Things have been such a whirlwind since that morning when I woke to find my fiancé Devin and everything I owned gone. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. I’m not normally a trusting person. Perhaps I should say that I’m a “trust, then verify” type. I’m an accountant. I deal with people’s money, which can be an extremely emotional subject. In fact, you might say that, as a self-employed accountant who deals with people and small businesses, I’m often a financial social worker.
When people come to me with their financial questions, they’re often baffled or overwrought. Can we afford to get divorced? How will I deal with an IRS audit? Is it safe to take on another employee? Expand the business? I didn’t set aside money for—you name it—and now the bill’s come due. I hold their hands, metaphorically that is, calm them and talk them through it.
I came up dirt poor, which has made me very cautious, so trusting Devin as an employee and partner made no sense. But love is like a giant blind spot. I didn’t see the evasions. The cruelty. The emotional manipulation. Until he vanished, I ran away from an abusive cop, and I met Tommy. Or Tommy met me, which is closer to the truth.
Doing my work in the small Vermont town where I ended up isn’t so different. Maybe people are even more cautious about money. Maybe more of them come as much to scrutinize Tommy’s last-minute bride as to deal with their finances, but I’m beginning to feel at home. I do a lot of work for my mother-in-law—and believe me, that’s a story all by itself. I’m trying to get Tommy to pay attention to his—our?—finances. I seem to be acting as general contractor to build a house up on Whitfield Mountain. In the midst of it all, there’s Tommy, who runs hot and cold and is ridiculously whimsical and doesn’t quite understand that he can’t be rushing into my office to kiss me when I’m with a client.
I guess I don’t mind that so much. It’s a revelation to live someplace where everyone knows everyone else’s business, especially when part of that business is their wanting Tommy to be happy. Marge at the Copper Penny always gives him an extra pancake and the mayor always waves from his tractor, and I now have a cop, maybe a couple of cops, in my life that I can trust.
But how a self-made woman from Pennsylvania ended up in small town Vermont? Well, to find that out, you’d have to read my story. It’s all written down in Wedding Bell Ruse, which my author, Kate Flora, claims is the only romance she’ll ever write. I’m not sure I believe her.
Wedding Bell Ruse is a novel of romantic suspense, released May 20, 2020.
Callista McKenzie is a self-made woman. She’s left her toxic family, gotten educated, and built an accounting business, deferring life and love until she’s debt free. Then Devin enters her life. The perfect employee, perfect boyfriend, perfect fiancé, until the morning she wakes from a drugged sleep to find Devin and her personal and business assets gone, a note clipped to her pillow: Thanks for everything.
Devastated, Callie tries to pull her life back together, but the police are convinced she’s secretly colluded with Devin and will soon sneak away to join him. When her biggest client fires her, saying her judgment can’t be trusted, and the detective makes it clear that things will go easier if she provides sexual favors, she throws some clothes in a suitcase and runs.
Many hours later, out of physical and emotional gas, she pulls over on a cold Vermont roadside to rest, awakened by a police officer knocking on her window. He sends her on to the nearest town, where the coffee shop is just opening. Nearly penniless, she scrounges enough change for a cup of coffee. Then a man sits down at her table and says, “Smile, and pretend you’re glad to see me.”
His words open the door to a world of temptation, complication, and danger. Callie needs a place to hide. Tommy Morgan needs a wife. And someone doesn’t want them to marry.
There’s a mysterious stalker outside her room. Her car windows are vandalized. Someone tries to poison her. And then the detective shows up, carrying her away from happily ever after.
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About the author
Kate Flora’s fascination with people’s criminal tendencies began in the Maine attorney general’s office. Deadbeat dads, people who hurt their kids, and employers’ discrimination aroused her curiosity about human behavior. The author of twenty-one books and many short stories, Flora’s been a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer awards. She won the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction and twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Her most recent Thea Kozak mystery is Schooled in Death; her most recent Joe Burgess is A Child Shall Lead Them. Her crime story collection is Careful What You Wish For: Stories of revenge, retribution, and the world made right. Her latest publications include a romantic suspense, Wedding Bell Ruse, a story in The Faking of the President and one in Heartbreaks and Half-Truths.
Flora divides her time between Massachusetts and Maine, where she gardens and cooks and watches the clouds when she’s not imagining her character’s dark deeds. Visit her online at kateclarkflora.com.
All comments are welcomed.