Snippet Sunday and Weekend Writing Warriors: Return Engagement

Welcome to Snippet Sunday and Weekend Writing Warriors, your chance to sample the work of a talented group of authors. When you finish here you can find more snippets at:

http://www.wewriwa.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SnippetSunday/

So far in my excerpts from Return Engagement my hero and heroine met on a beach ten years after his father broke them up. They find that all of their old feelings are still there even though she's engaged to another man. They've gone to a carnival together, and now they're walking back down the beach to their cars. He just gave her his jacket to wear and said he liked the idea of her wearing his clothes, like in high school.  They sat down on the sand to watch the moon, and both of them spoke at once. Elizabeth told him to speak first, and he told her she didn't really love her fiancé or she wouldn't have been flirting with and kissing him. Elizabeth just told him she can't stand it if he walks away again, and he tells her that it's taken 10 years, but they're back where they belong: together. Last week he asked to go home with her, and she said no. Today, I'd like to focus a little on Elizabeth and her background. We may come back to the place where we left off last week.

She didn’t come from money the way Richard did. Mentally, she pictured the small, two bedroom home where she had grown up. The house had originally been white, but Elizabeth had lived there for nineteen years, and they hadn’t painted it even once. By the time she and her mother came to Hollywood, most of the peeling paint had finally flaked off, leaving the weathered, gray boards exposed to the elements.

The inside matched the exterior: old, faded, and dirty looking no matter how much she and her mother tried to clean it. It had mice too. They never had any food to waste, so they constantly fought the little pests. She vividly remembered the day she found a mouse in the sack of dried beans her mother planned to cook for dinner. Sadly, her mother had thrown the bag away. For the next two nights they’d had nothing but sliced loaf bread smeared with margarine for dinner.