Catherine Lanigan - Love Shadows

“You are such a … dunderhead! I’m done here,” she shouted at Luke as he took a breath before his next tirade.

Luke took a step back. “Dunderhead?”

Sarah spun around and tromped back down the hill toward her friends. She realized the children were staring at them, cramming popcorn in their mouths faster than they could chew.

She had never been this angry at another human being in her life, and she didn’t like it. It burned like battery acid in her stomach. She didn’t know how Luke dealt with the seemingly perpetual anger he harbored. Was it like this for him all the time? Was this what he meant when he said anger was eating at him? That’s what it felt like to her.

Suddenly, she realized she was empathizing with him. Now she knew his kind of anger. She understood precisely what Luke was experiencing… .

Dear Reader,

The inspiration for my Shores of Indian Lake series came right out of my own life when I returned to my hometown after thirty-five years of living in big cities like New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.

It has been a revelation to me that the lives of those in small towns are filled with just as much pathos, romance, chaos and eternal struggle as people in glamorous cities.

Love Shadows and the characters in it, Sarah and Luke, sprang to life from my own grief after losing my darling sister, Nancy, to cancer only four years ago. Sarah and Luke must deal with so many emotions after the death of a loved one. They both discover that coming back to life is a road embedded with razor-sharp impediments, but that ultimately, life is meant to be filled with joy and happiness. It is the human condition to want and need love. For Sarah and Luke, personal illumination is primary. Only after they come to terms with their own demons can they surrender to each other.

The Shores of Indian Lake is filled with endearing, haunting and oftentimes seemingly eccentric characters who will steal your heart. The next book in the series features Sarah’s best friend Maddie Strong, who is faced with impossible choices of her own career dream-making when her first love, Nate Barzonni, returns to Indian Lake in pursuit of his fast-track goal of becoming head of cardiology at a major Chicago hospital and finds himself face-to-face with the one woman he’d left brokenhearted … and very angry.

I would love to hear from you and what kind of story you would like to read about along the Shores of Indian Lake. You can write to me at cdlanigan@aol.com and visit my website at www.catherinelanigan.com. I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well.

Catherine

Love Shadows

Catherine Lanigan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CATHERINE LANIGANknew she was born to storytelling at a very young age when she told stories to her younger brothers and sister to entertain them. After years of encouragement from family and high school teachers, Catherine was shocked and brokenhearted when her freshman creative writing college professor told her that “she had no writing talent whatsoever” and that she “would never earn a dime as a writer.” He promised her that he would be her “crutches” and get her through his demanding class with a B grade so as not to destroy her grade point average too much, if Catherine would promise never to write again. Catherine assumed he was the voice of authority and gave in to the bargain. For fourteen years she didn’t write, until she was encouraged by a television journalist to give her dream a shot. She wrote a six-hundred-page historical romantic spy-thriller set in World War I. The journalist sent the manuscript to his agent, who then garnered bids from two publishers. That was nearly forty published novels, nonfiction books and anthologies ago.

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This book is dedicated to my sweet, much-loved sister, Nancy Jean Lanigan Porter, who died May 7, 2009; to my mother, Dorothy Lanigan, who died June 12, 2011; and to my loving husband, Jed Nolan, who held my hand through all of the shadows that descended upon us and who will always hold my heart.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER ONE

SPRING EXPLODED OUTSIDE Sarah’s kitchen window as pink crab-apple blossoms unfurled their petals along a crooked branch. A thick, undulating bed of apricot and orange Parrot tulips swayed in the early-morning breeze and nuzzled against thick masses of purple Muscari. The newly mowed lawn was a lush carpet of a green so rich it did not look real. A midnight rain had gently showered the forsythia and bejeweled an intricate spiderweb that connected two rosebushes near Sarah’s back door. Rose-gold dawn rays, like the fingers of a divine hand, touched every tree, house and object in Indian Lake with the promise of a new day.

“What a beautiful morning.” Sarah sighed after she breathed in the fragrance of lilacs from the open window. “This was Mother’s favorite time of year.” Sarah smiled wistfully. A now-familiar pang in her heart—though not as painful as her sorrow had been two months ago when her mother died of cancer—plucked at the open wounds in her psyche.

The grandfather clock in the hall chimed the hour. Sarah used to love the burled walnut clock her father had given to her mother on their fifth wedding anniversary, but now its sound was that of an echoing gong throughout the very empty house. Sarah’s father had died three years ago and now her mother was dead, too.

Two years ago, Sarah had given up a very successful career as a commercial interior design architect in Indianapolis when she had learned of her mother, Ann Marie’s, diagnosis. Sarah knew she’d have to return home, so she applied for and landed a job in Indian Lake at Environ-Tech Design Studios, owned and run by Charmaine Chalmers. The job had been perfect for Sarah’s needs in that when Sarah had to take her mother to chemotherapy or stay at home during Ann Marie’s last four months and work at her drafting table in her father’s study, Charmaine had graciously given her the time off, though she continued to work on her designs from home.

Sarah’s move back to Indian Lake also contributed to the eventual breakup with her high school sweetheart, James Stanwyck, an investment banker whose fast-track career was stuck in warp speed. Sarah had not realized how unfulfilling her relationship with James had been until she’d moved back to Indian Lake. They’d dated during high school, college and grad school, and once they’d both begun their careers, their romance had languished until Sarah realized she couldn’t breathe. It was Sarah who put an end to them. James moved to Chicago, which was only an hour away from Indian Lake, but after sending him a thank-you note for the flowers he sent for her mother’s funeral, Sarah had not communicated with him. James had been equally silent.