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In Defense of Defending Our Work as Authors

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Are authors allowed to defend their work? Is an author a bad actor for speaking out in his or her own defense?

When I published my first novel, Dance for A Dead Princess, in 2013, I quickly learned that, according to prevailing professional standards, an author exhibited bad manners if he or she responded to a critical review. Fellow authors informed me that no matter how wrong a reviewer had gotten the plot or the characters or even the spelling of my name, it was strictly forbidden to answer back. Strictly. Even the ad hominem attack, the lowest form of argument, could not be answered. I was also informed that, by and by, I wouldn’t even bother to read the reviews.

I can’t say that I ever stopped reading reviews entirely. Feedback from readers is important. Language is inherently ambigious; and sometimes the words that seemed so clear when I wrote them didn’t fulfill that promise. Reviews help authors understand what their readers understand. And obviously that is critical to being a good storyteller.

But based upon the views of other authors, I came to see the review arena as off-limits to me as an author. I could stop by like a hovering ghost and observe what was taking place below, but I couldn’t reveal my presence in any way. For a long time, I abided by the notion that authors were supposed to suck it up in silence no matter how foul or untrue the blow the reviewer administered. Sometimes it felt like being slapped across the face and not being able to cry out in pain.

I think the first time I wrote a response to a reviewer was after I published my first legal thriller, Dark Moon.  In Moon, Sarah Knight, the main character takes on the defense of Alexa Reed, who allegedly has killed her ex-husband, the son of Coleman Reed, a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice, and a psychologist who has been a fixture in the San Diego legal community for longer than anyone can remember. The legal community is solidly against Sarah’s efforts to prove her client innocent because of Coleman Reed’s influence and because of the community’s loyalty to the psychologist. The story makes it clear that both law enforcement and the judicial system are stacked against Sarah’s efforts to help Alexa Reed. So when Sarah has a nearly fatal accident in her car, she doesn’t call the police because she knows the police would do nothing for her.

A reviewer lambasted this portion of the plot as “unrealistic.” The reviewer’s theory was everyone calls the police when in danger and the “good cops” show up and dispense justice on the spot without regard to their personal bias. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. So I wrote a few sentences pointing out that Sarah would have received no benefit from calling a law enforcement agency because all of them wanted her dead just as much as the person who had damaged her brakes.

Not long after that, someone else jumped on the “unrealistic” bandwagon. One of the things I have noticed about reviewers is that when one of them strikes a critical blow, several will crowd in quickly to try to strike harder blows on the same subject. To me, it looks like “roughing the kicker” in football, except there is no referee. And no fifteen-yard penalty.

After the “cops are unbiased and always good” reviewer left the building, another reviewer showed up to complain that the whole plot of the novel was “unrealistic” because “judges aren’t biased.” Actual case law will tell you this is not true, and I once reversed a murder conviction on that very ground: the trial judge was biased. So I quietly pointed out to “unrealistic reviewer number two” that I have been an attorney for more than thirty years.

After that, I made it a practice to point out inaccuracies here and there when I felt that a false statement in a review would deter another reader from giving one of my books a try. Not always and not often. And never to try to persuade the hater reviewer that he or she should have liked the book. Not everyone likes every book, and some people derive great delight in handing out poor reviews to every single book that they read. But I have made a few comments here and there to some of the more inaccurte reviewers because I would like the door to remain open for new readers to give my books an honest try.

This practice seems perfectly normal to me. In my “day job,” I regularly write replies. An appeal in California consists of the Appellant’s Opening Brief, a Respondent’s Brief, and an Appellant’s Reply Brief. In the Opening Brief, I tell the client’s story and give it five stars for reversal. In the Respondent’s Brief, the Attorney General gives my opening brief a one-star review. The AG says I’m wrong about the law and the facts and my client couldn’t be more guilty. And then in the Reply Brief, I explain why the AG is “mistaken” and has “overlooked” critical facts, giving the AG a two-star review at best. This whole process is more like a stately dance than an argument. Both sides use carefully chosen professional rhetoric. I suppose my decision as an author to break the “no reply to reviewers” taboo was simply an offshoot of what is expected of me in my “day job.” A lawyer is not supposed to remain silent in the face of a verbal attack on his client.

Recently, I encountered two criticisms of me for defending my novels. Someone on a Goodreads forum said “she answers back,” and in a Facebook forum that had nothing to do with books or reviews or even being an author, a gentlemen accused me of always replying to “one-star” reviews. He meant to vilify me as someone who refused to accept criticism. He had called me “childish” because I had written that I did not think Neil Gorsuch was an appropriate choice as a Trustee of the Williamsburg Foundation. I had replied that I am an attorney and in my professional view, the Foundation made a poor choice. The gentleman then shot back his purportedly damning “childish” label and made it clear that a woman who “speaks out” in any forum is a woman who does not know that “nice” women do not express or defend themselves. “Seen but not heard” was his major premise. And my crime was even greater because I am an author who defends her work. His position was based upon his belief that all Supreme Court justices deserve nothing but unswerving hero worship merely because of their positions on the court. (He should do some historical research on Justice William O. Douglas.) His logic was similar to that of the “good cops are never biased” reviewer. Enough said.

My position is this, right or wrong: I believe that all who participate in the artistic process have the right to be heard. The consumer has a right to describe his or her honest experience with that piece of art, however inaccurate that might be. And I believe that all creators, whether authors, painters, actors, or musicians, have the right to defend themselves and their art under appropriate circumstances and using appropriate words. I don’t think that being an artist takes away the right to speak up in one’s own defense. What do you think?

In Defense of Endings

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Sometimes I stop by the “Reviews” section of my books on Amazon to see how readers are responding to them. I used to do that more often, but I came to see that the “Reviews” portion of each book’s Amazon page was, in truth, the exclusive province of my readers. It is their spot to offer praise, vent their frustrations, or to explain what worked for them and/or what didn’t. The only time I leave a comment in this otherwise off-limits world is when someone says my legal thrillers aren’t accurate about the law. Since I’ve been an attorney since 1981, I think it’s fair to speak in my defense on that subject.

But one reader comment that I have never spoken to in the “Reviews” section is the occasional claim that some of my novels have “contrived endings.” To me, a “contrived” ending does not fit organically into the rest of the story. A deus ex machina is my idea of a contrived ending. Deus ex machina means “god from the machine.” In case it’s been a long time since high school English class, deux ex machine is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and seemingly unlikely occurrence, typically so much as to seem contrived. That doesn’t happen in my books. The pieces that come together to end the story are laid down, one by one, as I write the novel. I think the readers who find the endings contrived” or “artificial” are missing the clues I’m scattering for them. Here’s a hint: in each one of my books, the ending grows out of the individual identities of the characters and out of the sum of their actions throughout the story. Pay attention to who they are and to what they say and do. When you get to the end, you’ll see that all the pieces of the ending have been in front of you all along.

 

Chapter One, Keeping Secrets, A Legal Thriller

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THE EXECUTION ORDER

“I am dying in my own death and in the
deaths of those after me.”

T.S. Eliot

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, January 3, 2017, I-95 South from Richmond to Death Row at Sussex State Prison, Sussex, Virginia

Brendan Murphy drove south on the I-95 toward Sussex that morning with his heart aching. He glanced over at his briefcase on the passenger seat next to him, wishing he could toss it out the window. He imagined it coming to rest in a half frozen puddle of dirty snow along the shoulder of the freeway, languishing there with Edward Wynne Carter III’s execution warrant unread and unnoticed.

If only saving Ed’s life could be that direct and simple. Brendan had been trying for thirty-one years to make the Commonwealth of Virginia admit that Ed had not killed his barely pregnant wife, Anne Fairfax Carter, on a cold November night in 1983, while their four-year-old son Wynne slept in his crib, behind the locked door of his nursery. But to no avail. The Commonwealth’s Attorney, Gordon Martin Fairfax and Anne’s first cousin, was so hell bent on vengeance that he had thrice convicted the wrong man.

“Why did you take this case?” his wife Emma had asked him last night as they sat in front of the fire in the spacious great room of their six-thousand-square-foot, three-story, brick colonial in Richmond’s exclusive Windsor Farms.

They were slowing down at sixty-six. The thought made him smile as he drove. Now they liked to sit in front of the fire at night, talking and sipping good scotch, instead of going to concerts and dinner parties, and charity events. Well, he didn’t mind. He’d spent his career in the Richmond office of Craig, Lewis, and Weller. He’d officially retired last October. He was still a partner, but now his name appeared in the “Of Counsel” column on the firm’s letterhead. He went to his office only three days a week, and he had handed off most of his cases to other attorneys. But not Ed’s. He hadn’t wanted to give up his hard-charging career this early, but Emma, an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, had insisted. Stress had taken its toll, and he’d had a serious heart attack last spring.

To encourage him to back down from long hours at the firm, she had reduced her own hours at the Medical College of Virginia. She taught only one class and saw patients in her office only two days a week. Now they had time to spend with their grandchildren, five-year-old Jamie, Timothy’s son, and four-year-old Gwen, Ellen’s daughter. They spent days at King’s Dominion and Williamsburg, and went to visit the animals at Maymont Farms. And at Christmas, Brendan had overseen Jamie and Gwen’s delighted squeals as they had sledded on the softly sloping hill in the backyard that Ellen and Timothy had loved so well.

But now the magical Christmas snow was nothing but gray slush, and Brendan was on the saddest journey of his life. He glanced down and saw that the Range Rover was picking up speed too easily. He wanted the fifty-minute commute to last as long as possible to delay the minute when he’d have to look into Ed’s kind brown eyes and tell him that he would draw his last breath on Friday, March 3 at 9 p.m. in the execution chamber at Greensville State Prison at Jarrat, Virginia.

“Ed’s mother asked me to take his case,” Brendan drew Emma closer as they cuddled on the sofa under an afghan she had knitted.

“Caroline Randolph Carter?”

He nodded. “She knew me from church.”

“I’m surprised the firm let you accept it.”

“I wasn’t. Although my section of litigation accepted only white collar crime for our corporate clients, Craig, Lewis wasn’t about to turn down the matriarch of the Carter and Wynne families of Carter’s Grove Plantation.”

“Why didn’t you represent Ed in his first trial?”

“Caroline wouldn’t help him the first time around. She thought it was beneath a Carter to get himself arrested for murder. He was represented by Brad O’Connor over at the Public Defender’s Office. But when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out his first conviction, she decided she’d better spend some money to get the truth in front of a jury. But damn it, Emma, no jury has ever understood that Ed was in Charlottesville presenting a paper at a legal conference the night Anne was murdered.”

Emma rubbed his cheek softly. “I know how hard this is for you. Promise you won’t let the stress get to you.”

He kissed her softly on the cheek. “I wish I could make you that promise. But I only have sixty days left to save Ed’s life.”

“So you’re going to try for a stay?”

“A stay, a commutation, a pardon. Whatever the hell I can get. He’s innocent, Emma, you know that. I’m not going to let the Commonwealth murder an innocent man who’s become my friend.”

She laid her head on his shoulder and stroked his cheek. “I have some happier news.”

He looked down at her. She was still beautiful. She cut her hair short now to accent her wide, dark eyes, always full of compassion and love. The extra pounds of middle age still sat well on her five-seven frame. She had beautiful hands with long graceful fingers that stitched together tiny hearts in the OR. She’d chosen the right profession, he thought. She was a consummate healer.

“I’d love to hear something cheerful.”

“Claire is finally getting married.”

“Claire? Our Claire? Tyndall’s daughter? Ellen’s best friend from St. Catherine’s?”

“Yes! Isn’t it great news?”

“Not if it’s to that jerk who led her on for years and then broke her heart last summer with some woman he’d just met.”

“No, it’s not him. He lives in San Diego or Los Angeles. I’m not sure which. Ellen said Claire’s fiancé lives in New York. She met him after she went back last spring. He’s a couple of years older than Claire. Ellen said he’s done very well in venture capital.”

“Then he isn’t marrying Claire for her money.” As he spoke, he wiggled out of her grasp and started to get up, but she put out her hand.

“Why do I think you are going to the liquor cabinet for a refill?”

“Because I am.”

“No, you’re not. It’s nearly midnight, and you said you’ll be leaving for Sussex at eight in the morning. Your heart needs sleep, not more scotch.”

“I don’t think I can sleep.”

“Try. But no more scotch. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

How lucky am I, he thought, as they climbed the stairs together. I have her and Tim and Ellen and Gwen and Jamie and more money than I’ll ever spend. Ed was supposed to have those things, too. I can’t let him die. I can’t let him die.

To see what happens next, click on the image below!

 

THE IRATE READER, THE DREADED TYPO, AND THE MYTH OF THE INCOMPETENT SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR — OR TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED AUTHORS AREN’T PERFECT, EITHER

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Hi, everyone.  The air has changed in Southern California.  The heat of late summer that drives my breath back into my lungs, has suddenly dissolved into a cool, clear breeze.  It feels as if the world has come back into focus.  I’ve broken out the Pumpkin Spice candles and the Gingerbread tea and wrapped the house in garlands of silk autumn leaves that I bought on sale at Michael’s because the trees in SoCal are not going to provide real ones.  (Sigh!)

Our new puppy has come home.  Summer Moon.  She’s an English Golden Retriever. She isn’t golden, at all, of course.  She’s as white as the full moon.  Hence her name.  “Moon” because of her color.  “Summer” because she came home in late summer.  She looks like an angel but is full of mischief.  Her big brother, Rhythm, doesn’t quite know what to make of her.  She has two speeds: “on” and “off.”  And when she’s “on,” nothing in the house is safe from her tiny teeth, including Rhythm’s tail.

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I’ve just finished uploading the corrected manuscripts for Mirror, Mirror, so now the paperback version will soon be available on Amazon.  I used three proofreaders this time for the manuscript, and the last one read every one of the 120,710 words aloud plus punctuation marks.  When I was an editor/proofreader, before I went to law school, this is the way we read the final version of manuscripts because we had the best chance of catching errors by reading aloud.  So this time I thought I was safe from complaints about TYPOS.  But alas!

About a week after Mirror, Mirror had been published as an ebook, I got the message from Irate Reader.  “I like your book BUT—” Insert drum roll, thunder and lightning. “BUT it has TYPOS!!”  No hint of what those TYPOS might be.  I felt as if someone had sent one of my children home from school with a message pinned on his/her back, “Your child has CHICKEN POX!  Your HORRIBLE EXCUSE for a Mother!”

My first reaction was to protest.  Three proofreaders, I told her!  Every word and punctuation mark scrutinized, aloud!  But, alas!  Irate Reader was unrelenting.   Her next email cut even deeper. She called me, “UNPROFESSIONAL!” I had a big Breneˊ Brown moment after that.  If you don’t know about Breneˊ Brown, she describes herself as a “shame researcher.”  She is a professor at the University of Houston, who has written on the topic of shame and how it affects our lives.  When Irate Reader’s wrath descended upon me, I had been reading Dr. Brown’s book, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It isn’t).  And I knew that the paralyzing, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was shame.

Despite my best intentions, I’d humiliated myself in public, by telling a story that I had hoped many people would enjoy.  I wasn’t a woman with three post-graduate degrees, all cum laude.  I was an UNPROFESSIONAL with TYPOS.   Sort of like a careless excuse for a mom who’d sent her kid to school with CHICKENPOX and now the child had to be sent back to the incompetent parent.

I was deeply hurt by having my imperfections hurled in my face.  I thought about taking the book down.  FOREVER.  I’d worked so hard on it every night for six long months.  I’d worked on it on the nights when my heart had been breaking because my Golden Retriever Melody was dying.  I’d worked on it on the nights when I’d been so tired that I couldn’t see the page because I’d been writing for the courts of appeal all day.  But I had kept on going because I had thought my characters were telling me a story that would entertain and touch hearts.  And I’d launched that story into the world after so much time and care, happy and proud, and hoping to find readers with hearts to be touched.  But, now, within a week of its publication, it had been deemed worthless. TYPOS!  UNPROFESSIONAL! All because I’m not, and never will be, PERFECT.

“The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting.”  Breneˊ Brown

Since self-publishing has become an option for writers, a myth has grown up that self-published writers are the only ones who launch books with typos.  That was the gist of Irate Reader’s “UNPROFESSIONAL” (SNIFF) label.   I got a does (dose, get it?) of this prejudice early on when I published my first novel, Dance for A Dead Princess.  At some point, one of the TOP 100 AMAZON REVIEWERS got her 3-star hands on it.   But she didn’t stop at 3 grudging stars.   She went straight to the top, to THE ZON itself and advised that I was illiterate. Why, there were whole sections of the book that hadn’t even been spellchecked!   REALLY!  THE NERVE!

Turns out, Ms. TOP 100 didn’t understand that the Tudor diary of Thomas, Carey, the First Duke of Burnham, is written in my approximation of Tudor English. That means the way Shakespeare wrote and spelled.   THE ZON backed way down after I explained the development of the English language and added, “Bet you wouldn’t have sent a QUALITY CONTROL NOTICE to Random House!”

So, just in case anyone else out there besides Irate Reader and Ms.Top 100 thinks that TYPO’s are the exclusive manifestation of the ignorance of self-published writers and that all the brains belong to the traditionally published ones, let me offer the following examples of TYPOS from novels you will recognize (and by the way, editions of these WITH TYPOS are worth hundreds of dollars)

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Characters are referred to as “harmoniously abandoning themselves to the rhythm of the music—like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea.”

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

A wall against which people set up their huts being described as “It stretched out long and grey and very high, and against the base the small mat sheds clung like flees to a dog’s back.” Editions of the book that include the misspelling can go for as much as $9500.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Some copies of this book are valued at a small fortune for this reason. On page 53, in a list of school supplies that young wizards are expected to bring to Hogwarts: “1 wand” is listed at both the beginning and at the end. That said, the typo did reappear in a few later printings even after it was caught in the second round, so it’s only the true first editions that are worth beaucoup bucks. [This example illustrates just how hard these pesky little TYPOS are to eliminate even after they have been found.]

“The Wicked Bible”

The1631 edition of the King James Bible by Robert Baker and Martin Lucas included an accidental new twist on the 7th Commandment, informing readers that “Thou shalt commit adultery.” This managed to incense both King Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury—its publishers were hauled into court and fined £300 (a little over $57,000 in today’s U.S. dollars) for the oversight and they had their printing license revoked. Most of the copies were subsequently burned, and the book picked up the sobriquet “The Wicked Bible” or “The Sinners’ Bible.” Only about 10 copies remain today—one was put up for sale by British auction house Bonhams just last year.

As for me, I went back over the book one more time.  I found some commas that only I would notice were out of place.  There were a couple of repeated words, a few line breaks, and an “it” for an “in.”  One very kind reader wrote to tell me that my dates were wrong at the beginning of one of the chapters.  (Bless her.)

So the corrected version is up.  I’m sure there are more TYPOS out there because perfection is unattainable for me.  But here’s the deal.  If you find any more and email me with the error, its location, and your address, I’ll send you a Starbuck’s gift card for a cup of coffee.  And I’ll send you my greatest thanks for liking my stories and for being my friend.   Even though I’m not perfect.

Dark Moon, A Legal Thriller

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Now available for Pre-Order on Amazon with the introductory price of $0.99 – Dark Moon, A Legal Thriller. – Release Date, March 9, 
Amazon link, click here

Legendary criminal defense attorney, Sarah Knight, has spent all of her forty-six years hiding the unspeakable secrets of her past. Now, newly arrived in San Diego from New York, she is appointed to represent Alexa Reed, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk and the daughter-in-law of Supreme Court Justice Coleman Reed. Alexa is arrested for the murders of her ex-husband, attorney Michael Reed, and La Jolla psychologist, Ronald Brigman. During bitter divorce proceedings, Brigman has declared Alexa’s reports of Michael’s domestic abuse false, has diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder, and has given Meggie and Sam, ages six and five, to their abusive father. Alexa’s gun was the murder weapon and her cell phone places her at the scene of the murders. Sarah is warned that doing anything more than the minimum for her client will be professional suicide. Coleman Reed wants Alexa sentenced to death without delay. But Sarah and her investigator, ex-FBI agent Jim Mitchell, refuse to be intimidated even after attempts on Sarah and Alexa’s lives. They discover Michael Reed’s taste for high-priced call girls and his entanglement in an extensive pattern of criminal financial dealings. But when Coleman manipulates the trial judge to exclude Sarah’s star witness on the eve of trial, she must risk discovery of her own terrible secret to save Alexa’s life.

The Real Diana Tapes – The Peter Settelen Controversy

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of using Princess Diana as a minor, but important, character in my first novel, Dance For A Dead Princess. Some readers have understood that I wanted to preserve my own view of Diana in the book. She was a beautiful, naive, young woman, looking for love with an older man after an emotionally barren childhood. But instead of creating a family to nurture, as she wanted to do, she was badly used by her husband, who was chronically and openly unfaithful, and she was abused by the institution of monarchy which her marriage was designed to serve. For the trouble she took to produce two princes and two royal heirs, she was later unfairly labeled unfit and unstable by Charles and his supporters in divorce proceedings.

Some readers are put off by Diana’s presence in Dance For A Dead Princess. In their opinion, even mentioning her is somehow exploiting her memory. But that view is very short sighted because if we don’t mention her, we forget her. And forgetting her is exactly what institutional monarchy wants us to do. Charles, who never made a place for Diana in his life, has filled the place that should have been hers with the woman who destroyed Diana’s marriage. And now the party line is to forget about Diana altogether and to criticize anyone who mentions her favorably as exploitive.

I came across this type of criticism recently when I discovered the work of Peter Settelen, a British actor and voice coach. In 1992 and 1993, Diana hired Settelen to help her improve her public speaking. Tapes of her early speeches demonstrate she had little skill as a speaker at the beginning of her career in public life. But after working with Settelen, she improved dramatically.

When Settelen began to work with Diana, he told her she would have to find her own authentic voice if she wanted to excel at public speaking. To that end, he recorded a series of sessions with her in which she described the events of her life. They are charming and candid, and well worth watching. And they reveal the side of Diana that my fictional character, Nicholas Carey, knew and loved and desperately missed as the novel opens.

Settelen has been criticized, of course, for making the tapes public. He had to go to court and fight to get them back after they were found in Paul Burell’s attic. Earlier, Settelen had been told the tapes had been destroyed.

Settelen candidly admits they were meant to be private teaching tools. But, as he also says, Diana did not know she was going to die; and the opportunity to hear the story of her life in her own words is a powerful way preserve her memory. The tapes Diana made with Settelen are well worth a listen. And listening to them explains why my fictional character Nicholas was driven to preserve Diana’s memory at all costs out of loyalty to his greatest friend.

Here is the YouTube link, the Diana Tapes with Peter Settelen.   What do you think of the tapes?  Did Settelen do the right thing to publish them?

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Diana, Princess of Wales, in Fiction: Crass Commercialism or Loving Tribute?

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Even before the name of the new little princess was announced, I, like many others, wondered if she would be called after her grandmother, Diana. Diana was thrust onto the world stage at age nineteen, a bit gawky, a bit naive, but utterly charming and sincere. By age twenty-three, she was the mother of two children, one a future king. By the time she died in Paris, at age thirty-six, she had grown into a beautiful, compassionate woman, anxious to be a healing and unifying influence in the world.

After Diana died, I found I missed her although we had never met. While she was living through her disastrous marriage and divorce in the glare of world wide publicity, I was living through my own marriage and divorce nightmare on a smaller, but nevertheless, public scale. On the days when I had to wait to check-out at the grocery story, I used to read the tabloid headlines written by Prince Charles’ supporters, accusing Diana of mental illness and instability; and I would comfort myself with the thought that at least no reporters were sitting in the courtroom to hear the man I’d married say exactly the same things about me. Although it was a public courtroom and anyone who walked in could have heard how, by having three children whom I loved more than life itself, I had maliciously morphed from an academic over-achiever who graduated Number Two in her law school class into a dangerous, crazy, lying freeloader. I felt a bond with Diana, although I was unenviably poor and she was enviably rich, because I realized that access to all the money in the world could never make up for the pain of having the father of your children heap lies and disrespect on you in a public forum.

When Diana died, I felt as if I’d lost a friend. And as the years passed and Charles and his publicists pushed Diana and her memory farther and farther into the background to replace her with Camilla Parker-Bowles, I wondered how many people remained who, like me, thought of Diana, not as a clothes horse or as a Royal Highness, but as a beautiful, loving woman, unfairly used and demeaned by a powerful and wealthy family.

My first novel, Dance For A Dead Princess has many themes, but one of the most prominent is the power of an aristocratic family to control its members. Nicholas Carey, the heredity duke, who is the hero of Dance for A Dead Princess, was forced to return from America when he was only sixteen to assume the position of heir to the dukedom, although given his choice he would have gladly remained in New York and studied to become a concert pianist like his mother. Diana was also affected by the power of her aristocratic family at a very young age when her father wrested custody of his children from their mother, leaving Diana and young Charles to be raised by nannies at Althorpe while grieving their mother’s loss.

Another central theme is the toll an unhappy marriage takes on the individuals involved. Having been unhappy in childhood, marriage for both Nicholas and Diana represented the chance to form happy unions of their own. For them, marriage was a chance to love and be loved rather than to be used as pawns on their aristocratic families’ chessboards. But Nicholas and Diana’s hopes were dashed yet again. Nicholas’ wife, Deborah and Diana’s husband, Charles, turned out to be powerfully in love, but not with their spouses. For Nicholas and for Diana, having lost the chance at a happy childhood, the loss of the opportunity to have a happy marriage was a second and even more powerful blow.

Some readers interpret Diana’s presence in Dance for a Dead Princess as an attempt to make believers out of the conspiracy theory of Diana’s death or as a crass attempt to sell books because her name is in them. But neither was ever my intention. I brought Diana into the book to keep her memory alive and to remind the world of the tragedy of her life. She was a beautiful, loving woman who was denied the thing she most longed for: the chance to create a loving family for herself, her husband, and her children. At one point in Dance, Nicholas observes how unfair it was for Diana to be called unstable and mentally ill all because she wanted what every wife wants, to have her husband to herself.

The haunting tragedy of Diana’s life was what I hoped every reader would take away from Dance. In the Prologue, the reader encounters Nicholas in Paris where he is grieving the loss of his beloved friend and the mutual support and companionship they offered each other in their isolated, unhappy lives. Nicholas stares down at the Place d’Alama Tunnel, thirteen years after that fateful August night, deeply longing for one more chance to talk to Diana. “How many nights had he spent talking to Diana about his marriage, about her marriage, about his guilt over Deborah and about the impossibility of being in love?” And he wonders how his friend felt as death approached. “ . . . What had she felt as she slipped away from everyone who loved her? Had she struggled against it, as Deborah had? Or had her torn and broken heart quietly accepted her fate? No, he doubted that. She’d have fought to stay with her boys.”

Whether or not there was a historical conspiracy to assassinate Diana is not the point of Dance. The role of the conspiracy in the plot is to give Nicholas an opportunity to express his unbearable grief over the loss of both Diana and his wife. Aching from all that loss in his life, Nicholas vows to expose Diana’s assassins, not as an act of vengeance, but as means of expressing his soul crushing sadness. And ironically, through this one, last powerful expression of grief, Nicholas meets Taylor Collins, the one woman who has the power to give him what he has always longed for, but has never had.

Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks, Chapter Seventeen

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

New Year’s Eve, 2007

On New Year’s, Terri was in another snit because he was working a Vegas gig at the Bellagio with Epic that she hadn’t been asked to join. She didn’t want him traveling without her and with Cat. Hypocritically, he accused her of being unreasonable. But he knew very well Cat would try to lure him into her bed. And, of course, so did Terri.

Honestly, before the night he’d seen Carrie, he’d have gone with Cat in a heartbeat. At forty-eight, his years of being hit on by twenty-something slut singers were numbered. But since that night at the Del, he had wanted only Carrie Moon in his arms.

And that longing made his hellish life with Terri an even greater hell. As their sex life declined to the vanishing point, she lectured him with Dr. Philisms about saving relationships. He wondered when, if ever, she would figure out he had no intention of saving theirs.

He had thought the fight over the Vegas gig would finally see her exit. But he began to realize she was terrified of being alone. First, she demanded he make Marilyn put her on the gig or she would be his ex-girlfriend. But when he ignored her ultimatum because he couldn’t influence Marilyn’s choice of singers and because, in this case, he didn’t want to, Terri backed down.

But she remained determined to get something she wanted. So next she insisted he take her to Vegas with him. Money was tight, as usual. He had no intention of packing a New Year’s on the Strip onto his overburdened credit card. But when Terri figured that out, she just slapped down her own plastic and went anyway.

Now as he watched her sleep off a bottle of champagne in their petite suit at the MGM Grand, he reflected upon how much he hated New Years’ Eve. But even more than he hated New Year’s, he hated himself for the way he’d treated Carrie that night. Women set great store by the details. Call backs. First kisses. Giving up old girlfriends.

* * *

New Year’s Eve 1994

The club emptied rapidly after midnight. He felt uneasy in the car on their way back to the loft. He wondered if she’d guessed he had intended to kiss Lara but had chickened out at the last minute. Her eyes had gone deep, serious green, the way they did when she was holding something inside.

But by this time, he knew she would go to great lengths to avoid conflict with him. Whatever her private worry about Lara, he was pretty sure she didn’t want to talk about it that night. He could force the issue, but he was tired and half-regretting what he’d done.

They went back to the loft and made love. Exhausted, he fell asleep almost immediately, but too much champagne interfered with deep sleep. At two thirty he slipped out of bed, poured himself a strong scotch, and sat on the couch, counting the rhythm of the yellow winks from the neon sign outside.

Carrie loved him in a way that no one ever had, not even Deanna. He wanted to be wanted that way. She filled up the place inside his soul that had always been empty except for those few years with Deanna. All his life, he’d been knocking on closed doors, asking indifferent people to love him. And now, this amazing woman did.

But, and as he sipped the scotch, he reflected upon this enormous “but.” The money she earned made him uncomfortable. He was just a two-bit jazz player in a San Diego nightclub. He could never equal her income. He had been smoldering ever since he had watched her plunk down that credit card at the fancy bed and breakfast.

No, he had begun to tell himself after they came back from that trip. Their lives were just too different. And he could never return her consuming passion. He couldn’t give up Lara and his memories of Deanna.

“Stan? What’s wrong?” She crossed the room to him, but he held up his hands as if to keep her from coming any nearer.

“Nothing. Go back to bed. I just woke up and couldn’t sleep any more. I decided I needed some time to think.”

“About what?” She sat down on the sofa, but not as close as she normally did. He could tell she felt his need to stay in the space he had reserved for himself.

He shook his head wearily. “Lots of things. Things I don’t want to talk about right now.”

Her eyes became deep green, and he knew she was focused and upset. She studied his face in the dark for a long time before she asked, “So I guess Lara Beaumont is one of the things you’re thinking about?”

“What if she is?”

“I wish she weren’t.”

“She’s been a part of my life since Deanna. Ten years. I told you. We get together. We break up. I start seeing someone else, and Lara reappears. I think things over and get back with Lara.”

“So that’s part of what you were doing now? Thinking things over?” He watched her try to keep her hands from shaking.

“Yeah.” He gave her a defiant look, challenging her to tell him he had no right to reject her.

But Carrie just gazed back, her amazing eyes quiet and sad. Finally, she asked, “And what did you decide?”

“That it felt wrong not to kiss Lara tonight. We’ve had a lot of New Year’s together.”

“If it felt wrong, then why didn’t you do it?”

“I knew I’d hurt you in front of Harry and Kristin. Harry doesn’t like Lara. He likes you.”

“But I thought – “

“What did you think?”

She was struggling to hold back tears. Her voice was husky with the effort. “I thought you preferred me. That you kissed me because I’m your girl.”

Stan stared at the yellow light, winking like the heartbeat of the night. He felt a mixture of remorse and intoxication. Her hands were visibly trembling.

“Right now, it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels as if Lara should be here.”

“I – I see.” She stared at the yellow light, too, as if so it embodied the pain he was inflicting upon her soul.

After a bit she said, “But you and Lara obviously don’t stay together, even when you leave someone else for her.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. He was concentrating on the light the way he concentrated when he played. His body was present, but his mind was far away.

Carrie moved closer to him, but he drew back into his corner of the sofa.

“Why can’t I be near you right now? I love you.”

He gave her a long, skeptical look. “You don’t even know me.”

The sting in his words brought more tears that she managed to keep in check. “I think I do know you, Stan. And even if I don’t know everything about you right this minute, I want to learn the rest.”

Her eyes met his as she spoke, but he looked away quickly toward the light outside as if even that much contact was too intimate at that moment. She leaned over and reached for his hand. “Please don’t do this to us, now. This has been the best, most important relationship of my life. You don’t belong with Lara. You belong with me. I can’t explain this kind of love, so I won’t try. But I know it exists because it’s burning inside me like a fire that won’t go out.”

He looked at her fingers over his, and slowly withdrew his hand. At the same moment, he felt her heart split and wondered why he couldn’t stop what he was doing to her.

She leaned toward him slightly and tried again. “Stan, what was that night at Sambuco’s all about if Lara is the one you really want?”

“I don’t know. Right now I don’t know anything.”

He watched her get up and go back to the cold bed alone. A few minutes later, he heard her crying. The yellow neon winked outside the window, a steady accompaniment to her quiet sobs. To escape the sound of her grief, he considered going to Lara’s where he knew he’d be welcomed with sizzling sex until dawn. But that, he told himself, was just the trouble. It would only be sex. Whereas with Carrie, lovemaking was passion that pierced the armor imprisoning his soul.

Suddenly, he hated himself for what he’d done that night. He went into the bedroom and took her into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he whispered against her hair. “I’m so very, very sorry, Carrie Moon.”

The entire ebook of Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks is available for purchase at Amazon. com, http://www.amazon.com/Ride-Your-Heart-Til-Breaks-ebook/dp/B00RDJQB8Q. Deborah is also the author of the award winning novel,Dance For A Dead Princess, http://www.amazon.com/Dance-For-Dead-Princess-ebook/dp/B00C4HP9I0

Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks, Chapter Sixteen

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

December 25, 2007

On Christmas afternoon, at around two thirty, Karen pretended to believe Howard’s claim that he had left some important documents at the office. As soon as he had departed, no doubt to deliver the same diamond bracelet to Meg Atkins he had handed to her over brunch, she hailed her own cab and headed to Julliard at Lincoln Center. The day was overcast and cold, and the stars and musical notes that adorned the gigantic Christmas tree in Milstein Plaza had already been lit.

Karen walked around the Plaza pausing successively at the long white Julliard building, at Avery Fisher Hall, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. She wandered back to Julliard and stood in front, taking in every detail. “I could have been here,” she thought. “I should have been here.”

She found a place to sit. Even if it was cold and dreary, she wanted to be where music was learned and performed on this day when she felt as if she were the most alone person on earth.

* * *

November-December, 1994

He had come to her. As warm November lazed, day by day, under the autumn California sun toward mild December, Carrie marveled at the miracle of his presence in her world. At the office, she lost focus as she tried to read the dry documents that were her professional life.

At night, after hearing his last set at the club, they would talk and make love in his loft so late that she would sleep through the alarm. She would wake to the heavenly smell of eggs and bacon and the realization he would be hurt if she didn’t stay for breakfast although she was already hours late for work; and she knew Alan was waiting impatiently in front of her empty office.

She avoided what was staring her in the face: the natural rhythm of his life was far different from hers. He worked when she slept and slept when she worked. When he pulled her back into bed on weekdays for more lovemaking, she was painfully aware of putting her career in jeopardy. But she took the risk. Her need for Stan ran like fire in her veins. Her entire waking day was consumed by measuring the minutes they were apart.

Karen looked around Milstein Plaza in the gray December afternoon light and thought of how, in those early days with Stan, she had struggled to find time to practice flute. Being with him had awakened the music of her soul, and she longed to play for hours on end the way she once had.

But time squeezed her dry. She struggled to keep up her billable hours and be with Stan as much as possible. Every night, she counted the minutes until she could leave the office and slip into her usual place at the club. She knew he was waiting for her. She had to be there. She wanted to be there. She couldn’t let him down. And so, playing her own music, once again slipped down the priority list in her life. After all, he was the real musician. By her decision, she had made herself the amateur. Being close to Stan would simply have to be enough to fulfill her own creative needs. She didn’t have time for more.

They had spent their first Christmas tucked away in a cozy blue and white suite at Aynsley House, an exquisite bed and breakfast in an old Victorian gingerbread in Napa. Karen had wanted to give Stan a memorable Christmas gift that would take them out of their ordinary routines. They arrived on Christmas Eve to find two iced champagne flutes next to a huge four poster where rose petals had been scattered in a heart on the blue and white comforter. For those four days, she and Stan had dressed only when they went to the dining room for dinner. The rest of the time they made love – in the four poster, in the gigantic oval Jacuzzi tub, or in front of the fire. Stan’s craving for her seemed insatiable. On Christmas morning, he gave her a small gold trumpet on a fine gold chain.

At the time, Carrie Moon had seen nothing amiss in those four days, and she had wanted them to go on forever. But twelve years later, Karen Morgan at Milstein Plaza, eyes fixed on Julliard, knew the warning sign she had missed. A cloud had crossed Stan’s face on Christmas Eve at check-in at Ansley House when she had pulled out her American Express card to cover the bill.

* * *

A week later, on New Year’s Eve the club was full, not only with couples, but with an array of gorgeous women in gold, silver, and black sequined gowns. One group in particular that Carrie dubbed the Table of Eight waved and smiled and blew kisses to Stan all night long. And as the evening wore on, he never took his eyes off them. He seemed to be playing just for them.

Harry had reserved her usual spot close to the stage, and when Kristin wasn’t singing, she joined Carrie. As the second set began, Kristin leaned over and whispered, “Is everything ok with you two?”

“I thought so when we left home,” she whispered back. She wished Kristin hadn’t said anything, so that she could have gone on pretending Stan’s attention to the other women was just her imagination. He was an entertainer, she reassured herself; he was merely playing to his audience.

But something worse than flirtation appeared at eleven thirty. Carrie felt the cool rush of air as the back door opened, and she turned to see Lara Beaumont in body-hugging cobalt blue, one-shouldered satin. Stan’s eyes riveted on her face. She smiled and waived slightly as she looked around for a table. The only empty spot was at Carrie’s, so she slid into that seat, whispering, “I hope you don’t mind. Stan said to come by if I finished early at the Hyatt.”

Stan said to come by. The words hit Carrie’s heart like five lead bullets. He’d been talking to Lara. When? Not while she’d been at the loft; but she was at work a good part of every day.

Lara had just barely sat down when Stan summoned her to the stage to sing with him. Carrie saw Harry frown slightly at Kristin, who shrugged in return.

For the next half hour, she worked to keep a pretend smile on her face, masking her disappointment as Stan and Lara worked their way through “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Memories,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “New York, New York.” Carrie watched the approach of midnight uneasily. Lara was all over Stan. If he gave her the first kiss of the New Year, Carrie knew her heart would break.

As the giant clock Harry had placed on stage began to chime midnight, he began “Auld Lang Syne” at the piano. Stan played along, while Kristin and Lara sang. The entire audience joined in. Carrie held her breath when the song ended. Kristin leaned over the piano to kiss Harry; and predictably, Lara reached for Stan. But he turned away, his eyes on Carrie in the audience.

She was so relieved she couldn’t stand up for a few seconds. Stan left the stage and came down to give her a kiss. “Happy New Year,” he smiled. Behind him, she could see Lara’s deeply disappointed face.

“Happy New Year,” she said and added one more kiss of her own.

The entire ebook of Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks is available for purchase at Amazon. com, http://www.amazon.com/Ride-Your-Heart-Til-Breaks-ebook/dp/B00RDJQB8Q. Deborah is also the author of the award winning novel,Dance For A Dead Princess, http://www.amazon.com/Dance-For-Dead-Princess-ebook/dp/B00C4HP9I0

Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks, Chapter Fifteen

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

December 24, 2007

At six p.m. on Christmas Eve, Karen Morgan once more stared at the bare, dark trees in Central Park as she waited in her empty suite at the Plaza for Howard to arrive. He had telephoned that he was on his way from the office, and he had reservations at seven at La Vache, a trendy French bistro ten blocks away. What was Stan doing that night, she wondered.

Knocking interrupted her thoughts. Why couldn’t Howard carry a key? He was such a baby: dependent on her, his secretary, his paralegal, and his junior associate. He was fully functional only in a court room.
To her surprise a messenger was standing at the door. He handed her a package that held two, blue Tiffany’s boxes and smiled. “Mr. Morgan wanted these delivered.”

“Thanks.” Karen took the package and sat down on the sofa in the living room. She pulled out identical boxes and stared at them for a moment. Howard never bought her more than one gift. She was too puzzled to wait for tomorrow. She’d act surprised when she opened them. Carefully she pulled the silver ribbon off of each one and looked inside. Identical diamond bracelets. Clearly one was meant for her, the other for someone else. But whom?

Probably Meg Atkins, the highly attractive blonde, twenty-eight-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears junior associate who was part of Howard’s litigation team. Apparently Meg didn’t mind spending Christmas helping Howard prepare for trial. Howard had mentioned that he had asked her and her husband to come to New York over Christmas because he needed Meg’s help. Karen wracked her brain to remember what the husband looked like. She’d seen him standing next to Meg at the Christmas party. He was about his wife’s age, an earnest, owlish tax attorney who worked in Warrick, Thompson’s pension planning section. Odds were he’d never know what the senior partner had given his wife for Christmas.

Karen had vague knowledge of Howard’s various affairs over the years, but this was the first hard evidence she had come across. She could confront him, but it would be pointless. He would deny it and claim the bracelet was to reward Meg’s hard work on the case. Even if she pointed out that it was professionally inappropriate, Howard would ignore her. He did what he wanted to do; he always had. What she wanted was inevitably irrelevant.

Besides, Karen thought as she wrapped the two boxes up again and put them back in the larger box they had come in, her feelings for Howard, if they had ever existed, had been extinct for years. The most horrible part of this discovery was not that Howard was sleeping with another woman. The horrible part was knowing down to the depths of her soul she didn’t care.

* * *

December 24, 2007

Stan lay in bed at two thirty a.m., wide awake. Terri had dropped off the minute her head hit the pillow. Thank God. He had been in no mood for sex that night.

They had played a Christmas party at the Hotel Del with Epic. Terri had looked daggers at Cat all night, and done everything possible to upstage her. In the process, she’d upstaged Marilyn, too. Bad move, he reflected. It was Marilyn’s band. At forty-five, she was highly sensitive to being shoved out of the spotlight by the twenty-somethings. Cat was smart enough to understand the politics and stay away from Marilyn’s toes. But Terri was determined to make her mark to impress Stan. She might not ever work Epic again.

He really hoped so. Marilyn had been so pissed she’d taken him aside during the first break to heap well-deserved blame on his head. Terri was his live-in. Why was he leading Cat on? Make up his mind, so the band drama would go away. Marilyn hated band drama.

Stan got up without waking Terri, who’d had too many pink martinis during the breaks. He went into the living room and slumped on the sofa. He looked around. The house was his, free and clear. He’d won it in Vegas on a lucky streak a few years back. He’d never expected to have a place of his own. He smiled because at last he actually had a home no one could kick him out of.

He knew he should tell Terri it was over. He looked at the sad, spare little Christmas tree slumped in the corner with a few presents underneath. Tomorrow wouldn’t be a good day for the news. But there was a deeper reason why he didn’t just tell her to pack and go.

When he’d met Terri, he’d become tired of the endless flow of women through the revolving door of his life. One night stands had gotten dull. The women on the chat lines predictably swooned over his profession and made conquest far too easy. He liked Terri’s spunk and determination to make it as a singer, and her complete oblivion to how cheap she actually was. He’d sworn he’d make it work even though he didn’t love her. Maybe even start a family. Well, no, not that. But he’d promised himself to stay with her, so he wouldn’t be alone.

He had never really been alone since he’d discovered how to charm women in his early twenties. And after he was widowed, they lined up to comfort him, each one determined to be “the one” to make him forget Deanna. But now he was sick of the compromise that Terri and all his relationships represented. He’d seen the real thing just a week ago. Tonight’s gig had been torture. Every time he’d looked into the crowd, he’d pictured Carrie’s face as she gazed up at him during the Warrick, Thompson party. And he’d have given twenty years of his life to see her in the crowd that night on Christmas Eve at the Del. What was she doing? He couldn’t imagine she’d been making love with that prick of a husband who likely couldn’t do it anymore anyway. Not wild, passionate Carrie Moon. She would never go to bed with a robot. Where did she live? He tried to imagine her house. She’d had a charming little condo in Del Mar back in their day. What had she created for herself and the prick? And then a thought so chilling swept through Stan, that he got up and went to the kitchen and poured himself a stiff scotch straight up. Children. He hadn’t asked if she and the robot had any. The thought split his heart in two.

How he hated Lara. No, it wasn’t her fault. He hated himself. He’d used Lara the way he was using Cat now. He knew his pattern, but he was powerless to stop himself. He couldn’t give in to love and lose control. If only he could, he’d have spent the last twelve years with Carrie.

* * *

November 1994

The phone woke him at ten a.m. on Sunday. Lara wanted to take him to brunch at Croce’s. She’d sung there the week before and had been paid with, among other things, a gift certificate.

He told himself seeing Lara would put Carrie out of his mind. But it didn’t. She seemed so plastic and artificial and cheap in her tank top and thigh high skirt, as she rubbed her legs against him under the table at every opportunity.

He managed to ditch her after the meal, pleading the need to practice. He walked by the bay for a while, but the ache in his heart didn’t ease. He tried practicing. That usually took his mind off of everything. But it didn’t. He kept seeing Carrie’s face looking up at him in the darkness of the club.

By three, he wondered if she were at work. He looked up Warrick, Thompson in the phone book and walked to the Emerald Shaprey Center, whose six hexagonal glass towers loomed over him and West Broadway, like an army of transparent Titans. The elevators in the marble lobby were guarded by a man in uniform who told him that Warrick, Thompson was on the twenty-sixth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-fourth floors. But off-limits until Monday morning.

Awed and intimidated by the corporate grandeur that separated his life from hers, he wandered back to his loft feeling tired and defeated. He’d screwed it up. He didn’t realize how much he’d miss her. And he didn’t know how to unscrew it.

When he pulled out the keys to his front door, the scrap of paper with her phone number fell out. It was worth a try.

She answered on the third ring. His heart was in his throat. “Carrie, it’s Stan. I thought you’d be at the office.”

“I was earlier in the day.” Voice flat. She wasn’t going to make it easy.

“Look, I’m sorry for the other night. It was a rotten thing to do. I miss you at the club. Harry misses you, too. Could we get together and talk?”

Silence. He struggled to keep his breathing even and the anxiety out of his voice.

“You mean now?”

“Well, it’s my only night off. If you’re not working, I mean.”

He could picture her eyes in thoughtful mode. Were they gray or green or that haunting mixture of color that defied a label?

“I’m at home. I’m tired. I’ve worked all weekend. If you want to come by, we could go for coffee.”
“You’re in Del Mar, right?”

“Yes.”

“Let me buy you dinner. I used to play a lot at Sambuco’s back in the day. The food’s good. We’ll get a bottle of wine and talk.”

“Ok.”

“Around six?”

“Sure.”

* * *

The condos were typical, coastal narrow stucco two-story buildings, directly on the ocean. Expensive, he thought. Hers was painted white, and he found her end unit without any difficulty. He followed the path from the parking lot to her front door but paused just outside. The haunting lilt of a flute playing Brazilian samba stopped him in his tracks. At first he thought it was a recording. But suddenly the tune shifted from throbbing syncopation to a passage from Mozart and the Magic Flute, and he realized she was the source. She was experimenting, he realized. And she was a damned good musician. Better than he had ever guessed.

He wanted to go on listening, but eavesdropping felt wrong. He rang the bell.

When she opened the door, she took his breath away. He had never seen her in anything but a suit or a cocktail dress. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and holding the flute in her long fingers. No makeup, and all that magnificent red hair loose around her shoulders. She looked about nineteen. This was Carrie Moon, the musician. The lawyer had disappeared. The change was so dramatic he could not speak for about thirty seconds.

“You sound amazing.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t think you still played.”

“I just started again.” She stepped aside, to let him in, then led the way down the white-tiled entry way to her living room. He noticed the music stand facing the ocean, which would have been visible in daylight through the sliding glass doors that dominated the room. He took in the comfortable, white sofa and matching chairs. Soft, black mohair throws cuddled beside red and black cushions, inviting him to sit and nestle among them. The walls were covered with abstract oils with slashes of orange, yellow, blue and green. Although the room exuded money and taste, it was also charming and inviting. But she, of course, spent little time there he reminded himself.

“What’s that?” he pointed to the page of thick notes on the music stand.

“The first movement of the Prokofiev flute sonata.”

“Play some of it for me?”

She hesitated.

“I’ve played for you,” he reminded her.

She put the flute to her lips and took a long breath. The haunting opening melody filled the room.
He watched her face as she played. She was happy the way she was at the club. And when they’d made love. The sharp sting of Lara and why he was here hit him. He wished for the hundredth time he hadn’t been so insensitive.

“You shouldn’t have given up music as a career,” he said when she finished.

She smiled but did not look at him as her long fingers twisted the silver joints apart, swabbed them out, and put them back one by one in the leather case. “Maybe not. But I did.” The profound sadness in her voice touched him. She went on, “You can want something too much.”

“You told me that on one of the nights when we walked by the bay.”

Her stormy green eyes suddenly met his. “Or someone.” She closed the flute case with a sharp click.
“Let’s go to dinner,” he said.

* * *

He reached across the red-checked table cloth, in the candle light flickering against the red brick walls of Sambuco’s and took her hand.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve already said that.” The wine was taking the edge off her anger and distrust. Her eyes were beginning to sparkle again. Stan hoped he hadn’t blown it forever.

“Will you come back to the club?”

“That depends. Tell me about her.”

“Who?”

“Lara.”

“Didn’t Harry explain?”

“In your own words. Who is she? Why is she important to you?”

So she was going to make this hard. Well, he deserved that.

“I met Lara and Deanna in Las Vegas. They were show girls at Caesar’s Palace. I played their gig that night. They were roommates.”

“And when Deanna died?”

“Harry told you. Lara and I have been an item, off and on. We end up in horrible fights.”

“Over what?”

“Deanna. Lara claims I don’t love her, that I just use her to avoid admitting that Deanna is really gone.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Love Lara?”

Stan studied their hands twined together. Then he looked back at Carrie and the auburn glow of her hair in the pale yellow light.

“I thought I did. Until –”

She waited for him to finish. When he didn’t, she repeated, “Until?”

“I looked down that night at Harry’s and saw you looking up at me from the second row.”

She smiled, her entire face alight.

“Come back to the club?” he repeated. “Play with us?”

A shadow crossed her smile. “I don’t know about playing. I’m not a professional any more. I don’t have time to practice enough.”

“You sounded fine to me.”

“Endurance. I can’t play for hours the way I used to.”

“You could still sit in on some tunes.”

She smiled. “We’ll see.”

He rubbed his thumb along their entwined fingers. “Carrie, there’s another reason I want you to come back.”

Her green eyes met his. “Why, then?”

He sighed deeply, and studied their joined hands before meeting her steady gaze.

“I play better since you’ve come. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s because you actually know what I’m doing. If it’s good, you know. And if it sucks, well, you know that, too.”

“What about Lara?”

“She’ll be back on a cruise ship in a month. She’s never here long. Look, you said you saved the club so that you could hear me play. What was the good of that if you don’t come back?”

“You have a point.”

* * *

He walked her to the door, wishing she would ask him in.

But she opened it with her key and smiled from the threshold. “Thanks for tonight.”

“Sure. And, again, I’m sorry.”

“Understood. You can stop saying that now.”

“Tomorrow night, then? At Harry’s?”

“If I can get away.” She smiled and began to close the door.

Disappointed, he turned away and walked up the path toward the parking lot and his car. Wanting her close to him throbbed in his veins. He could smell her hair and taste her lips.

He opened his car door but stopped and stared at her building. He heard the rush of the ocean onshore and smelled the fresh, night sea breeze. And he remembered how it felt to hold her.

He closed the car and locked it. His heart pounding, he retraced his steps and knocked.

When she opened the door, he swept her into his arms. Her mouth opened hungrily under his, and she hugged him hard to her. Then, without a word, she smiled, kissed his open mouth, long and lingeringly, and led him down the hall to her bedroom.

* * *

He slept intermittently. He lost count of the times they made love. He felt like a man rescued from death. He had never thought anyone could love with the fire and intensity that burned inside of her. He was afraid it would consume him and yet afraid that it would not. He wanted to be one with her in a way he had never experienced with anyone else. If she consumed him or he consumed her, he could never lose her. He slept and woke to her fire over and over until dawn.

The alarm went off at six a.m. He struggled awake at the unaccustomed hour.

She wrapped him in her long, soft arms and whispered in his ear. “You don’t have to get up. Unfortunately, I do.” She kissed him, long and deeply; and he wanted her with that throbbing desire that blotted out all rational thought.

But she rolled away, and seconds later he heard the shower start in the adjoining bath. He dozed and wished she didn’t have to go to work.

A little later, she bent over the bed, now dressed in one of her usual conservative black suits. Carrie was gone, and now she was Karen the lawyer again. But she gave him another one of those bone-deep kisses and caressed his cheek.

“Sleep, sweetheart. There’s no rush for you to leave.”

He pulled her down to him in one long, last, glorious kiss. “Tonight at Harry’s. Ok?”

“Of course.”

The front door clicked behind her. He sank deeply into the sheets that smelled of her and sex. After a while he drifted off in the soft dark of early morning.

When he woke, the sun was streaming hard bars of light through the blinds. He opened his eyes and saw the time, ten a.m. He got up slowly, showered, and dressed, savoring the creams and lotions and soaps that attested to her feminine presence. She had left a note in the kitchen that coffee was ready to be brewed in the pot. He made a cup and sat on her patio, savoring the deep rich hazelnut and watching the changeling Pacific, first blue then green in the morning sun. He missed her. He never allowed himself to miss anyone. And he missed her, down to his soul. But a warning bell was already going off within him: their lives were so different. She was locked in those massive glass towers downtown while he was alone here by the sea.

The entire ebook of Ride Your Heart ‘Til It Breaks is available for purchase at Amazon. com, http://www.amazon.com/Ride-Your-Heart-Til-Breaks-ebook/dp/B00RDJQB8Q. Deborah is also the author of the award winning novel,Dance For A Dead Princess, http://www.amazon.com/Dance-For-Dead-Princess-ebook/dp/B00C4HP9I0