Today we have a sneak peek from the women’s fiction book by J. Jeffrey: The Second Daughter.
It had started out well. Umbrellas tangled. A storybook romance followed. A wonderful wedding. A beautiful, sweet first daughter. They were complete, a family, happy. And then they went and had another daughter.
Everyone blames poor Debra as the family slowly, then quickly, then explosively disintegrates. But fortunately Debra Gale has unyielding determination. Fortunately she has an irrepressible capacity to love.
And maybe, just maybe, she also has a chance.
The Second Daughter is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Barnes & Noble.
Here is an excerpt from The Second Daughter…
CHAPTER ONE
CHANGE OF SCENERY
Almost everything was gray.
The warm rain dropping from overcast skies, the dirty wet pavement, the faded sidewalks; the apartment buildings in their long depressing dark rows. It was an old city street scene from black-and-white television, complete with the rounded windshield-wiping vehicles streaming by, the businessmen in their dull hats and raincoats pushing through the lunch-hour crowd, and the unmistakable sense that everything everywhere was about to change.
And there, at the corner of Seventeenth and Waterhouse, at one of the payphones, was a delicate woman in a shiny pink rain jacket with matching pink boots and umbrella. She was cradling the phone against her slender neck while holding a cigarette in her left hand and her little pink umbrella in her right. She was laughing, displaying a nearly perfect smile as she did so between short breaks for sharp puffs.
The payphone next to hers was empty.
Her back turned, she was telling her friend Jacqueline something she had just learned about their old geezer of a gynecologist way back in high school, Dr. Monroe. Suddenly something caught violently on her umbrella and knocked it from her hand.
“Tchiao!”
The enormous teddy bear of a man who’d uttered this strange sound was standing in the rain at the payphone next to hers and laughing loudly, his oversized black umbrella tangled with her little pink one in the large puddle between them.
“Mister!” she exclaimed.
“Sorry, sorry!” he said, still laughing. He bent over, picked up her umbrella. “I suppose this is yours?”
There was a long rip across it.
“That was a gift from my mother,” she said.
“Well, she has great taste,” the man said quickly. He then got a good look at her face. “Whoa! And apparently some pretty good DNA.”
“May I have my umbrella back, please?”
“Of course, of course.”
They looked at each other in the rain.
“Hey,” he said, gazing at her. “No fair taking my breath away.”
“No fair attacking from behind, I would say.”
He smiled. “Right-o. Sorry about that. Hey, listen,” he pointed at the rip in her umbrella, “you’re getting wet.”
“You have a keen eye for the obvious, Mister.”
“One of my many strengths!” He winked as he raised his umbrella over both their heads. “Please, let me make it up to you. Let me take you to coffee. Right now and not a minute later. I know a terrific place around the corner. They import their beans.”
“I’m sorry?” She looked at him. He was actually quite goodlooking beneath that unruly hair and that thick dark beard; and his intelligent blue eyes, behind those thick-rimmed glasses, were warm and inviting. He was a little large for her taste perhaps, but large in a gentle way, an almost cuddly way. She sort of wanted to press his belly.
“Seriously, it’s the latest thing. They come from Central or South America somewhere, they make a fine beverage—none of the local dishwater brew, if you know what I mean. My treat, of course. How about it?”
How about it, indeed, she thought …
