My little novelette, The Will to Love, is now available from Amazon in paperback as well as for Kindle! It's a story about unrequited love, true love, and destined love, with a rattlesnake thrown in. Here's the prologue and the first few paragraphs of Chapter One so you can take a quick look at it.
Prologue
Daniel knew he was
dead. He seemed to be hanging in darkness somewhere far above the hospital. But
he could see every detail through the ceiling as the EMTs worked with his body
on the gurney in the emergency room—one forcing air into his lungs and one
pounding his chest while Dr. Agnew charged the paddles to try to jumpstart his
heart.
The doctor
positioned the paddles. “Clear!” The body convulsed, but after an initial blip,
the trace running across the EKG screen returned to an erratic line.
Dr. Agnew turned
to the nurse who was adjusting the defibrillator. “Again.”
Daniel watched his
body convulse yet again, and the line again jumped, continued with a few
spasmodic blips, then settled into a flat, steady progress across the screen. The
doctor stood frozen, paddles held ready to use. “He isn’t responding.”
The nurse turned
to reach for a nearby tray of syringes.
“No. Don’t.” The
doctor lowered his hands and shook his head slowly. “We’ve already resuscitated
him once in spite of his advanced directive. It’s time to let him go.”
The nurse blinked
to hold back the moisture gathering in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know you were
friends.”
“Damn!” The doctor
thrust the paddles at her and stalked out, sorrow twisting his features.
“Too bad,” said
one of the EMTs. “Heard he was a pretty nice guy. Donated a chunk of money to
upgrade the cardiac care wing when his wife died.”
“He was. And we
failed him.” Still holding the paddles, the nurse wiped at her cheek with one
forearm.
The scene began to
fade as Daniel felt himself float away into a swirling gray mist. Where the hell is the tunnel? And the light I’m supposed to follow?
He heard a
chuckle. No—sensed it. Puzzled, he turned to find out who was laughing at him,
and saw a dim glow in the distance. Was that the light? As he moved toward it,
the glow grew brighter until he realized he was in a church. Shadowed pews on
each side of a broad aisle seemed to be filled with people. Was this his
funeral? If so, the people looked awfully damn happy, and he didn’t see a
casket. Instead, a minister stood in front of a flower-laden altar, and in
front of him…
It was his son,
Dan! Older, maybe by ten years, and dressed in a tux. He stood facing a girl
with tousled red hair topped by an ornate veil that spilled down the back of
her simple, form-fitting—and a very nice form it fit—wedding gown.
His son must be
getting married. He was sure he’d never seen the girl before, but she looked
familiar somehow. Like someone he’d known once, a long time ago. He wanted to
get a better look at her, and found himself drifting around to look into her
face.
A shimmer in the
air above and behind the young woman began to coalesce as he realized who the
young woman resembled—Virginia, the girl he’d fallen in love with fifty years
ago, the girl who’d left him wanting to die because he couldn’t imagine living
without her. The slanted eyes were the same aqua green, and that slim-waisted,
full-hipped figure was identical.
He looked back at
the shimmer and gasped as it took the form in his memory. Not the graying,
stooped Virginia he’d seen in recent photos, but the young, vital woman he’d
known. She smiled at him, filling him with the same deep ache as when she was
seventeen and he twenty, and he heard her voice: It’ll be OK, Daniel. It wasn’t our time. It will be theirs.
Then darkness fell
and he was sucked into a whirlpool, spun and battered and spewed forth into
hard, brilliant cold. He gasped as pain shot through his body and his eyes flew
open to see a wide-eyed nurse jump away and collide with the table near the
gurney, sending a metal tray crashing across the floor.
“Oh, my God! He’s
alive!” An alarm started to shrill, bringing feet thudding toward him.
I am alive, he thought, with some
surprise. And I have a lot to do before I die.
Chapter One
Mandy lowered her
suitcase to the floor and stared around the entry—or foyer, she supposed it
would be called—of the mansion where the taxi had dropped her. The foyer was
bigger than the combined living room and both bedrooms of her cottage back in
Illinois. The floor under her Walmart luggage looked like marble.
Double doors
opened opposite a wide staircase that curved up past a multi-tiered crystal
chandelier, and a gray-haired woman wearing an elegantly tailored suit strode
out, head down, examining something on a clipboard. Mandy cleared her throat,
and the woman looked up with a slight frown. Her eyes traveled from Mandy’s
tousled copper-colored hair, down her Star
Wars T-shirt, to her worn jeans, and ended on her Reeboks before returning
to the freckles sprinkled sparsely across Mandy’s pug nose.
