RELEASE BLITZ

Title:

  All That Lies Broken

Series:

  Ashmore's Folly, Book 2

Author: 

  Lindsey Forrest

Genre(s): 

 adult contemporary fiction, women's literature, romance, mystery-suspense

Length: 

  190,000 words.

Release Date: 

 June 23, 2015

From the ashes of great tragedy rises a great love...

After fourteen years, Laura and Richard now stand face to face, equals, at the same place in their lives.

She is no longer that girl, separated by time and violence from the only man she has ever loved. He no longer stands alone, a young man devastated by betrayal and his own terrible folly.

But the world is not so easily forgotten. Even as Richard begins to dismantle the past that blocks his future, he struggles to open his heart to the last love of his life. Laura chafes against her place on the edge of his life, wanting so much more, no longer willing to settle for less.

"I won't be the woman you can't admit to."

Enemies challenge the life they are struggling to build together. An estranged wife seeks to smash the man she hates so fiercely. A younger brother rages against the man who bested him in life and in death.

"Something always gets broken...."

Secrets unravel. A world begins to shatter when a reporter stumbles across Laura’s secret. Then a sliver of bone resurfaces in a place of great sorrow, and a ghost of a girl rises from the past….

Please read All Who Are Lost first! Some trilogies can be read out of order -- this isn't one of them. This is not a standalone story; it picks up the day after All Who Are Lost ends.

The e-book of All Who Are Lost is ON SALE for only $0.99 through June 30, 2015! Click here!

Oh, and this one also ends on a cliffhanger! Rest assured, I am all about the HEA, and I am halfway through writing the third book. Look for it in early 2016.

Need more information? Check out the full cast of characters, family trees, and maps, QR codes and links to back-story timelines and other supplemental material on www.ashmoresfolly.com!

Diana was late again. Lucy had told her to meet at the coffee shop at 7:15; Tom had gone in early to prepare for a deposition, so he couldn’t catch her talking with her sister. Diana had promised to be there with bells on, hinting mysteriously at some juicy gossip.

But, as usual, even though Lucy had called and left a reminder on voice mail, Diana couldn’t be bothered to show up on time. Lucy had skimmed the paper, reviewed her schedule, made notes on a contract she was revising, and read the next chapter in her mystery – and Diana still hadn’t waltzed in the door.

The customer in the next booth was drinking such strong coffee that Lucy was starting to feel sick. Sick was good, she reminded herself. The waistband on her skirt digging into her skin was good. Crying over Titanic with Julie Saturday night was good. But the coffee – if Diana didn’t get here soon, her anxiety was going to ensure that the coffee was not good.

Five minutes before the deadline she’d given herself for leaving, Diana came rushing in.

“I know I’m late, Luce, I’m sorry.” How many times had she heard this in her life? Diana looked flushed this morning, but not as hung over as usual for Monday, and she slid into the booth with more energy than Lucy had seen her exhibit in a long time. “How are you doing this morning? Things okay? You sounded so secretive last night—”

Lucy reached out, took her sister’s hand, and shoved Diana’s jacket sleeve away from her wrist.

Silence between them. She must have sliced herself up royally; the bandage covered more area than the last time. Well, that explained Richard’s cryptic requirement for the negotiations. He’d known already that Diana had tried to kill herself again, so this must have happened before he’d left with his mystery woman on Friday night.

She stared at her sister. Diana stared back until her lashes flickered, and she pulled her hand away and reached for a menu.

“What happened?” Lucy couldn’t believe how calm her voice was. She felt anything but calm. Richard had known. Tom must have known. Certainly Diana had known! And not one of them had bothered to tell her. She was getting tired of everyone sheltering her as if she were made of glass. Diana was her problem to deal with. “When?”

“Friday,” muttered Diana. “Will it make you sick if I get fried eggs?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “When Friday?”

Diana was studying the menu religiously. “I’m thinking pancakes then, or waffles. Those shouldn’t bother you. And OJ instead of coffee—”

Lucy jerked the menu away from her. “Forget food, Di. What happened?”

“Oh, honestly!” Diana yanked the menu back. “Stop obsessing about it! Friday, okay? I was at Daddy’s with Laurie, and—”

Lucy felt herself about to become seriously unglued. “What do you mean, Laurie? What was she doing over there?”

“Waffles and OJ,” Diana said to the waitress. “And a side of bacon and biscuits. Thanks.” She made a production of putting the menu back in its holder while Lucy sat there fuming. Then she settled back against the seat, clasped her hands in front of her, and gave Lucy a look that promised to be open and honest and was anything but. “She came over to help me clean. Oh, did I tell you, we found those checks you’ve been looking for?”

_______________

Inside, the cool air brushed their faces. Laura pushed the subpoena towards Richard and set a late-night dinner out for Max before her cat could deposit the rest of his fur on Richard’s suit. He worked beside her, setting the kettle on for her tea, measuring the ground beans into the coffee maker, pulling down mugs from the cupboard. How comfortable it felt, the two of them, working side by side, performing these small domestic tasks – no, she wasn’t going to succumb to what-might-have-been. The subpoena had been a rude awakening. Eleven years of separation or not, Richard still had a wife with an interest in his past and a desire for revenge.

And she not only knew about that past now, but she had the most compelling evidence of all in her daughter.

She heard herself say, “I don’t have any papers. Why does Di think I do?”

Richard carried his coffee over to the trestle table and held out a chair for her. “Actually,” he said when she sat down, “you may have something and you don’t know it.”

“I don’t have anything,” said Laura. “If you’re thinking about those tapes—” Francie’s foray into the world of erotic fiction. She shuddered. “All her stuff is in storage. I can’t imagine those tapes would be good after all these years.”

“Not the tapes.” He shook his head. “I got rid of those years ago. No, what you may have is a burgundy book with gold lettering on the front – it’s her flight log, and I signed and dated every lesson as her instructor. It completely slipped my mind until I was filling out my flight log yesterday. I’m certain she took it with her. No one ever mentioned it. Did you see something like that?” He looked at her and exhaled. “Yes, I see you did.”

She’d seen that book every weekend during the final spring of Francie’s life. “Cam signed it when he gave her lessons in ’91. I know exactly where it is.” From the look on his face, that was not welcome news. “But it’s okay, really it is! It’s in storage with the rest of her stuff.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Richard said flatly. “Read the wording. If it’s in your control—”

She touched his arm. “But it’s not, that’s just it! After—” she took a breath and plunged ahead as his eyes shadowed— “after Francie died, I was sick for a while, so Cam had his admin pack up her stuff and rent a storage space. I never had the key. He always kept it in his desk drawer. Everything is probably still there – I’m certain he never gave it another thought.”

He drew a breath and said patiently, “You don’t understand. You’re his heir, so I assume you inherited the furniture. That’s what this whole brouhaha about the piano is about, isn’t it? That means the desk, and its drawers, and its contents, belong to you. So, yes, you do control it.” She started to speak, and he overrode her. “Listen, Laura, I’m no lawyer, but I’ve dealt with subpoenas for years. Architects get dragged into lawsuits all the time. You may be a thousand miles away, but the desk and its contents are still in your control.”

“But that’s it, Richard!” She smiled triumphantly. “I wrote an email tonight giving Mark the desk. I thought it was his all along. It belonged to their father at the bank. How was I to know? I haven’t thought about that key for years. Mark wrote me this plaintive email about how I could take every stick of furniture and would I please let him keep that one thing – why are you laughing?”

“Oh, God.” He covered his eyes with his hand. “I can just imagine Kevin Stone’s reaction to the timing of your transfer of that desk. Well, here’s the good news. On the face of it – my signing that flight log was no more incriminating than your husband signing it. It links her to me, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because you’re not going to testify.”

He acted as if he had a magic wand to make it all disappear. “Lucy said she couldn’t help me, since she’s your lawyer. So she’s going to talk to a friend of hers and see if he’ll represent me.”

He nodded. “She told me. It’s fine that you’re getting a lawyer, but I promise you that you won’t need one.”

Laura was getting tired of those words. “You keep saying that. How can you make this go away?”

Richard reached into his briefcase, pulled out a blue-backed sheaf of papers, and put it in her hands.

“I filed for divorce this afternoon,” he said. “Diana was served at the Tavern this evening.”

If he’d meant to knock the breath out of her, he succeeded. She stared at him in shock. She must have imagined his words; he hadn’t said what she thought she’d heard. He hadn’t stepped off the precipice so abruptly; he hadn’t tossed away eighteen years of marriage – miserable years, but, still, eighteen – for her. He hadn’t decided to cut the love of his life out of his life for her.

But he had. He’d laid the petition in her hands in the same way that Max liked to bring her his dead bug trophies. Maybe, she thought hysterically, he wanted her to pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he was.

He was divorcing Diana.

“Why?” she whispered.

He paused for a moment. “It’s time.”

She nodded, dazed, and looked down at the petition. Richard Patrick Ashmore, Complainant, vs. Diana Renée Abbott Ashmore, Defendant…. Plain words on a paper. Eighteen years of marriage, the end of the fairy tale, right here in her hand. She bit her lip and felt tears bathing her eyes. Stupid to cry, she hadn’t even cried when the FedEx package had arrived in London with Cam’s divorce petition, but no fairy tale had ended there. No Prince Charming had danced with his Sleeping Beauty at City Hall in San Francisco.

She paged through the petition, unseeing. He said nothing, he justified nothing. He merely waited while she absorbed the reality that in her hands lay the end of one dream and – no, she wouldn’t think it, wouldn’t wonder if it could be the beginning of another. This was a tragedy. Two people who’d been in love beyond all thought were finally admitting that their love had come up short, that they hadn’t well lost the world for each other.

Buying Links: Book 2

Amazon Kindle Store ($2.99)

Amazon.com (paperback)

Buying Links: Book 1

Kindle Version

Paperback from Amazon.com

Lindsey Forrest, a lead writer/editor for an international information company, writes about income tax but prefers to dream of heroes and heroines and grand romance. With the publication of her trilogy, she checks off the top entry on her bucket list. She lives in north Texas with her family and cat and has a five-year plan for becoming a full-time novelist and editor of indie fiction. When she isn't working or writing, she amuses herself with reading, needlepointing, tramping around historical sites and houses, and outbidding everyone who gets in her way on Ebay.

Visit Lindsey's web site at www.lindseyforrest.com. You can also learn more about the Ashmore's Folly Trilogy at www.ashmoresfolly.com.

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SALE BLITZ

Title: 

  All Who Are Lost

Series: 

 Ashmore's Folly, Book 1

Author:  

Lindsey Forrest

Genre(s): 

 adult contemporary fiction, women's literature, romance

To celebrate the upcoming release of All That Lies Broken, Book 2 in her Ashmore's Folly series, author Lindsey Forrest has put book #1, All Who Are Lost, on sale at an absolutely unbelievable price! This is a reading experience that should NOT be missed! The sale begins Monday, June 15th and will end on June 30th. See what you've been missing!

Synopsis

Three women.

Three sisters growing up in the shadow of their father’s obsessive drive to recapture his lost muse, the woman he threw into the cold Irish sea.

One man.

The scion of a great family estate in Virginia, falling in love with the wrong sister, blind to the ice at her core.

Too many betrayals.

A girl, rejected and ignored by the man she loved, choosing to walk away forever.

A man living a life of regret and sacrifice, trying to atone for a New Year’s Eve kiss that wrecked his marriage.

A fragile wife, lost in her own lies, unable to halt the devastation she set in motion with one vicious lie.

A woman haunted by a moment of blood and violence, when she reached out and took a man who didn’t belong to her.

One last chance.

On a clear summer day, Laura St. Bride’s life changes in smoke and flame. Even as the fires of grief rage on, a man reaches out from the past and tells her to come home.

Can she truly go home again?
Can sisters, bred to be bitter rivals from birth, learn to forgive the sins of the past?
Can a family, once smashed apart, find peace and rebirth?

What do you do
when the love of your life
is the last person you should love?

Can a man and a woman cast aside the violence of their past
and reach out for the last love of their lives?

Excerpt

In his life, Richard Ashmore had made three mistakes with women. Not that three was so unusual; no man reached his thirties without suffering the particular pain that women could inflict and without inflicting it in return. He was luckier than most men, perhaps, for he had erred early and grievously, and caution had been driven into him like a bullet. He carried with him permanent reminders of his follies: a marriage gone disastrously wrong, the painful conscience that he had not always been the upright man his daughter loved, a shoulder that ached in cold weather.

Ah, Diana, unattainable once attained, a monumental mistake made in all the first flush of adolescent desire and pride. Too young to marry, too blindly in love to recognize the ice behind her eyes, he had turned a deaf ear to his father’s warning that his princess was hollow at her core.

Francie, silver-quick smile and hungry eyes, and his own need for the warmth of a woman’s arms. The dangerous combination of a magnum of champagne on New Year’s Eve and three years of exile from his marriage bed had erupted into a springtime of madness. The gods had demanded their due: a marriage wrecked beyond salvage, a family foundered, two young women cast adrift.

And the third.... Oh, but even now, all these years later, he stood before her picture, and he still did not understand. She watched him from the poster, more animated in flat gray and white than he had ever known her. But he knew those eyes. He knew how they adored him, how they burned in fever and desire, how they haunted odd moments of the day and dark pockets of the night.

Diana. Francie. Laura the Cat.

He supposed he had a special weakness for shuttered eyes that invited a man in with promises implied and unkept, for wild autumn hair spread gloriously across a pillow, for tall, elegant figures and clear, sweet voices and beguiling, destructive ways. They all three had this and more in common, and why not? They were sisters, after all.

I know you’re out there somewhere....

She stared out across a crowded London square, unknowing, unseeing, the serenity of her face captured in the flat surface of the theatrical poster. The light noon rain ran down in small diagonal rivers across her, crinkling the smooth plain of her forehead and the gentle cut of her jaw. She wept, large, abandoned tears that warred with the lovely turn of her mouth.

The Great Cat, they called her.

Many of those who had come to Leicester Square, hunting for half-price theater tickets, gravitated to her, beckoned by her eyes, lured on by the legend of mist and mystery that surrounded her. A few balked at the price of “An Intimate Evening with Cat Courtney.” Others realized to their sorrow that they had conflicting tickets, meals planned with in-laws, flights to catch. Three nights only, announced the poster, and this, unfortunately, was the last night.

She smiled out at them all, oblivious to their concerns, uncaring of the rain wetting her face.

The American tourist who came walking into the square, his daughter by his side, did not notice her at first. The rain had stopped for a few minutes, and other matters engaged him: folding up a handy umbrella, glancing at his watch, reading a guide book over his daughter’s shoulder. For one minute longer, he remained merely a tourist on a much-needed vacation. For one minute longer, the Great Cat never crossed his mind.

But the Great Cat could wait, and for this man she would wait forever.

She had left him a decade before, both of them reeling from the blood of their folly, in a deserted cottage on a desolate shore on the other side of the world. Had she eyes to see, she would know him instantly.

Eventually, respite ended. Eventually, Richard Ashmore lifted his head, his eyes scanning across the theatrical posters, in search of an evening’s entertainment suitable for a young girl. The titles made little impression – Les Miserables, The Graduate, Noises Off – until he saw her and everything around her blurred into oblivion.

He knew her too, instantly.

Laura.

His worst mistake.

Buying Link

amazon.com

About the Author

Lindsey Forrest, a lead writer/editor for an international information company, writes about income tax but prefers to dream of heroes and heroines and grand romance. With the publication of her trilogy, she checks off the top entry on her bucket list. She lives in north Texas with her family and cat and has a five-year plan for becoming a full-time novelist and editor of indie fiction. When she isn't working or writing, she amuses herself with reading, needlepointing, tramping around historical sites and houses, and outbidding everyone who gets in her way on Ebay.

Visit Lindsey's web site at www.lindseyforrest.com. You can also learn more about the Ashmore's Folly Trilogy at www.ashmoresfolly.com.

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5-Star Amazon Reviews...

"I read the reviews for this book and expected a good read but nothing prepared me for the intensity of emotions that the author brought to life in this deeply rooted saga.
With the stories of three families intertwined we see how one person’s hope is another’s hate. How one person’s loss is another’s passion and how life creates good and bad moments in the blink of an eye. This is a haunting read and the author draws you in to the lives of the characters while adding layer after layer of family dreams, hopes, desires and despair. Prepare to feel the joy as well as the agony of characters throughout this read. The story is solidly written and leaves you wanting more so I’m glad this is just the first book and can hardly wait for what may be coming next..."

"WOW!!!! I just finished "All Who Are Lost" by Lindsey Forrest. I LOVED it! I am an avid reader, but this is not my usual genre. Or SO I THOUGHT! This book spans multiple genre's ( romance, drama, mystery & intrigue, and even historical)! There are so many twists and turns to the story, and so many individual stories with twists and turns it literally made my head spin and I had a hard time putting it down.It is the 1st of a trilogy, and I can not wait for book 2! I think this is a Hallmark mini series prospect! I absolutely highly recommend this book!"

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