Review
A beautiful, poignant tale of healing hearts and redemption...HELP WANTED: HUSBAND? is as tender as it is triumphant. --
Writers Club Romance Group on AOLTalented Darlene Scalera has a way with tales that capture your heart and HELP WANTED: HUSBAND? is no exception. --
Romantic Times Magazine Top Pick - May 2002
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
He was the largest man Lorna had ever seen. Not that she’d seen that many, having spent three-quarters of her life at the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls and the other quarter within these county lines. But she’d seen enough. One too many, the population of Hope, Massachusetts, was still saying, and if anyone was bold enough to say it to her face, Lorna would have to agree.
Standing behind the trees she’d been pruning, she watched the mountain of a man as he rounded the rusty pickup. His jeans were worn white, emphasizing sturdy Viking legs. His shoulders were a yard wide. The faded denim jacket stretched across their width normally would be too thin for this time of year, but today’s weather was good. Only the old snow in the woods remembered winter. The man crossed onto her property and with each heavy step, she waited for the ground to give a fine tremble.
He stopped, his gaze on her house. It was an upright saltbox formerly New England austere until five days ago when Lorna had found some old shutters in the shed and painted them yellow. Not a polite yellow. A screaming yellow. She suspected it was this trimming that held the stranger’s eye. She was going to paint the weathered door next. Blue—a brilliant, peacock-strutting blue. No more somber colors. That was one thing she’d sworn off when she’d buried her husband less than six weeks ago. Life was too short and too brazen for grim colors. Good to her new vow, she’d worn chartreuse to the funeral. She’d sashayed past the pews, the murmurs soft as pillow talk. Still Lorna knew what they whispered. A madness born from grief. Craziness was expected, even excused, when two days earlier your husband had been surprised by a shotgun while in bed with another man’s wife and shot in an area of the anatomy unmentionable in mixed company. Suffice it to say, the tale would never be told! without men wincing and women nodding in silent satisfaction that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
