I haven’t really written songs into any of my work. The one blatant exception is my free read, a serialized story that my readers help me plot. Early on, when they selected their heroine, they let me base the character on…me! This opening scene is exactly like something that would happen to me, and exactly how I would have handled it. Enjoy the snippet!
On a whim, romance author DiDi Devereaux decides to travel to remote Louisiana bayou country to take possession of a house she inherited from a reclusive relative. But before she reaches her destination, she drives her car into a ditch to avoid a large animal that leaps into her path. Rescue comes in the form of a sexy sheriff, whose gruff demeanor seems to hide a feral attraction. As DiDi settles into her new home she finds herself torn between her attraction to the sheriff and the raw, handsome bad boy whose offer to help her renovate her home is a little too convenient and tempting.
Nothing in Bayou Noir is what it seems. When strange things begin to happen, her natural curiosity leads her into danger…
“Wah-ah-ah-ah!”
DiDi Devereaux bounced her head to David Draiman’s gorilla-like chant. She’d popped her Disturbed CD in the player after she’d turned onto the small county road. She liked listening to hard rock when she wrote a fight scene or needed a little courage. Raucous, masculine music rarely failed to rev her engines.
Unfortunately, the music wasn’t working its magic now.
Her headlights barely cut through the thick fog, forcing DiDi to slow her car as she peered over the steering wheel at the narrow donkey trail of a road. She’d left the highway twenty minutes ago and knew she’d entered bayou country by the thick forest pressing against the road from both sides and the muggy quality of the air. She’d rolled down her windows because her AC fogged up the windshield, but still had to swipe her palms against the glass to clear it enough to continue.
Why she’d decided to finish the journey at night, she didn’t know. But she never questioned an impulse, and never really regretted any of the mishaps she’d fallen into as a result of ignoring good advice. Many of her stories came from those misadventures—and inspiration, of late, was getting pretty thin.
A road trip was just what she needed to “fill the well”.
On a whim, she’d removed the deed to the Gauthier House from her safe deposit box on Monday after she’d moved her furniture into storage and let her apartment go. Originally, she’d been torn between seeking a summer rental in the Yukon and heading Down Under.
Then she’d remembered the property she’d inherited three years earlier. A dilapidated house in a section of boggy bayou with a dock that led into the swamps. The lawyer who’d handed her the deed and the keys had told her to sell it—or let it return to the land. No use fighting the age of the place because it would be a money pit.
She’d been satisfied to let the document lay at the bottom of her safety deposit box, beneath her passport and a CD that stored every page of every book she’d ever written, just in case catastrophe hit and she had to start all over again. Nothing was more valuable to her than the dreams she’d created on paper, nothing was more meaningful. She’d sacrificed a lot to be where she was, edging toward the top of the bestsellers’ lists and finally getting those contracts that fed her gypsy soul.
Now, she had money to sink into the old plantation house. Enough to pay someone else to do the work while she plunked away at a keyboard with an iPod in her ears as workers sawed and hammered around her.
She could make this work—if she ever found the damn place.
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A snippet from the review:
