Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, a small lake town in the shelter of the Alleghenies, is a place soldiers have come to heal, to find new lives, and--sometimes--to die, in all the wars since the 1860s. Its comfort and welcome have extended to others in need of a place to heal and a place to begin again.
Title A Year of Firsts
Author Liz Flaherty
Genre Contemporary Romance / Later in Life Romance
Publisher Singing Tree Publishing
Book Blurb
“I’m Sydney Cavanaugh. Just passing through.”
Widow Syd Cavanaugh is beginning a “year of firsts” with the road trip she’d promised her husband she’d take after his death. An unplanned detour lands her in Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, where she meets the interesting and intelligent editor of the local paper.
Television journalist Clay McAlister’s life took an unexpected turn when a heart attack forced him to give up his hectic lifestyle. He’s still learning how to live in a small town when meeting a pretty traveler in the local coffee shop suddenly makes it all much more interesting.
While neither of them is interested in a romantic relationship, their serious case of being “in like” seems to push them that way. However, Clay’s heart condition doesn’t harbinger a very secure future, and Syd’s already lost one man she loved to a devastating illness—she isn’t about to lose another. Where can this relationship possibly go?
Excerpt:
And then he told her. About collapsing at work and waking in a Washington hospital. About the zipper on his chest and the scar on his thigh. About the pain and how he’d been too afraid of addiction to take the painkillers he’d been prescribed. About the weeks and weeks it took him to feel like himself again. About the statistics that made a long, full life look less likely than one could hope for.
He saw her flinch and was sorry for it. There she was with a whole boatful of bad memories because of the illness and death of the man she’d loved and Clay was heaping more onto the boat. Not that they loved each other—he wasn’t about to go there—but they both knew there was something between them. Something that harbingered pain down the road.
“I’ve never met anyone I’ve wanted to spend time with the way I do you,” he said. “I feel like I should be wearing my letter jacket when we go out, because it just feels…young. And I gotta admit, I’m really enjoying that. Coronary artery disease kind of takes the young out of you.” He reached, tracing a finger down her soft cheek. “Just as ALS took it from Paul and, ultimately, from you. What I’m saying is like something from a really old rock and roll song. I’ll make you no promises and I’ll tell you no lies, but it’s not anything we can build a relationship on. Even if you were willing to make the trip, I won’t take you down that road again.”
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)
Amazon: https://a.co/d/24uO8Ih
Draft2Digital; https://books2read.com/u/b5w1NR
Author Biography
Liz Flaherty has spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide most every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that.
She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com
Social Media Links:
Title Reinventing Riley
Author Liz Flaherty
Genre Contemporary Romance / Later in Life Romance
Publisher Singing Tree Publishing
Book Blurb
He’s afraid a second time at love wouldn’t live up to his first. She’s afraid a second round would be exactly like her first.
Pastor Jake McAlister and businesswoman Riley Winters are in their forties and widowed. Neither is interested in a relationship. They both love Fallen Soldier, the small Pennsylvania town where they met, even though Rye plans to move to Chicago, and Jake sees a change in pastorates not too far down the road. Enjoying a few-weeks friendship is something they both look forward to.
However, there is an indisputable attraction between the green-eyed pastor and the woman with a shining sweep of chestnut hair. Then there’s the Culp, an old downtown building that calls unrelentingly to Rye’s entrepreneurial soul. And when a young man named Griff visits Jake, life changes in the blink of a dark green eye.
Excerpt
Riley Winters made it a habit not to be afraid of things. It wasn’t a natural habit, by any means—she didn’t like emptying mousetraps of their contents any better than the next person, but necessity—as Granny Kamp always said and Rye tried to ignore—was the mother of invention. She learned, shuddering and swallowing hard, to pick up the mousetrap and its prey with long-handled tongs and put them into a zippered plastic bag. She’d dispatch the bag to the trash—outside—then wash her hands a few times with a lot of soap and maybe a scrub brush before sitting at the table with a glass of wine and something with chocolate in it.
So she wasn’t even scared when the door to her office appeared to have been vandalized. Just…irritated. This was Peru, Indiana, for heaven’s sake, a little town full of friendly people and helpful neighbors. She’d gone in the back door at DeRozier’s Bakery and laughed with Joe and bought two doughnuts, got coffee at Aroma, and walked to the storefront on Third to start her day.
Plus, what had happened with that alarm system she’d paid way too much for?
It didn’t occur to her that whoever had broken into the Center Ring, her party-planning shop, might still be there. Surely they would have just emptied the cashbox of the fifty dollars’ worth of change and small bills she left in it, latched onto some of the more expensive decorations, and gone on their way. They might have disabled or stolen the computer, too, but it was old, as was the furniture and the collection of umbrellas that stood in a tall crock by the door. The crock was new—she’d bought it from a pottery shop in town, and a glance told her the intruder had smashed it to pieces.
That was what got her. She’d loved its shade of blue and had bought it on a lonely whim after her best friend moved away. She’d sent Syd a picture of the crock when she saw it and it was as if they were shopping together. She knelt beside its shards, paying scarce attention to the slam of the building’s back door, and mourned its loss. One more in a too-long string.
She called the police, and while she waited for them to come, she sipped her coffee and called the person who’d stopped in the day before. “I’ll accept your offer,” she said. “Could you come in later this morning so we can go over the details?”
She still wasn’t afraid, she told herself later, after cleaning up the mess the vandals had made and listing her house with the realtor who had sold Syd’s less than a year before. She was just done.
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)
Amazon: https://a.co/d/1XKWiQP
Draft2Digital: https://books2read.com/u/4jBnV5
Title The Summer of Sorrow and Dance
Author Liz Flaherty
Genre Contemporary Romance / Later in Life Romance
Publisher Singing Tree Publishing
Book Blurb
In the midst of a summer of change, they’re both searching for an anchor.
Dinah is a mom, a giver, and a doer, so she’s used to change, but this summer is kind of overdoing that. The diner where she’s worked for half her life is closing, her college-age kids aren’t coming home for the summer, and a property on nearby Cooper Lake is calling her name, bringing long-held dreams of owning a B & B to the fore. Newcomer Zach Applegate is entering into her dreams, too.
Divorced dad, contractor, and recovering alcoholic Zach is in Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, to visit his brother and to decide what’s coming next in his life. He doesn’t like change much, yet it seems to be everywhere. But he finds an affinity for remodeling and restoration, is overjoyed when his teenage sons join him for the summer, and he likes Dinah Tyler, too. A lot.
Excerpt
He went in the back door, certain he’d find Dinah in the kitchen. She was there, standing at the island slicing pie, swaying in time with the music coming softly from the elaborate sound system installed by the inn’s previous owner. James Taylor was singing “You’ve Got A Friend.”
She must have set up the play list for his parents.
Her hair was in a messy bun and she was wearing a sundress that exposed her pretty shoulders. She was nowhere near as glamorous as Marlene had been. She wasn’t even, if he’d been forced to admit it, as pretty as his ex-wife. But he loved looking at her and being in the same room with her. He liked how she mothered her children and that she was invariably kind to his. He was grateful she was the kind of friend she was to others. And to him. He loved her freckled shoulders and the farmer’s tan she got by accident when she picked strawberries all one June day and the fact that to look into her face was to see absolute truth.
“If I sneak up behind you without you having any idea I’m here,” he said quietly, leaning against the frame of the doorway into the kitchen and speaking to her back, “and put my arms around you and kiss your neck and then dance you around the kitchen, will you slap me senseless?”
She didn’t turn, just finished cutting the pie and laid down her knife. “I don’t know how you’ll ever find out if you don’t try it.”
“Well, then.” He pushed away from the doorway and went to slip his arms around her. He hugged her, the scent of her hair wafting under his nose, then turned her in a slow twirl. The apron she over her dress and the streak of what looked like cherry pie filling on her cheek added to the look he couldn’t seem to get enough of. “Oh, Dinah,” he said, drawing her in so that their bodies fit oh-so-perfectly together, “I’ve missed you.”
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)
Amazon: https://a.co/d/9s95duv
Draft2Digital: https://books2read.com/u/bOjRvN
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202713539-the-summer-of-sorrow-and-dance?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_43
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