark, and emotionless.
“Maybe,”
he said laconically. “There’s a world of hurt in the world.” For a long
moment,
he held her riveted there by the intensity of his gaze, his presence. Then he
gave another shrug, and turned away from her. “Let’s get you back. The dogs are
out and you’re not safe alone.”
“I’m
not alone,” she said, although she had to hurry to keep up with him. “I’ve got
you,”
she added breathlessly, partly to annoy and partly because he walked too fast
in his hurry to ditch her.
The
glance he cast her menaced. Said clearly that he wasn’t amused. Or attracted.
But
he
didn’t speak. Neither of them spoke until he pulled the side door open to let
her back
into
the crowded ballroom.
“Good
night, AJ,” he said politely, but his eyes were filled with distaste as, from
across
the room, Mike Towers waved at them. “I hope you enjoyed your tour.”
His
dislike and lack of respect hurt, she realized. Silly, since she wanted him to
dislike
her.
To stay away from her. She managed a final, flirty smile. “More than you can
imagine,”
she purred seductively. “I’ll tell your boss how good you were to me.”
Anger
tightened his face and thinned his lips, but he said nothing, just turned and
disappeared
around the corner of the house. Mike Towers was coming toward her, all
smile
and swagger. Undoubtedly, he thought she’d be grateful to him for the midnight
tour.
She couldn’t let him know how repulsive she found him. Not yet.
She
drew in a deep breath and tilted her chin up in determination. Towers had
stolen
her
horse and her dreams. That was nothing. Gina had taken her life because of him.
AJ had no proof, but she knew. And nothing would protect him from her plans for
revenge. Not his money, not his power. And certainly not a man like Chance
Landin, no matter how diligent he was as head of security.
Far
off, so faint she might be imagining it, a high, keening wail echoed in her
ears.
“A world of hurt,”
Chance had said.
She
had taken the words at face value then. But a sudden, strong awareness told her
his
words weren’t meant to comfort. He was warning her. No. More than that.
Threatening
her.
A Love Beyond
(October 6th, 2014)
Bio:
Leslie P. GarcÃa grew up lost among a crowd of six siblings
and a menagerie that included more than twenty horses and ponies, uncounted
dogs and cats, possums, raccoons—even a lion and monkeys. Then she moved to
Texas, fell in love, was disowned—and embarked on her real adventures, raising
4 children, teaching hundreds, and loving 9 grandkids through forty years of
marriage. The fabric of that colorful life has always been writing. In A Love Beyond, Leslie celebrates two of
her passions—unusual love stories and the ever present chance at redemption in
spite of past mistakes. Leslie loves hearing from readers and can be found all
over cyber space, including these places:
I'll admit it–I caught the genealogy bug years ago. I methodically traced my family tree back to the Revolutionary War and to Europe. One of the things I kept noticing was the way the last names of various family members kept intersecting. I realized travel was hard, and there wasn't a large gene pool to draw from, so I kept track as cousins married first and second cousins. As more and more branches on the tree interconnected, it became a family joke that the inbreeding explained the occasional lunatic in the family–those who lived in their own private worlds.
