The story behind the story: Pink Neon Dreams
The Making of Pink
Neon by Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy
Bíonn dhá insint ar scéal agus dhá leagan
déag ar amhrán
My
favorite Irish proverb says there are at least two versions of every story and
a dozen version of every song. As a
writer and author I agree. When I first
began my upcoming new release, a contemporary romance from Evernight Publishing,
titled Pink Neon Dreams, I had a
beginning and I thought I knew how it would take shape and form. An earlier
edition, titled Pink Neon has gone
the way of the dinosaur and risen, stronger, better, edited with a finer hand,
and emerged as a proverbial phoenix from the fire. So, yes, there are two versions of this story
but the newest, the one out on May 7, is the better.
The novel
begins with a woman driving a vintage fire engine red GTO over the hills and
curves in the Ozarks, a woman too exotic to be a native with her dark skin and
corn-rowed braids. She’s brave, though,
and bold as she comes to start over, to begin again in a different place in
order to realize her dreams. Here’s the
blurb and when I have the cover, I’ll share it too.
Cecily Brown lands in Branson, Missouri after a divorce to start over.
She plans to make her long standing dreams of owning a boutique called ‘Pink
Neon’ come true and forget the decade she spent trapped in a hellish marriage
to millionaire jeweler Willard Bradford VI. But, her ex-husband managed
to get murdered on the steps of his mansion but Cecily doesn’t care. Her old
life is history and she’s eager to move forward with the grand opening of her
boutique. Her first customer at Pink Neon is a man, dark and mysterious and
their attraction is intense. So is their first date which ends in intimacy and
soon, she’s all but inseparable from Daniel Padilla.
Life’s good until Padilla admits he’s an FBI agent sent to check Cecily
out. She reacts with anger but as she learns she’s become the FBI’s favorite
suspect, she has to trust Daniel if she can trust anyone at all. As the
investigation heats up, she ends up heading south with him to Texas, as she and
her FBI lover try to discover who the real killer might be. But danger lurks
and it’s going to get rough before they straighten things out….if they can
So Pink Neon grew from a story about one
woman seeking a new life and a fresh start to a romance between two seemingly
unlikely people but it works. I built it
page by page, scene by scene.
Here’s a little taste to whet your appetite:
Tell
her, you bastard. Just spit it on out
and handle her reaction. She’s going to
be pissed but better now than after you make love again. He struggled to find a way to say it so it wouldn’t seem so damn bad
or make him out a villain. Daniel wanted
to make her understand why he’d kept silent about it until now. Somehow he needed to spin it so she wouldn’t
hate him.
Deep in thought, he didn’t speak for a few
minutes, longer than he thought because Cecily leaned over and shook his
shoulder. He inhaled her sweet, rich
perfume and wanted to kiss her first.
The wine he’d drunk sent dizzy spirals though his head when he moved.
“Daniel?” she inquired. “Is something
wrong? You zoned out on me.”
Her concern made it harder, but he looked
up. “Cecily, I need to tell you something before we go any farther. I should’ve told you up front, but I didn’t
know it’d be like this between us.”
She frowned and made a furrow between her
eyes. “Whatever it is, just tell me. How
bad can it be?”
“Try not to hate me, okay?”
“You’re starting to scare me, sugar.”
“All right, I’ll just say it straight out
– I’m an FBI agent out of the Kansas City office. They sent me here to check
you out.”
Her amazing eyes turned to onyx. “For what?”
“Your ex-husband’s murder and the theft of
two million dollars in jewels.”
The words hung between them, almost
tangible enough to touch. Daniel watched
as the information sank into her consciousness and saw the terrible knowledge
change the expression on her face. A
minute passed, then two, maybe three. “You think I did it?” she said.
“No,” Daniel said. “I know you didn’t.”
Cecily stood up and stood still. She reminded him of the eerie calm before a
tornado slams out of the sky or the pause prior to a thunderstorm unleashing
fury from the heavens. An almost pagan
fear of the unknown seized his chest and he tensed, his earlier relaxation
gone.
“How?” she asked.
Aware what he said might well either save
his ass or trash it, Daniel came to his feet and faced her. “Everything I’ve
come to know about you tells me you didn’t kill him and you wouldn’t. You’re a hell of a lot more straightforward
than that, and I know you didn’t take the jewels. And my gut says so, too, for whatever it’s
worth.”
“Uh-huh,” she said with her usual bravado,
but he saw the tears glinting in her eyes. “Right. Want to explain why it took so long to
mention your career, G-man?”
He couldn’t. But he tried. “I don’t know. I was afraid you’d be pissed at me.”
“Yeah, I am,” Cecily cried in a voice
sharp with the lilt of the Chicago neighborhood she’d called home. “That’s why
you choked, on the fishing pier, isn’t it? You didn’t want to tell me.”
“That’s true, I didn’t because I already
knew how attracted I was to you,” Daniel said.
It sounded lame even to him.
“So how do I know any of this is real?”
she asked. A tear slipped from her eye
to trail down her cheek. He wanted to wipe it away, but he didn’t dare touch
her, not now. “Maybe it’s just all some bullshit FBI tactics to get me to
confide in you.”
Her accusation hit him with force and
Daniel knew, reeling, he cared very much for this woman. Hell, maybe he loved her. He’d never been one to believe in ‘love at
first sight’ but he couldn’t deny the powerful attraction he’d felt from the
second he saw Cecily. Nor could he
explain the closeness he felt to her or why he’d confided things he never spoke
about.
“It’s not, querida,” he said. “It’s real, realer than anything I’ve felt in
years. I’ve been dead inside, but you
revived me. Believe me. I don’t lie.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Except when
you don’t mention who the hell you are and what you’re doing.”
She nailed him to the wall with the truth.
Daniel felt the sting of it. “Cecily, listen to me.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not this
minute. I can’t breathe. I need to think.”
You
can find more out about me on my Facebook author page:
From
Sweet to Heat: The Romance of Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy
Pink
Neon
like my other titles will be available at Evernight Publishing, Amazon.com,
Barnes and Noble, Bookstrand, Smashwords, and All Romance Ebooks.
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