From
New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge comes a warm yet heart-wrenching tale of passion, betrayal and family devotion.
When two grown daughters discover an old diary of their mother’s in her attic, it comes as a shock to learn her true love was not their father. But is all as it seems? That’s the mystery they must unravel as their mother lies mute and near death in a nursing home. Only the pages of her diary can provide clues.
In a richly detailed journey into the past, we see the young Elizabeth Marshall lose her heart to one man while remaining devoted to another. Finally, she must choose between stable, loyal Bob…and the electrifying and unpredictable AJ. When a suspicious fire is linked to AJ, Elizabeth is faced with the most painful decision of her life: she’s the only one who can clear his name, but to do so would ruin her reputation and cost her the love of her fiancé.
The Diary is a love story. It’s also the story of a family and the question that all adult children must ask themselves at some point: How well do you really know your parents? The answer just might surprise you.
About the Author: Eileen Goudge is a
New York Times bestselling author who has thirty-two young adult novels and over thirteen women's fiction titles to her credit. She has also written numerous short stories and magazine articles, and one cookbook.
You can visit Eileen online at
www.eileengoudge.com.
Excerpt from The Diary:“You worry too much.” He turned to smile at her.
“You want to know something funny? I’m not worried. And that worries me.”
AJ slipped an arm around her waist. They sat that way for a spell, gazing up at the moon that was like some enormous piece of fruit ripe for the picking, neither wanting to be the first to break the silence.
At last she dropped her head onto his shoulder with a contented sigh. “When I was a little girl, I used to beg my parents to let me sleep outside on nights like this,” she reminisced. “My father would always give in. He’d help me set up the tent in the backyard so I wouldn’t get eaten by mosquitoes and let me borrow his flashlight. After he died, that was the end of that. My mother was always afraid some stranger would carry me off in the middle of the night, like the Lindbergh baby.”
“And so he has.” AJ chuckled.
She cast him a coy glance. “Is that so? Well, in that case, sir, what sort of ransom did you have in mind?”
He crooked a finger under her chin, gently tipping it up to kiss her. She’d been breathlessly anticipating this moment, despite her earlier resolution to nip the affair in the bud, but it caught her by surprise nonetheless---not the kiss but the intensity of it. There was none of the initial tentativeness of last time. AJ laid claim to her with his mouth and hands as though they were already lovers.
They went on kissing under the benign, unblinking eye of the moon. When he lowered her onto her back, she was only dimly aware of the grassy turf rising to meet her; she could feel nothing but the sensations that were like a slowly winding passage taking her deeper and deeper into a forbidden realm. Even her body felt unfamiliar, a stranger’s yielding to touches that from anyone else would have caused her to shrink in modesty.
Bit by bit, he removed her skirt and blouse and undergarments, each button and hook a small seduction in itself, pausing every so often to nibble and kiss and stroke the warm flesh underneath. When at last she lay naked before him, she felt as though she’d not only been stripped of her clothing but turned inside out, her innermost recesses laid bare. She watched as AJ hurriedly removed his own clothes. There was a moment, looking up at him silhouetted in the moonlight, a figure seemingly wrought by hammer and chisel out of something more durable than flesh and blood, that she was certain she was dreaming.
But if so, it was a dream she didn’t want to wake from.
You can purchase your copy of
The Diary from
Amazon.com,
Barnes and Noble and
Borders. For more online retailers, check the author's
website.
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