Life’s Too Short for White Walls is a Backlist Bonanza pick #romance #backlist #giveaway
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  • N. N. Light
    • Aug 23, 2023
    • 4 min read

Life’s Too Short for White Walls is a Backlist Bonanza pick #romance #backlist #giveaway



Title: Life’s Too Short for White Walls


Author: Liz Flaherty


Genre: Contemporary romance


Book Blurb:


Still reeling from her divorce, Joss Murphy flees to Banjo Bend, Kentucky, where she'd been safe and happy as a child. The family farm is now a campground. Weary and discouraged, she talks owner Ezra McIntire into renting her a not-quite-ready cabin. With PTSD keeping him company, Ez thrives on the seclusion of the campground. The redhead in Cabin Three adds suggestions to his improvement plans, urging color and vibrancy where there was none. Neither is looking for love, yet the attraction they share is undeniable. Can the comfort of campfires, hayrides, and sweet kisses bring these two lost souls together?


Excerpt:


“Do you like pleasers?” she asked when Ez took the chair next to hers.


“What?”


“Pleasers. Do you like people who are always nice?”


“Depends.”


“That’s no answer.” She looked from the fire to him, noticing that the young couple had left. She turned her head the other way and realized everyone else had, too. A glance at her watch told her she’d been sitting here longer than she’d realized.


“Sure, it is. If a person hides behind being a pleaser, then, no, I don’t like it. It means they’re pretending to be something they’re not. But if a person’s genuinely nice, who am I to question that?”


“It’s the genuine part that bothers me. How do you tell?” Ez had the most beautiful eyes. Darker gray than any she’d ever seen, they looked black in the dim light from the dying fire. They were as hard to look away from as the flames had been.


“Depends on if you’re looking outside at someone else or inside at yourself. If it’s someone else, I don’t know—you have to trust your own judgment. If it’s yourself, and being a pleaser is making you angry, maybe it’s not real.” He held her gaze in the flickering light. “Or maybe it’s time to please yourself instead of the people around you.”


“Is that what you’re doing?” She didn’t know him well enough to ask these questions, but she asked anyway. No one would remember in the light of day, would they? Even if one was fully sober, confessions before a nighttime fire were things to be forgotten.


“I wouldn’t say so,” he said after a moment’s thought. “I needed to be somewhere different than where I was. Gray was there at the right time saying the right thing. A habit of his, I might add.”


Laughter hummed in her throat. “It always was. He was the oldest of us. Even when our ages were still single digits, he was our voice of wisdom.” But as quickly as the laughter had come, tears took its place, thickening her voice when she went on. “I loved my life. I loved my husband. As silly as it sounds, I thought it would just go on forever. I hate that a year after I found out he and my sister were involved, six months after our divorce, I’m still not over it. I’m still this whiny person who doesn’t know what to do with herself.”


Unbelievably, the man beside her laughed. Not just a little, but loudly into the quiet night.


When she pushed forward in her chair—being laughed at was the final straw in this horrible moment of vulnerability—his hand on her arm stopped her. “Wait,” he said, his voice soft. “Wait.”


So she did, not looking at him. He held her arm, his fingers splayed over the fabric of her sweatshirt. His hand was warm and strong. She didn’t want him to take it away. But she didn’t want him laughing at her, either.


“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “we’re all whiny people, and if anyone tells you they always know what to do at any given time in their lives, they’re lying to you.”


She was silent for a moment, smiling when the fire popped and sizzled as it died down. “That’s true, isn’t it?”


“It is. I’m not sure of all that much, but I promise you that’s true.”


They got up at the same time. He picked up the guitar case beside his chair, and without talking about it, they walked toward her cabin.


“Do you like to line dance?” she asked.


“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. Experience with learning the electric slide tells me I may never want to.”


She walked on, thoughtful. The woods whispered around them. Voices came from campsites as people gathered around their own fires. It was a blissful kind of quiet.


“About that job,” she said.


“What job?”


She sighed. Were all men obtuse, or just the ones she knew? “The one on the bulletin board here and in town.”


“Oh, that one. Did you meet someone who wants to apply?”


“Yes.” They reached her porch, and she stepped onto it. “Me.”


Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):








What makes your featured book a must-read?


Joss and Clay are life-scarred and unwilling to take risks because of events that caused those scars. Rather than tap dancing around the issues that face them, they step into a slow dance of learning where they can’t stop the music in their hearts even if they want to.


Giveaway –

Enter to win a $20 Amazon gift card:

Open Internationally.

Runs August 23 – August 31, 2023. Winner will be drawn on September 1, 2023.



Author Biography:


Retired from the post office, Liz Flaherty spends non-writing time sewing, traveling, and doing whatever else she wants to. She and her husband Duane live in the old farmhouse in North Central Indiana they moved to in 1977.


They’ve talked about moving, but really…40-plus years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening. It would require removing old baseball trophies from the attic and dusting the pictures of the Magnificent Seven, their grandchildren.


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