Second Chances

Mr Big: What would you come back as?
Carrie: Someone who knew better.
Sex in the City

When I was very young (well, okay, youngish) I was engaged for about five minutes. My fiancé jumped ship on my twenty-fifth birthday. Nearly four years later we ran into one another in a revolving door and decided to get married. The minister who officiated at the wedding warned my husband-to-be that he would “have to carry a lot of water” before he could regain my trust.
So far he’s hefted enough buckets to drain Lake Michigan.

Second chances.
They’re like the safety net for those of us who frequently don’t get it right the first time around.
And second chances in romance are, well, romantic. I mean there’s nothing like a brand-new, deoderant-fresh love affair, but there’s something fascinating about the resurrection of an old relationship. When it works, its almost as if fate has taken a hand.

In THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO, a story of magic and mayhem in a small Virginia town, the hero’s long-held goal is to reconcile with his beautiful ex-wife, but just when he’s about to make that happen, a ghoulish crime throws him into the path of an energetic, impulsive, duty-obsessed elf with whom he shares a powerful chemistry and he has a tough choice to make.

EYE OF THE TIGER LILY, my first Triskelion release, is the story of Molly Whitecloud who became pregnant as a teenager and, instead of telling her boyfriend the truth, she opted for safety by marrying a family friend and staying on the reservation. Molly lost Cameron Outlaw and she lost the child and more than a decade later, frustrated by what her timidity cost her, she makes the rash decision to rob a sperm bank.
Cam, now a single father and engaged to someone else, comes (reluctantly) back into Molly’s life to protect her when she poses as a hooker to investigate a murder at the reservation’s casino. Passions flare between the two but Cam is wary. He doesn’t know if he can trust the girl he once nicknamed Tiger Lily.
Now Molly, burdened with two baby secrets and a guilty conscience, has to find out whether there can be any future for her with the man she loves.
Here is an excerpt.

EYE OF THE TIGER LILY

By Annie Holloway

Chapter One
Molly Whitecloud squeezed her eyes to block out the stark overhead light in the treatment room. A burning sensation crawled up the back of her throat. She knew it couldn’t be morning sickness. Not yet. Even if the procedure had worked she’d only been pregnant for about seventeen minutes.
She carefully lifted herself off the table, shed the paper gown, tugged on her bluejeans and pulled her apple-red sweater over her head freeing her thick, black braid in the process. She knew she looked like the same old Molly, the self-appointed guardian angel to the Blackbird Indian Reservation. But she wasn’t the same. This morning she’d let her halo slip and now she’d have to wait to see whether her big gamble would succeed. She prayed it would. She prayed she’d get to welcome Cameron Outlaw’s baby during the Sowing Moon.
Molly’s lips formed a grim line. She didn’t want to think about her former lover’s reaction to her use of his sperm-on-ice. Cam Outlaw might have turned into a buttoned-down banker during their years apart but Molly knew those pinstripes masked a lion’s heart and the passion that went with it. She thought of the deadly rapids under the frozen Eden River. That was Cam.
And Molly had just drilled a hole in the ice. She walked out of Boston’s Spotswood Fertility Clinic and into the brilliant autumn morning, climbed into her ancient Jeep Wrangler and headed for home. She’d traded love for security thirteen years ago. It was too late now for love but fate had presented her with a second chance at motherhood. She had no regrets. She couldn’t afford to have any regrets.