Author Spotlight: Liz Flaherty Is Here with Holiday Romance!

Liz Flaherty wanted to shake off the dust of central Indiana farm country and move to the city, get rich, wear designer clothes, and write books.

Well, she writes books.

She lives five miles from where she grew up, only now she relishes the sights and sounds and scents of the fields around her, doesn’t care much about clothes, and thinks being rich would probably have been overrated anyway.  She’s spent the past several years enjoying not working a day job, making terrible crafts, and writing stories in which the people aren’t young, brilliant, or even beautiful. She’s decided (and has to re-decide nearly every day) that the definition of success is having a good time. Along with her husband of lo, these many years, kids, grands, friends, and the occasional cat, she’s doing just that.

You can find her all over the place, but this is easiest:  https://linktr.ee/LizFlaherty She’d love to hear from you!

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Oh, Nan, thanks for having me back to your blog again. And thanks for coming to mine yesterday. Remember people calling us the twins once in a while? I think it was because we’re both naturally blonde … sort of … thin-in-process … sort of … travel buddies, and there’s something else … oh, right, we’re besties who never thought we’d meet kindred spirits … er … several decades past high school.

To your readers, thanks for coming by. As you can tell by the nonsense above, I’m a fan of ellipses and traveling, and I love having best friends. I also love writing about them. My heroines always have one and my heroes often do, too. I think it’s why, when my stories start, the heroine may not be perfectly happy, but she isn’t broken, either. She doesn’t need fixing, but she might need another best friend. Not that she knows that, but one of the greatest joys of falling in love is the friends part that is an integral part of building a romance. (I realize this is arguable, but in my quest to write happily-ever-after, I need happy-BFF, too.)

So, meet Fiadh (Fee) Brady and Jed Healy. Best friends from way, way back … who became inseparable in high school. They always … well, here, this is how that got started.

It had been so new to them, the discovery that the way they felt about each other was more than friendship. They’d laughed at the very idea of dating—they were best buds, for God’s sake—but by the time he walked her up to her front porch at three minutes before her midnight curfew on their first date, they’d known better. By the third date, everyone knew they were a couple. By the fifth, she was wearing his high school letter jacket instead of her own winter coat.

It was when he came to meet her for the sixth date that he found her crying. That he said, “Tell me.”

Those two words, tell me, change the trajectory of not only their relationship but their whole lives.

It’s nearly 20 years later that Jed, widowed, returns to Dickens, the small town where he grew up. He’s a world-renown photojournalist who never stays in one spot too long and who never intends to. Fee is the first person he sees, the second one he talks to when he walks into Silver Threads and Golden Needles, the quilt shop, in search of gingerbread.

I hope you want to find out what happens next!

A New Kind Of Hope

Fee and Jed were best friends who fell in love, but that was high school. Life and families and other loves had happened since that dear and distant time. They’re friends again, comfortable with each other and having so much fun at Christmas time in Dickens. They’re not still in love, but … wait … could it be happening again?

Buy links:

Amazon: https://a.co/d/e97f6Yf (ebook)  https://a.co/d/bE4QoB0 (print)

Everywhere else: https://books2read.com/u/bogDg0

Excerpt:

Joanna joined her, and soon a few of the Klatchers came in, too. They sewed together, had coffee and cookies, and laughed uproariously at wildly inappropriate stories that may or may not have been true.

The painful loneliness left by Jed’s absence was more bearable here. Talking with the other women gave her … she didn’t know … balance, maybe. She’d known there was no permanency in what he felt about her—there never had been. It was her own fault that she’d allowed herself to hope for more.

But who’d have expected lightning to strike twice in the same place? It wasn’t as if she’d stayed in love all that time, although her memories of him were good ones. Tender ones. She thought, even after their friendship developed into something mind-blowingly physical, that it wasn’t really emotional. Mental, maybe, because she liked talking with him more than she’d ever enjoyed conversation with another man.

But not emotional. Not … love. She may as well say it, since she wasn’t talking aloud. For the first time since she’d fallen in love in high school it had happened again. She—

“What?”

Joanna was looking at her across the table. “What?” she repeated.

“Nothing.” What had she said aloud?

“You know,” said Joanna, “if you need to talk, I’ll be glad to listen.” She grinned over at Fee. “We’ve cleaned toilets together—you can trust me.”

“I do trust you.” It had been so long, she realized, that she’d handled things on her own, taking care of Ailey, robbing Peter to pay Paul in the time-honored way of single mothers everywhere. No one had put her on the back burner, but that’s where she’d chosen to stay.

Until now. Until she wanted more. She met Joanna’s eyes. “Have you ever asked a man for anything?” Joanna’s divorce had been bitter.

“Not since I was married.” Joanna stitched a few inches, then stopped. “But I’d like to think I would.”

“Even knowing—” She stopped.

“That I could get hurt?”

“Yes.”

“I hope so.” Joanna smiled at her, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s been years since I’ve felt anything about a man. I miss that. So, even though there aren’t any guarantees, I’d take that chance again.”

By the time she went home, the quilt for Jed was ready for the longarm quilter. The kittens were thrilled to see her, although their food and water bowls weren’t empty, and she was so happy not to be alone in the house she nearly cried again. Twice in one day would be just too much.

Christmas was in two days. She’d give herself until the shop closed at three o’clock on Christmas Eve to mourn the loss of what she hadn’t even realized she longed for.