#NewRelease from Liz Flaherty - SHADES OF GREEN - Book 3, Colors, The Harper Loch Series

Today we have a #NewRelease from Liz Flaherty - SHADES OF GREEN - Book 3, Colors, The Harper Loch Series, which released on September 1. Liz is a very prolific writer. She was on my blog in June when Book 2, Patches of Red, was released. Can't wait to read about this one! Glad to have you back, Liz!

Inspiration for the story.

Thanks for having me back so soon, Jana! I know I was just here in June, when Patches of Red was released, and here I am again, like a bad penny. This didn’t used to happen because I didn’t used to write series. I didn’t … you know … want to. I liked the whole stand alone process, where I didn’t have to remember things or look up ones I forgot.

I still like writing stand-alone titles. Honestly.

But when Maggie’s story, Pieces of Blue, decided all by itself that it wanted to be a series because Ellie, Maggie’s best friend, wanted to move to Harper Loch and have her own story, I said Fine. No problem. Just that snippy, too, because it’s not just that I didn’t want to write another series; it’s that I wasn’t sure I was good at writing series, but, hey, why not? It’s the thing to do these days. So I wrote Patches of Red. I went from one and done to two and through just like that.

Except for Cari.

Cari Newland was one of the first people Maggie met when she moved to the lake. In her early 30s, single, and a classic non-finisher, she’d quit cheerleading, college, culinary school, and an engagement to be married before ending up—kicking and screaming—in seminary. She did a couple of backup sermons at her grandparents’ church at Harper Loch and seven years later, she’s still there.

And there’s this guy who dances well, laughs hard, flies for the Navy, and … well, you see where this is going, right. It goes directly to Shades of Green, Book 3 in the Harper Loch Trilogy.

At least, I think it’s a trilogy. But then, I’ve been wrong before.

Blurb:

Pastor Cari Newland’s life is stuck in the middle.

Her friends and parishioners at Harper Loch are mostly older than her thirty-two years… or they’re younger. While she likes being a single minister, she would also like to meet someone who sees her as someone besides “Preach.”

She gets hugged a lot, she realizes, but she never gets held. She’s never been the daughter her parents wanted or the woman her long-ago fiancé needed. Her life is good, but it’s lonely. Enter handsome navy pilot Zack Grant. Visiting his parents at the lake, he attends a wedding Cari officiates. They talk and they dance and they are … interested. But Zack’s life is a thousand miles away and Cari’s life is firmly in Harper Loch. When interested begins to grow into something more, Cari and Zack must decide how to fit into each other’s world and whether or not they can make a long-distance romance work.

But Cari’s life is in the small lake community in Michigan. Zack’s is in the Florida Panhandle. And neither of them has any intention of changing locations.

Buy Links:

Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dKnw8fA 

D2D: https://books2read.com/u/3RRAgL

Excerpt:

Speaking of no one’s business, I didn’t realize before I entered the ministry just how much of other people’s business I’d come to know. Even more than the knowing is the keeping it to myself. Well, between God and me, and while he is hugely helpful with my responses to what I’m told, I’m not one of those people who hears his voice at convenient times. I’m more likely to hear it in the middle of the night after I’ve already said the wrong thing to someone who was counting on me to know the right one.

Jax and Kelsey’s reception was in the Burl’s huge garage. Sam insists that one day they will park his truck and Maggie’s car in there, but not until the lake builds its own clubhouse. After eating, making toasts, and moving tables to accommodate the band and create a dance floor, the wedding guests divide into groups.

I find myself in the middle.

We all watch and applaud when the bride dances with her father and Jax dances with Maggie—who’s been the mother of his heart for years. When the bride and groom move from a slow dance around the perimeter to a line dance, many in the crowd join in. Many others—most of the over-forty group—drift toward the screened deck on the back of the Burl.

I’m thirty-two. I want to dance. And yet … so many of my friends are on the deck. Some of them are dancing there, too, but with their partners. The ones in the garage are closer to my age, younger and even a little older, but I don’t really fit. Most everyone watches their language around the pastor. They don’t tell the same stories they would tell if I weren’t there. They don’t mention sex because they doubt I know what it is.

Inside, the other group settles in at the tables with glasses of local beer and wine. They talk about their lives, their memories, and some of them speak woefully of the medical appointments that have become their social lives. I am comfortable with that group and actually have more and closer friends among them. But on this day of joy and music and laughter and coming together, I am apart from both them and the ones in the garage. I am, as I said before, in the middle.

I sat quiet and alone at a little bistro table in the corner farthest from the band and the dancers. Usually, I don’t mind being alone. I work better in quiet surroundings and enjoy reading the same way. Being a pastor is very peopley, and I’m happy about that; however, sometimes, after a counseling session or a long service or a Bible study that doesn’t gel, I’m so eager to be by myself I almost run into the parsonage and slam the door.

But today I wanted to dance. To feel the soft and whispery fabric of my dress swishing against my legs and the warmth of a man’s arms around me. I’m a hugger, and I get hugged a lot, too, but I am very seldom held.

I wanted to be held.

Bio:

Liz Flaherty

Retired from the post office, Liz Flaherty spends non-writing time thinking about writing and wanting to travel. The author of 20-some books and her husband Duane share an old farmhouse in North Central Indiana. They do think about moving from there, but they have literally decades of stuff, and they’re just not ready! She thinks one of the things that keeps you young, when you quite obviously aren’t anymore, is the constant chances you have to reinvent yourself. Her latest professional incarnation is as a fledgling women’s fiction author and she is enjoying every minute that she’s not scared to death. You can connect with her at https://linktr.ee/LizFlaherty She’s always glad for new friends—and to see her old ones!