Series: The Blue Trilogy #2
Publication date: October 2020
Synopsis:
She was a distraction. He was a mistake.
Now they're in each others' way.
Rookie investigator Devyn Foster knows the pain of losing family. It's what drives her to do what she does - finding the missing and the lost and returning them to their families.
Her latest assignment is no different, finding the computer a whiz who disappeared while working on a mysterious project. Even though his case has gone cold, she won't let his elderly parents suffer. She will find him and return him back to them.
But that was before the one-night stand that changed everything...
Private Investigator Max Carson has never let anything--or anyone--stop him from getting the job done. So when he's hired to track down a software program that could change the world, that's exactly what he's going to do... until he finds himself in a dead heat with a woman who's just as determined as he is to get the job done on her own terms.
Now Max has to deal with two problems: how to get Devyn out of the way... and out of his heart.
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Guest Post
On the heels of the holiday weekend, I thought you'd like to read a piece is typical of something I'd write for fun, my thoughts on Christmas 2020.
I sent out an annual summary to friends and family at the end of every year since I married. This season, I couldn't.
Instead of writing the update, I created ornaments from photographs of past Christmases. It took a week to do it.
Setting the mood, I turned on holiday jazz playlists from Spotify that included traditional holiday music sung by Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Bing Crosby. I prepared hot cocoa and added a handful of mini-marshmallows to float on top because the best part of the hot chocolate ritual is consuming the melted goodness at the bottom.
Then I cleared off the kitchen table and set up my workspace. Photocopies of my siblings, parents, in-laws, husband, and children, stacked next to the craft supplies. I glued each photo to craft paper squares and fixed them in place with Elmer's glue. I embellished them with glitter and looped the twine through them for hanging.
The collection sparked memories. I put the ornaments on a memory tree. It is in the family room--I can look at it every day.
As youngsters, we went to midnight mass and sang carols with the choir. The church docents took snapshots of us, our mouths open in song instead of conversation.
I had photos of the anemic trees dad got on Christmas eve. They were sparse and resembled twigs. We filled in the bare spots with tinsel, hand-crafted ornaments, glittered pinecones, and strings of popcorn. The topper was an angel my mother and her sisters passed on to each other year after year.
Christmas morning, my parents fussed over us when we gathered to open presents in our flannel pajamas, rubbing the sleep from our eyes. Each had something in our stockings.
But before opening presents, we had to pose for the annual picture in front of the tree. The eldest stood in the back row while the rest sat cross-legged on the floor.
Mom cooked pot roast and all the fixing for dinner. Afterwards, our cousins came over to visit, and we played board games, drank hot cider, and ate cookies.
Once we started our families, we still celebrated with my parents. More people meant more chaos. The children added many moments of happiness and memories of the holidays.
We still took those photos under the tree. Thanks to modern technology, dad could get us all in the picture with the panorama feature on his cell phone.
In our home, we have our tradition as well. My husband purchases a full spruce tree right after Thanksgiving. The kids help decorate it with ornaments, some they made when they were in school, candy canes, glittering ribbons, and blinking white lights you can see from the street.
For 2020, we will take a photo with masks in front of our tree. Bah Humbug COVID.
If you'd like a copy of mom's pot roast recipe, here's the link.
K. Nilsson's love of reading began with the Bobbsey twins. When she ran across some Italian True Romance novellas stashed in the attic, the musty serials hooked her on adult fiction. Though black and white photos were dramatic enough to keep what the stories were about, she taught herself to read in Italian and translated them to her friends. She's an unapologetic reviewer of books, restaurants, and vacation destinations. An amateur photographer, K. loves taking editorial photos and documenting her travels. Her personal philosophy, sleeping is a waste of time.
