Excerpt 

​Loch Ness wasn’t Scotland’s only body of water to boast a water monster; it was just the famous one. 

Connor rounded a curve and leaped into the cold, dark, deep water—so deep none truly knew how far the loch’s bottom descended. The sinuous bulk of the monster bumped him gently. It would not harm him for he belonged to the loch as much as it did. But the driver of the doomed car could not be so lucky. 

The monster had grasped the vehicle in its toothy jaws. Connor swam past the monster’s bulbous eye and realized he had to surface for air. He shot upward, gulped a lungful of air, and then dove back down, following the monster and its prize. Every so often, the monster would shake its head, the violent swish of the car through the murky water leaving whitish bubbles and eddies of disturbance. On one of those shakes, the vehicle’s passenger side door flew open and the car’s sole passenger floated out. Connor hoped the mysterious and ancient water dragon of Saorach did not realize that its fleshy prey had escaped the metal shell. 

He swam around the monster’s lithe, snakelike neck and grabbed a bit of cloth. Lungs burning, he needed air—desperately. The lake monster stilled and fixed a bushel basket sized eye upon him and the barely discernible body he grasped. 

Connor’s own eyes narrowed and he sent a warning to the monster to leave well enough alone. 

Do fola liom éileamh, ionúin Saorach. The claim rang clearly through his mind, vibrated through his flesh. He remembered those words from long ago and knew they were not for him that time. He gasped, sucking in a lungful of water. And his vision began to burn as much as his lungs. 
​

​When the weeping devolved into sniffles, he said gently, “What you did with Connor is not sinful. You’re married and it’s good that you enjoy one another.” 

“But it’s not normal. It’s wrong,” she insisted desperately. “I was married before … before this. Am I still married?”

Hamish trod delicately, straddling the line of doctrine and the whole world beyond which doctrine could not govern.

“You vowed to love your husband until death, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And then you died.”

​“But I did not die.”

He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, my dear, you did die. There is nothing left of the woman who was Maggie beyond the memories of what used to be.”

“That makes no sense, Hamish.”

“No, it doesn’t if you refuse to think beyond what you saw and knew. But you’ve seen and learned beyond the ordinary now. You met the water monster. You saw your physical body completely remodel itself. You exist beyond the ordinary as does Connor. You are beyond the normal rules of humanity.”

She said nothing, pondering his words. Then she asked, “But what about this … this thing I have with Connor?”

These next two weeks I'll be on vacation, so you'll get nothing in the way of organized thoughts.

May 10: Our younger son came home for a visit. He's stationed in Alaska, and I haven't seen him since Christmas 2017. (Yeah, Mommy got all misty-eyed at the airport.)

May 11: Yippee! New covers for the Russian Love series. (See below.) Credit for them goes to Cindy, who moonlights as an editor and cover designer. I hope to meet her at the Summer Book Fair in August. I love the way she incorporated the original rose theme into the new covers.

May 12: Sure, it's Mother's Day. It's also the day my elder son graduates from the University of Dayton. Congratulations, young man! We only have a few more weeks with him before he heads to South Carolina and embarks upon a new career. Welcome to adulthood, son.

May 13: Happy birthday to me. (I'm old enough to know better, but that doesn't mean I care.)

May 28: I'll be back!