She closed her hand around his. “Later.” She grabbed his tie with her good hand and tugged. “Come here.”
He grinned. “I think you need to rest.” Zach gently moved his arms around her and into her embrace.
As he brushed his lips against her forehead, she whispered, “You just wait till I get out of here.”
END
AFTERWORD
About the author
Here we are, again. Like the caterpillar’s question to Alice, I’ve always found “Who are you?” to be the most difficult one to answer. More so because it has always struck me as less about personal trivia than the more esoteric aspects of personality, like “what are your beliefs,” and “what is your philosophy,” or “what color are the glasses through which you peer at life?”—not to be confused with the question I’m more commonly asked—“what color is the sky on your planet?”
My home is Florida. It’s who I am. But my Florida isn’t tied tightly together by six-lane ribbons of asphalt, or littered with strutting, pastel, multi-million-dollar beach sandcastles. It’s a Florida of scrub palms and sand spurs; of cool December beach breezes, forty-minute four o’clock August thunderstorms, and sultry, honeysuckle-scented summer nights. And when I say Florida, I mean all of it. I’ve lived in every corner of my prickly paradise, from the rusty buckle of the bible belt up in the northeast corner, to a stone’s throw from Ft. Lauderdale’s Slip F-18; from Gainesville’s pines dripping with Spanish moss, to walking distance from where the road ended for Jack Kerouac. I’ve watched the sun rise over the Atlantic and drop, hot and red, into the Gulf on the same day; walked the backroads; raced motorcycles across the Everglades under a full April moon; and awoke, bleary-eyed and cotton-mouthed, on Key West’s Duval Street more than once. I wouldn’t trade those memories for a mountain of gold.
Please stop by http://www.mjcarlson.com or
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MJCarlsonAuthor/541197405998287?ref=hl
and say hi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I hope reading this was as much fun for you as writing it was for me, because I had a blast. No one writes a book in a vacuum, and for all those kind souls who offered words of encouragement, suggestions, or or just put up with my sustained absences, I thank you. I would like to take a moment to specifically mention my ever-patient editor, Jennifer Zebel. Also, Laurie Andrews, Glenn Boutilier, Dave Brunetti, Nataleigh Palmer, Cheryl Bartoszek, Justin Gregoire, and the Central Library critique group in Cocoa, Florida. They read these pages before there was a story, and without them, there would have been no book. I would also like to mention my Wise Reader and muse, Sparkle. Without her, life would be a pale facsimile.
As always, any errors and omissions are fully my responsibility. Also as always, the reader who finds the greatest number of errors in this book may choose to have a victim named after him or her in a subsequent book.
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