Logline:
He’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll. She’s
spray bleach, spreadsheets, and check lists. Will their relationship hit
the charts, or break hearts?
Blurb:
When the normal life Ray has always dreamed
of unravels, she falls for a drummer, comes to terms with her unconventional
childhood, and inevitably discovers that normal was never really in her best
interest.
Excerpt:
The loud clanking of a
spoon against a cereal bowl roused Ray from her second slumber. Her nausea was
completely gone, but it felt like somebody shoved a few dozen hat pins into her
skull. She opened one eye, and found herself staring at someone’s bare feet.
Ray had a thing about
feet. Feet were disgusting appendages. Especially hairy guy feet. The
Birkenstock trend nearly made her mental. She never even let her husband touch
her with his feet. But these feet were different. They weren’t hairy or
calloused, for one thing. They were clean, for another, and the right one had a
dragon tattooed along the side of it.
“Did you clean my kitchen?”
Ray sat up, squinting
with the pain of bright lights and hat pins stirring in her cerebrum. She dug
into her purse for the ridiculous aviator shades she’d bought at the last gas
station and put them on. Looking up, she saw that the feet were attached to the
drummer boy from the band in the bar. Wavy brown hair tucked behind his ear,
cobra tattoo hissing on his chest, he wore nothing but a pair of faded jeans.
Funny, had she seen this guy in the supermarket last week, she’d have crossed
the aisle to avoid him. This morning she couldn’t take her bloodshot eyes off
of him.
“Sorry about that. I’m
psychotic.” She rubbed her temples, the effort of speaking causing more hat pin
sticks. “It’s just, I got up to take some Advil, and I stepped on some Cheerios
and so I tried to sweep up the crumbs, but the crumbs were stuck because the
floor was sticky…next thing you know I’m scrubbing your floor. It just
snowballed. It snowballed and thank God I started to feel sick or I would have
moved on to the bathroom, started changing sheets while you were still sleeping
in them, who knows. I clean when I’m stressed. It’s my process.”
He smiled and shook his
head, shoveling another spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth.
“I’m Ray, by the way,”
she said, removing a bobby pin that was poking at her scalp near her temple. Holy
crap, maybe those aren’t imaginary hat pins in my head.
“Were your parents
hoping for a boy or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’m Van,” he said, in
between bites.
Van. A flicker of
excitement stirred in Ray’s stomach. Might she have stumbled upon somebody else
whose parents were too high in the seventies to properly name their child?
“Were you conceived in a
van or something?”
He did a combination
laugh-choke. “Uh, I have no idea. My first name is Jeff, last name Vandermark.
Van’s just a nickname. It’s easier since there always seems to be at least
three other Jeffs in any given room.”
Ray sighed. A fun
nickname given by friends. She couldn’t relate to that.
“You hungry?” he asked,
pointing his spoon at his bowl of Cheerios.
“A few hours ago I swore
I’d never eat again. Think I’d better hold off.”
He smiled slightly, and
got up to pour himself another bowl. Ray sucked in a breath. When he passed by
she got an eyeful of chiseled obliques, angled perfectly, pointing toward the
Promised Land. What is wrong with me? Escaping lunatic husband, thirty bucks
to my name, dead car, remember? Not the time to drool over drummer boys.
“Thanks for letting me
crash here last night. I’d get out of your hair, but I have no idea where my
car is. I mean, I know it’s at a bar somewhere in Portland…”
He laughed into his
spoonful of cereal and nodded as he struggled with a swallow. “Right. Let me
finish eating and we can go see about your car.”
My Review: 3.5 stars
This book started off with me biting
my nails and sucked me right in. This is a sweet story about two very different
people that cross paths in a particularly hard time of the heroine’s life. They
both have an undeniable attraction to each other but she needs to fix things
before moving on.
I love how it took place in the 90's
and lived true to that decade. It was fun going back in time a bit. Van our
H is a mechanic by day and drummer by night he's asked to play in another band
that has a lot of potential just before meeting Ray (h). Ray is on the run and
just so happens to run into Van at the bar he is playing at. After an awkaward encounter he gives Ray a place to stay for
a few days. Things heat up fast but they both know their time is limited. And do opposites really attract?
Will they be able to find their way
back to each other? Or will they start their separate lives away from another?
This was a quick, easy, fun read!
The characters were funny and likable. And it was fun to reminisce about the
90's (which was a big part of my life).
I would recommend.
HEA? (3)<<<click here if you want to know.
Author Bio:
Audra Middleton was born and raised
in Washington State where she lives with her husband
and their three boys. She gave up her teaching career to raise her children,
and in between diaper changes and baseball games, she began writing books. Once
she started, she couldn’t stop, even after she went back to teaching.
My site links:
Web page/blog - http://www.audramiddleton.com
Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/AudraMiddletonAuthor
Giveaway:
No comments:
Post a Comment