A merry tale of life, love and confusion in a small town.
Welcome to Beyond the Book. Today I'd like to introduce you to Fortuna, a romantic comedy that releases January 28. I'm having a FB release party on Monday Feb. 1, and I hope you can come. I'll be giving away some pretty nice prizes. For today, I thought I'd share one of my favorite scenes from the book. In this excerpt my heroine Aimee and her fiance Rocky go to a church dinner where Aimee encounters an enemy.
Rocky joined her near the end of the table just as she
took the lid off a square plastic container. He peered into the dish. “What’s
that?”
Aimee took a look and
saw something that reminded her of meatballs: blue, perfectly shaped meatballs.
She giggled. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Both of them stopped
snickering when a buxom blonde wearing a tight, flowered blouse approached with
a frown on her face. Aimee gasped. This was the woman from the coffee shop at
the funeral home.
The woman recognized
her at the same time. “You!”
“Yeah, I recognize you
too.” Aimee tried to instill the proper amount of disdain in her voice.
A second, older woman who
looked somewhat like the blonde wandered over to the table to see what was
going on. Fortified by the newcomer’s presence, the buxom blonde gestured
wildly toward the table. “What are you doing to my bean balls?”
"Bean balls?"
"Yes. You were staring at my bean balls."
Aimee giggled even
though she tried not to. “I was just taking the lid off them. Honest.”
“Well, I don’t like
the way you were looking at them. Don’t you know it’s better for you to eat
healthy food?”
Aimee gritted her
teeth, amusement gone. “I was looking at them because I had no idea what they
were.”
She wondered if the
blonde was about to have a stroke. Her face was that red. Actually, it matched
her skirt pretty well, which, by the way, didn’t match her tight blouse. The
woman gave Aimee the evil eye. “You are a hateful, mean woman. I’m sorry I ever
met you. First you misrepresented yourself at the coffee shop, and now you mock
my bean balls.”
“I did not!”
Without warning the
blonde jerked the plastic container away from Aimee. It scooted across the
table and crashed into a gelatin salad, taking a corner off its molded perfection.
The blue bean balls went everywhere, rolling around the table like marbles on
steroids. ”Look what you’ve done,” the blonde wailed. “Nobody will want to eat
them now.”
She snatched a bean
ball and hurled it at Aimee, who ducked just in time. “You missed me,” she
taunted. She had no sooner finished speaking before a second bean ball flew
through the air. This one caught the shoulder of her new blouse.
The blonde laughed.
Aimee grabbed a bean
ball from the table and threw it at the blonde. She hit the woman right in the
chest. “Help me!” the blonde shrieked. “She hit me in the heart. Where’s the
sheriff?”
From the corner of her
eye, Aimee saw the priest hurrying their way. She fired one final bean ball,
which hit the blonde’s forehead with a beany thud.
Rocky grabbed her arm.
“They’re circling the wagons. Let’s get out of here.”
Practically running,
they made their escape from the church. Rocky took the precaution of locking
the truck doors. He sighed. “I guess we can’t come back to this church either.
Are we going to become atheists?”
“Of course not!”
Sunk in gloom, they
drove back to Fortuna. The jinx was still on as far as churches were concerned.
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