I have for you today an exclusive excerpt and a giveaway for Curved Horizon by Taylor Brooke and you will fall in love. I'm always happy to participate in this!
Title: Curved Horizon
Series: The Camellia Clock Cycle #2
Author: Taylor Brooke
Publisher: Interlude Press
Release date: March 8th, 2018
Curved Horizon picks up a few weeks after the conclusion of Fortitude Smashed with Daisy
Yuen and Chelsea Cavanaugh, whose Camellia Clocks are drawing close to timing out.
Navigating the ins-and- outs of love is hard enough as strangers destined to be soul mates and
proves even more complicated when Daisy shares dark, ugly secrets that linger in her and
Aiden’s pasts.
Meanwhile, Shannon and Aiden continue to explore their own, new relationship. Fall brings them an unforgettable one-year anniversary, but when Shannon suffers a life-threatening accident on the job, Chelsea, Daisy, and Aiden must find a way to let go of the past to make room for their future.
Meanwhile, Shannon and Aiden continue to explore their own, new relationship. Fall brings them an unforgettable one-year anniversary, but when Shannon suffers a life-threatening accident on the job, Chelsea, Daisy, and Aiden must find a way to let go of the past to make room for their future.
Dive deeper into the world of the Camellia Clock—a world of soulmates, secrets, and the
healing power of love.
Excerpt
Daisy stood against the side of the ice cream shop with one boot propped against the wall and
head tipped up, staring at the night sky. Across the street, Laguna Beach Canvas & Sculpt
slumbered peacefully. She smirked at the newly installed security cameras that jutted from the
wall and pointed at the back door.
Five minutes went by, and her phone didn’t ring. She gripped it hard, shoved it in her small,
black, cat-head- shaped purse, and headed into the shop.
If Chelsea was going to stand her up for the last portion of their first date, Daisy was going to
buy herself ice cream. She dug her nails into her palm and clutched the edge of the cardboard
pizza box. If this was how Chelsea wanted to start things, so be it. If this was her statement, her
realization, her bow-out, Daisy had to deal with that.
“Matcha, please,” Daisy said to the young man behind the counter, “with sprinkles.”
She paid for her ice cream, took the cone, and walked back into the warm late-spring night.
Teenagers played on the beach despite the darkness, a couple held hands as they left the
theater, and Daisy saw a group of friends sharing the booth by the window at the diner. That
used to be their booth, she thought. The one Aiden, Vance, and Jonathon used to occupy with
her every day after school.
Her boots thudded against the street as she jogged across the crosswalk to Main beach.
She’d met Jonathan here, who introduced her to Vance, who introduced her to Aiden.
She’d had her first kiss on the stairs of the lifeguard tower when she was fifteen. She’d told
Aiden about it the next day while they lay on the sand and shared a joint under one of the
volleyball nets.
Laguna Beach was a town riddled with ghosts that kept coming back to haunt her.
“Daisy...”
She didn’t turn around for Chelsea. Her hip rested against the back of a stone bench, and she
looked at the moon, glowing against black waves. She sucked sprinkles off the top of her ice
cream cone.
“I’ve been sitting in my car,” Chelsea said. Her voice trembled, and Daisy heard the pop of her
knuckles. “I don’t know why. I just couldn’t... I didn’t mean to make you wait, I didn’t exactly know what to do and I—”
“It was ice cream, Chelsea, not a marriage proposal. Were you going to drive away?”
Daisy’s phone kept going off in her purse. Only one person would be that persistent.
“No,” Chelsea snarled. “I just needed to think.”
“You asked me to go to dinner with you, remember?”
“I remember.”
Daisy nodded.
“I don’t know what I’m doin’ here, all right? It’s supposed to be
instantaneous. We’re supposed to fall in love, and be happy, and there’s all these
expectations... I just needed a minute to think about what comes next.”
“Ice cream came next!” Daisy’s laugh was sharp and brittle. Gripping the pizza box in one hand
and her ice cream cone in other, she turned toward Chelsea. She felt utterly alone, even with
Chelsea’s wide, aqua eyes staring back at her. “We don’t have to go by some set of rules, or
live up to the golden Camellia Clock standard, Chelsea. We can just be friends, like you said,
and we can make this work. You can’t expect everything to just fall into place.”
“I don’t want to be friends,” Chelsea snapped impatiently.
“Well, that’s too bad! It’s not like you’re gonna have any if you keep leaving them stranded at an
ice cream shop, looking like a fool, waiting for you to get your shit together. You don’t want to be
friends? Do you think about anyone but yourself, ever? What, you think you get to go sit in your
car and almost drive away—”
“I wasn’t going to drive away,” Chelsea said, anger biting at the edges of her words.
“You’re a good liar, but you’re not that good. I’m going home.”
After fleshing out a multitude of fantastical creatures as a special effects makeup artist, Taylor
Brooke turned her imagination back to her true love—books. When she’s not nestled in a
blanket typing away on her laptop, she’s traveling, hiking or reading. She writes Queer books for
teens and adults. She is the author of Fortitude Smashed (Interlude Press ’17) and is
represented by Saba Sulaiman at Talcott Notch Literary Services.
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