December Wedding

December Wedding

by Emelle Gamble

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BLURB:

Molly Harper is a movie star who fans think ‘has it all’. Cruz Morales is Molly’s true love, and he hates the media intrusions into their life. Molly and Cruz are going to have a baby. And throw a secret wedding for her brother Harry. What could go wrong? Read DECEMBER WEDDING, the sequel to DUETS and MOLLY HARPER, and find out if there really is a happy ever after for Molly and Cruz.

EXCERPT:

Molly Harper lay beside Cruz Morales in the darkened bedroom, finally drowsy as the familiar night sounds floated in on the Santa Barbara breezes. She was on her second set of counting backwards from 100 to fall asleep, forty-two, forty-one…

“Will you marry me, Molly?” Cruz asked, his voice husky and close.

“No.” She’d said no to him a hundred times the last year. He told her last Christmas Eve he was going to ask her the last thing every night for a year before he’d give up. Saying no had been easy. Though meaning it was getting a little more difficult.

“Why not?”

“You know why not. I love you too much to subject you to a wedding.”

Cruz sighed. “Lame reason, chica. No one I know would think that’s a good reason.”

“They would if they remembered I’m an actress whose life attracts the press like a tub of honey attracts bees. And bees sting. You know what a zoo our wedding would turn out to be.”

“Not if we got married at the courthouse in Taos, or at your home there. People can get hitched the same day they get the license in New Mexico. I checked. We could keep it a secret.”

“A secret?  You know that’s impossible. Someone at the courthouse would tell their friend, who would call the newspaper or People Magazine or tweet it to thirty thousand of their closest friends.”

“Are you sure we’re still interesting to other people? I think the gossip about us has cooled down. People seem more interested in royal babies and the Jolie-Pitt clan now.”

“That’s true. There were only two camera crews outside the restaurant where we ate last Friday.” Molly’s brain reran a few snippets of the last two years, all recorded and available on the internet. Cruz struggling to recover from the motorcycle accident that nearly killed him. Her movie star husband leaving her for another woman. Her ex and the other woman having a baby.

Mother’s death.

All events which were played out on the front page of newspapers and websites around the world.

“Please? I’ll put a ring on it tomorrow if you say yes.”

Molly took a rattling breath. Tonight’s discussion was quite a bit more protracted than the three hundred plus nights before. “No, thank you. I don’t need you to do anything more to prove you love me.”

In the midnight shadows, his generous mouth softened against the hard curves of his face. “I do love you. I’ve always loved you. Every single moment since I met you. Even when we were apart.”

“Did you, Cruz? Did you really even love me then?”

He touched her nose with his finger and cleared his throat, which he always did when he recited a favorite poem.

“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i  am never without it (anywhere I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)”

    

Molly’s eyes burned. “I melt when you recite love poetry, Professor Cruz. I hope you don’t do in class; all those cute girls will be trying to jump your bones.”

“I only recite for you, chica. I read e.e. cummings when I was recovering in the hospital. He brought you back to me.”

“Oh please,” she whispered. “Let’s not talk about those terrible times.”

“Why? They don’t matter now, they hardly mattered then. Once we got back together, I mean, the past was gone.”

“The past is never gone. It’s on Facebook and Entertainment Tonight.”

“No one looks at those things.”

That made her laugh, as he had hoped it would.

“Right. No one.” Molly embraced him, the sheets silky smooth, while Cruz was warm and hard, and then rolled onto her other side.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

1.How has being an author changed you?

It taught me, more than any other job or career endeavor I’ve made, how hard work at something you love is the very best way to spend your ‘work’ allocation of time.

2.What was your favorite scene in the book?

I love the scene when Cruz Morales gets ambushed by Molly Harper’s ex-husband, at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’ve visited that hotel and the area is gorgeous, and while Cruz doesn’t behave very well, it was very satisfying.

3,What event triggered you to become a writer?  Any major inspirations?

Since I was a pre-writer, I wanted to tell a story. Often, the same story…HA!...all about discovering who I was and where I came from. Molly Harper, in these series of novels – DUETS – MOLLY HARPER – and the final novella, DECEMBER WEDDING – does just that. It was very satisfying for me to work that out through the character of Molly, a beautiful and successful movie actress who knows that until she’s comfortable in her own skin, she’s not going to be any good to herself.

4.What’s the very best thing about being an author?

Telling a story. Touching people in some way. It is unbelievably gratifying to read an email or review and hear that someone cried or laughed or nodded their head and said, ‘this worked for me’. It the gift that makes all the hard work worth it. Oh, and answering the question, ‘what do you do?’ with the answer, “I’m a writer,” is also really, really cool.

Thank you Elaine for hosting this blog post. I hope your readers will share with me what genre they most like to read … and why!

 AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Emelle Gamble Bio : Emelle Gamble became a writer at an early age. As ‘M.L. Gamble,’ she published several romantic suspense novels with Harlequin Intrigue. She is now self-publishing and also working with Soul Mate Publishing  who have released  two romantic women’s fiction novels,  Secret Sister, in July of 2013, and Dating Cary Grant, an April 2014 release.

Always intrigued by the words ‘what if’,  Gamble’s books feature an ordinary woman confronted with an extraordinary situation.  Emelle celebrates the adventurous spirit of readers, and hopes each will enjoy the exciting and surprising journeys her characters take.

Emelle welcomes any reader interested in emailing her at emellegamble@aol.com  and hopes they will visit her website, www.EmelleGamble.com ,  her FaceBook page: https://www.facebook.com/Emelle.Gamble or follow her on Twitter @EmelleGamble.

Emelle will be awarding a $20 Amazon GC plus a digital copy of December Wedding to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during this tour and the Review Tour, here. A $25 Amazon GC will be awarded to a randomly drawn host also between the two tours. Use the rafflecopter link below to enter. You can find her schedule at http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2014/10/vbt-december-wedding-by-emelle-gamble.html

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Duets and Molly Harper

Emelle will award a signed paperback of MOLLY HARPER with bonus novella DUETS included (US ONLY) to THREE randomly drawn winners via rafflecopter during the tour. Please click the tour banner at the top to see other stops on this tour.

Movie star Molly Harper has it all, beauty, success in her field, and a loving family and marriage to actor Ben Delmonico. Norma Wintz, Molly’s mother, has it all, a lovely life style and two children who adore her, and a respite from the battle against cancer she’s been fighting. Anne Sullivan, at age fifty, is optimistic that her move to sunny Santa Barbara, California, will allow her to be closer to her youngest son and his family, and help her start her life anew after the death of her beloved husband.

But all three of these women, despite their considerable blessings, are plunged into turmoil when the most intimate of secrets that ties their lives together is revealed. At this same time, Molly Harper is confronted with the news that her marriage to actor Ben Delmonico is over. As she navigates this heartbreak and tries to keep the personal details of the drama off the front pages of the newspapers, Molly must also find a way to once and forever negotiate a way forward with her ex- lover and best friend, the volatile and compelling Cruz Morales.

How each of these characters handles the resulting upheaval in their own life, and in their relationships with one another, forms the compelling story of family, secrets and trust in the romantic women’s fiction novel, Molly Harper.



DUETS offers alternating looks into the lives of two women who would seem to have little or nothing in common.

Screen star Molly Harper has it all…beauty, success in her profession, a loving family and an upcoming marriage to actor Ben Delmonico. But as Molly is on the verge of marrying the man who has swept her off her feet, she still wonders if he hasn’t swept all her feelings for her first love away, Cruz Morales.

A handsome and cerebral college professor, Molly and Cruz have an on-again, off-again history stretching back to Molly’s early teen years. He’s not a man who a girl can ever forget about, and his feelings for Molly are equally conflicted.

Anne Sullivan, happily married for twenty-five years, is fighting to hold onto the man she loves, and hold off a confrontation that could shatter her family’s image of what they are. It involves the beautiful screen star and her mother, upper crust matron Norma Wintz, who Anne has traveled to California to meet under the most dramatic of circumstances.

Duets confronts the most intimate type of family secret that ties these two women’s lives together, just as chance events turn Molly and Anne’s worlds upside down.

Enjoy an excerpt from DUETS:

Anne Sullivan looked down at her watch.

One twenty-one p.m. Norma Wintz was twenty minutes late.

Anne leaned back against the banquette and avoided making eye contact with the hovering waitress. She folded her hands together and wondered if her face looked tight as cellophane stretched over a bowl of tuna salad. That’s how it felt.

I shouldn’t have come. She glanced around the unfamiliar restaurant. It was all glass and mirrors; chock full of shockingly glamorous Californians surely leading shockingly exciting lives. People who wouldn’t understand why a widow from Potomac, Maryland was breaking into sobs and intruding on their lunch experience.

Which is probably what I’m going to do once Norma arrives, she thought. She had tried to prepare herself for meeting the woman, face-to-face, who had adopted her baby thirty-five years ago, but Anne wasn’t sure she was going to be able to handle it as she hoped.

Calmly. Dispassionately. In control.

Anne’s chest suddenly ached, as if all the emotion she’d suppressed for decades gathered into a knot under her ribs.

I should call the number for Norma Wintz and tell her not to come. Which was a great idea, except she’d left her cell phone in the car. And if she went to her car to get it, she might not have the emotional courage to come back.

To say nothing of the fact that if she walked the two long blocks to where she was parked, there was a good chance she would miss Norma Wintz altogether, and the woman would probably think she was a crack pot.

Anne took another peek at her watch.

One twenty-two.

That’s impossible. It felt as if an hour had passed since she’d last looked at the time.

“Excuse me, are you Mrs. Sullivan?” A waiter, his eyes jade green against his tan skin, smiled at Anne. His name tag read ‘Taj’.

“Yes, I’m Anne Sullivan."

“There’s a call for you.” Taj held out a phone.

Anne pressed it against her head. “This is Anne Sullivan.”

Taj clasped his hands behind his back and smiled at her as if she was a small child on the first day of school.

“Hello, this is Norma Wintz calling,” a voice said in Anne’s ear. “I’m on my way but there was an accident and traffic is wretched. I got no answer on the number you gave me, but I wanted to let you know I wasn’t standing you up.”

“Oh, that’s no problem.” Anne nodded at Taj and repositioned the phone an inch higher on her ear. “I don’t have other plans for this afternoon.”

“Fine. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.” The phone went dead.

“Okay. Thank you!” Anne met the waiter’s eyes and wondered how Taj had known to bring it to her.

Norma Wintz must have described me to him. But what could she have said, since we’ve never met? Look for a woman who seems the sort to give up her first-born child for adoption?

Emelle Gamble was a writer at an early age, bursting with the requisite childhood stories of introspection. These evolved into bad teen poetry and worse short stories. She took her first stab at full length fiction in an adult education writing class when her kids were in bed. As M.L. Gamble, she published several romantic suspense novels with Harlequin. She contracted with Soul Mate Publishing for Secret Sister, published in the summer of 2013, and Dating Cary Grant, an April 2014 release.

Once and Forever, an anthology which includes the novella Duets, came out on November 1st. Molly Harper, a full length novel starring the characters from Duets 3 years later was released by Posh Publishing in January, 2014. Duets is now available as a standalone novella. Emelle lives in suburban Washington D.C. with her husband, ‘Phil-the-fist’, her hero of thirty years, and two orange cats, Lucy and Bella. These girls, like all good villains, have their reasons for misbehaving.

Her daughter, Olivia, and son, Allen, are happily launched on their own and contributing great things to society, their mother’s fondest wish.

Review Quotes:

Praise for SECRET SISTER…

“Along with being a very unique and captivating plot, SECRET SISTER offers a shocking turn of the paranormal kind… This is a story of friendship, family, and most of all, true love and what those things can mean. I cannot recommend SECRET SISTER strongly enough… “ Fresh Fiction, Fresh Reviews

DUETS…

"I'll admit I grabbed this book for review more because Emelle Gamble had a story in there - I've loved her significant touch brought to family relationships in a previous book of hers that I've read, and I wanted to confirm if this sort of embroiled-relationships type of tale is really her niche or not. Turns out, it is!" Zee Monodee's Author's Corner reviews MOLLY HARPER…

"MOLLY HARPER ...is the first book I've read by this author, but it won't be my last! Ms. Gamble does a wonderful job of drawing these characters and making them just leap off the page." Long and Short Reviews

DATING CARY GRANT…

"Fantasy and reality blend together in this mesmerizing tale from Emelle Gamble…It's not your typical romance, making it a breath of fresh air in a market currently inundated with new adult contemporary romances (which I do love, but need a break once in a while!). I continue to be a fan of this author..." Andi's Book Reviews

Links:

Email: emellegamble@aol.com

Website: www.EmelleGamble.com

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/Emelle.Gamble

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmelleGamble

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7123746.Emelle_Gamble

Emelle Gamble BOOKS:

DATING CARY GRANT book of the month at Long & Short Reviews. eBook exclusively at Amazon.com http://amzn.to/1iiE8Y0

SECRET SISTER… RONE Award Honorable Mention for BEST CONTEMPORARY NOVEL of 2013 available in audio, paperback and eBook at Amazon http://amzn.to/17J2Bn6

DUETS, a prequel novella to MOLLY HARPER, now available at Amazon http://amzn.to/1cagyNa

MOLLY HARPER, available in paperback and eBook at Amazon http://amzn.to/MOJUXa

MOLLY HARPER and DUETS now available in one Paperback volume! http://amzn.to/1hW6YSj

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