I’m really excited about my work in progress–California Sunshine. It’s a romantic novella that’s a prequel to the whole California romance series (California Wishes) and when I’m done, I’m going to offer it for free. If you want to be one of the first people to know when it’s available, sign up for my newsletter list. Here’s a taste:
“What is your problem?” Sunshine Campbell called out to the buttoned-down man grading papers as she strode past the tumble of desks and chairs, her sixteen-year-old daughter Redwood trailing behind her.
She sensed Redwood’s total embarrassment, but that didn’t stop her. This teacher needed to be taken down a notch. How dare he give her daughter a C on her term paper, simply because Redwood had written it in free verse? Creativity needed to be encouraged, not squashed.
“Excuse me?” He pulled off the wireframe glasses pseudo-intellectuals liked to wear, and looked up at her, his sky-blue eyes promising more than the narrow-minded professor his grade seemed to indicate.
Damn he was good-looking. If he hadn’t been such an ass, he would be nice to have in her bed.
He steepled his fingers and smiled at her.
Damn.
She’d already had him in her bed.
Pain she thought she’d dealt with over two decades ago shot through her veins. Richard Mondrake had been the first of the trifecta of male betrayal in her life, but he was the worst.
She steeled herself. With luck, he wouldn’t remember her, and she could once again bury that part of her history.
“Hi, Lucy,” he said to Sunshine’s daughter.
Lucy?
“Her name is Redwood,” Sunshine corrected.
“M-o-m,” Redwood strung out the word as only a teenage girl could. “I told you. I don’t want to be a tree. I want to have a normal name. I like Lucy.”
So like her daughter to be trading in a red tree for a red-capped comic.
She’d worry about her daughter’s bent toward normalcy later.
“Why did you give my daughter a C on her term paper?” Sunshine attacked again. “She showed great creativity in writing it in free verse. Or are you so narrow-minded that your students have to write in a proscribed manner, dull as a dentist’s attempt at humor?”
The smile disappeared, and he stood, walked around the desk, and pulled a chair from the corner. He gestured for her to sit.
She remained standing. She knew all about power positions and she wasn’t going to let one of the public school establishment pull one over on her.
He shrugged and sat back down. “Mrs. Campbell—”
“It’s Ms.”
Metal screeched on the floor as Redwood tossed herself into one of the student chairs.
The smile twitched around his lips.
Oh, hell. She took the chair next to the desk.
He turned to her, and creases forming the number eleven in the space between his eyebrows. Like her, he had fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the beginnings of the summer tan that came early on coastal California. He didn’t look forty-one he had to be, though.
She glanced at the long brown braid streaked with premature gray that had slipped over her shoulder. She looked nothing like the teenage girl he’d left behind.
Twenty plus years did that to a person.
“The problem is,” her long-ago lover resumed, “Lucy didn’t do any of the required comparison. The approach was brilliant; the substance not.”
“I wish you’d stop calling her Lucy, Mr. Mondrake,” she said. “Her name is Redwood.”
“She has asked me to call her that,” he said. “I try to respect my student’s wishes when I can.”
Sunshine opened her mouth to protest, but shut it again. Redwood’s name wasn’t the point. Maybe she’d been a little too hasty in blaming the teacher for the problem. She knew well-enough that most sixteen-year-olds weren’t innocent in any way.
She looked over at Redwood/Lucy. Her daughter was studying the acoustical ceiling tiles. In the corner of one, Sunshine saw a pencil hanging from its point.
Mr. Mondrake followed her stare. “Ah. Douglas has been at it again.”
She returned her gaze to his and got lost in the clarity and honesty of his eyes for a second or two. He’d meant something to her, damn it. When he escaped their parents’ commune in the redwoods, he’d promised to come back to her.
He never did.
She hated him for that.
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