Billingsly Castle

So far, I've set all of my novels in Georgia - more specifically metro Atlanta - because that's where I grew up. I know the feel of the region: the textures, the tastes, the smells, the runny, gummy humid heat of it. I can write about it with familiarity. I flavor the landscape with both real and imagined places, relying on Georgia landmarks to add realism, and using made-up restaurants and stores here and there to give myself more creative flexibility.

I love my Georgia; I love living in it, and I love writing it. But there was just no way Delta Brooks's mother was going to allow her only child to be married locally. Ha! Mike and Delta's wedding in Keep You had to be exotic, and because I want to go there myself, I picked Ireland. Billingsly is an example of one of my fake locales: fake name, fake history, but inspired by real five-star castle resorts. Ashford Castle in Mayo, on Lough Corrib, was a rough inspiration for the location of my fictional Billingsly Castle.

Click on the lick below to go to the home page (it's gorgeous!) and turn up the volume on your computer if you want to hear the Irish background music.

http://www.ashford.ie/index.html

 

And check out Keep You at Amazon.



Better Than You: part 40

**And so we've reached the end of this particular adventure. I learned a lot about Delta, about Mike, and about my own writing in the process. Never turn down the chance to tell a story, I say, and I hope it's been as enjoyable to read as it was to write. I'm going to try to pitch this one, so, lovely readers, if any of you might feel so kind as to give me some feedback, I would be much obliged. Thanks for sticking with me!

Also, if you liked Better Than You, and want more, check out Keep You and Dream of You over on the sidebar to read Jo and Jordan's stories.**

 

40.

 

Three Years Later

 

“You can come by tonight if you want,” Delta said into the cell phone clenched between her ear and shoulder. She hoisted Evan up higher on her hip, felt her purse sliding, sliding, sliding…and just managed to fit her key into the front door. “We’ve got to get rid of this place,” she told Christy, her real estate agent, as she let herself in and heeled the door shut. Evan was wriggling like a too-big worm and she set him down on his sturdy toddler legs, her purse smacking down against the floor, lipstick and spare change spilling. With an inward sigh, she stooped to retrieve her things, watching Evan go tottering off toward the living room; he was two and mobile and very much a Walker – she’d long since stopped trying to gentle him.

 

“Will you be downsizing?” Christy asked from the other end of the line.

 

“No,” Delta said, smiling to herself as she picked up a tampon and crammed it down deep in the bottom of her purse. “I’m pregnant again. We need a bigger place.”

 

Better Than You: part 39

 

39.

 

His daughter in all aspects, Delta was never surprised by any of Dennis’s edicts. But she wasn’t prepared for the grudging respect he offered Mike. Apparently, Mike threatening to beat his ass – for her no less – had triggered some well-concealed, primitive male side that was only impressed with chest-beating and territory-marking. Whatever. She was just glad they were getting along. Her father asked her, at that horrible but necessary first dinner post-Ireland, if she would have truly stood by and let Mike attack him. Chin lifted, she’d told him yes, and that the bigger man always won out in that sort of thing. Dennis hadn’t missed her double meaning. And the wedding was back on.

 

They were going to get married in the Baptist church. And migrate to Dennis’s country club for the reception. It would be the wedding they were supposed to have had in the first place.

 

But first…

Better Than You: part 38

 

38.

 

Mike’s phone rang at the bottom of the stairs and he answered it with a tired-sounding,“Yeah?”

 

Delta toed off her pumps and set them neatly beneath the coat rack in the foyer while he had a short conversation with whoever was on the other line, gave his thanks, then hung up.

 

“Mitch,” he explained. “His brother’s in insurance and I needed to get an address.”

 

She nodded, not wanting to press for info that was clearly none of her business.

 

He rubbed the back of his neck, expression reluctant. “Tam and I hafta take care of something tomorrow morning.”

 

“Okay.”

 

He watched her and she realized that he was waiting, wondering which one of them would initiate the painful series of apologies that needed to be spoken. He would, his wounded green eyes told her, submit to her and come groveling if that’s what it took. But she knew, as she tried again to swallow the lump in her throat, that she didn’t want him to do that. She didn’t want to hear what a hero he was and then force him to beg. He was a caveman – her caveman – and she didn’t want to take that away from him.

Better Than You: part 37

37.

 

She went home: to her parents’ house, to her old room, to the life she’d left behind years before. People said – so many mindless people repeating overused phrases they didn’t understand – that you couldn’t go home. That wasn’t true. Her home was unchanged, and sleeping between the fluffy covers of her childhood bed, she was no different than she’d been back then; walking across the threshold had catapulted her back in time, to a place where she was uncertain and grasping, lonely and crushed, grieving over something so precious that going on without it felt insurmountable.

 

Delta had never before taken vacation time for anything personal, but she’d already secured the days she’d need for her honeymoon. Going into work would have been such an obvious sign, her coworkers would have been whispering behind her back. So she took her honeymoon in the sultry, humid escape of the garden, reading, avoiding her parents and their hateful glares, steeling herself for the inevitability of retrieving her furniture, and most of all, analyzing every moment that had passed between her and Mike. Not just in Ireland, but before, from the moment she’d laid eyes on him in her store to the moment she’d watched his wide shoulders disappearing through the crowds at Hartsfield-Jackson when they’d landed. She recalled every smile, every touch, every lingering moment of eye contact, every kiss, every word, sweet or otherwise.

 

She spent a week drowning herself in literature and torturing herself with the realization that had come to her.

 

Better Than You: part 36

36.

 

All the next day it rained. The white sweeps of satin, the bundles of tulle, the ribbons and cut flowers, the lanterns, the red carpet…all of the finery took on water until it was as gray and muddied as the churning surface of the lake. There was no wedding. The castle didn’t notice. But Mike watched the breeze unwind a long, once-white silk ribbon from around the bole of a tree until it clung by just an end, lifting and diving in the rain. He let his forehead rest against the cool dampness of the window and looked all the way across the lawn, toward the lake and the place where he was supposed to be married.

 

He stayed in his room. Walt and Jordie and Dad all came by to sit on the side of the bed with him and offer wisdom – which was none. Tam had found an earlier flight back to Dublin – no doubt he’d maxed out his credit card doing it.

 

His mom was the female to finally brave the door. It must not have been latched because she didn’t knock, but came in unasked. Mike knew it was her before she came and took the honorary place of advisor beside him on the bed; the smell of her perfume was something ingrained in his memory – in all the Walker children’s memories – and even if he’d dreaded it as a teenager, hiding smokes and porn mags under his bed, there was a comforting familiarity about it now.

 

Better Than You: part 35

35.

 

Dennis and Louise had not just a room, but a suite, complete with sitting room, and that was where the four of them now stood. At least, Mike stood, and Dennis was squared off from him, his tan hands braced on the back of an embroidered chair. Louise was sniffling into a wadded tissue in the matching chair. Delta, her hair wet and curling, was perched in the windowsill, watching the black night and the jagged tongues of lightning through the drapes left parted. Her profile ghostly white, dark lashes low on her cheeks, she was as breathtaking as always. And as cold and aloof as always.

 

“We need to talk,” Dennis had growled out in the hall, and Mike had followed him in here, thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’d be something like need shining in Delta’s eyes. But he’d been mistaken. And like hell was he enduring a lecture from this rich jackass for the fun of it.

 

“Look,” Mike started to turn for the door, mind still away with blood- and mud-spattered Tam and wherever he’d crawled with a bottle, “I don’t have time for this shit -,”

 

“You won’t go anywhere,” Dennis had a commanding, courtroom voice when he chose to use it, “until you’ve explained that damn Jerry Springer episode I just watched down there!”

 

A personal attack he could have handled; an attack on his family – and even if he was a miserable, sister-screwing ass right now, Tam was his family too – was too much to tolerate.

 

Better Than You: part 34

34.

 

As a very little girl, Delta had stood up at the counter in the laundry room, standing on a stool beside Mrs. Miller as the housekeeper’s hands deftly smoothed and folded every starched white napkin, setting them aside in tidy piles. Delta had always marveled at the simple magic of the task, the assuredness in Mrs. Miller’s hands – hands rough and worn and made for the precise rituals of the house. In her own world – the working, breathing, thriving bowels of the big house – Mrs. Miller had been a queen in her own stoic way. She knew things. She understood things. There was a steadiness about her that Delta had wished belonged to her mother instead.

 

One morning, after a particularly volatile fight between her parents in the drunken aftermath of a dinner party, Delta had watched the folding of the clean napkins and announced, “I’m never getting married.”

 

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Mrs. Miller had scolded with a smile in her voice. “Of course you will.”

 

“I won’t,” Delta had insisted, kicking her chin up. “Not ever.”

 

Better Than You: part 33

 

33.

 

The rain fell softly, gracefully, gray and gentle over Billingsly. Delta watched it through one of the windows that overlooked the lawn from the mezzanine, letting her mind go spinning away from everything that was wrong until she was just a girl watching rain through a window; she took a slow breath and let the place – the castle and its majesty – pull her up out of her mental muck.

 

It couldn’t last, though. Another wedding had upstaged hers, a little fact her mother had failed to mention, and the mezzanine and ballroom weren’t available for the ceremony. Maureen had told her this like she already knew it: “But your mum assured me…” Louise hadn’t even bothered to tell her she’d been incorrect in her thinking for weeks.

 

Ryan Atkins had come out the loser in a bar brawl with Tam and his face, according to reports, looked like an overripe plum. She knew why Tam had attacked him – the motive, anyway – but what she didn’t know was why Tam would sulk and fight rather than take his girl back. He, like Mike, like her mother, like everyone, seemed determined to disrupt the wedding at every turn.

 

She was exhausted by it all, and not sure she’d eaten since lunch the day before.

 

Better Than You: part 32

 

32.

 

Dad had a football. It was the first good news Mike had heard since leaving his house for the airport. After he was forced to trudge back down to the dining room and eat dinner without his girl, Randy told him about the football, and about the game they were having first thing the next morning. It had been raining – still was – the grass wet under their shoes, mud sliding, raindrops pelting them. It had been the perfect exertion, the best way to shake off the mood he was in…

 

Or, at least, it had been. Until Tam had put his elbow in Ryan’s eye. The others had bought the “it was an accident” story, but Mike knew better.

 

“You wanna explain that to me?” he asked, and paced a circle through the rapidly-expanding puddle that had dripped off his clothes and down onto the tile of the vestibule.

 

Tam had his arms folded, his wet clothes clinging to skin that almost looked blue in the cold gray light, his hair plastered flat to his head and dripping at the ends, leaned back against the wall. “It was an accident,” he repeated in a wooden voice and stared at the opposite wall.

 

Better Than You: part 31

31.

Regina was awake and sitting up in bed, flipping through a Cosmo, the TV babbling away when Delta got back to the room. She wasn’t ever self-conscious in front of her best friend, but with darkening bruises on her skin and her underwear stuffed into her purse, her hair tangled beyond what her fingers had been able to repair, she felt a shameful blush creep across her skin as she walked in front of the TV on her way to her bed.

Regina’s sex radar must have gone off. Her head came up and a smile curled the corners of her mouth as she watched Delta round the bed and go to her suitcase on the floor. “Someone get lost on her way back from dinner?”

Better Than You: part 30

30.

 

Mike slept like hell. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shared a room with another guy – college, he guessed – and while he might have fallen asleep on the couch every so often while Tam and Jordan were over, all of them waking in the small hours to realize they were still in their chairs and slumped on the floor and not at all comfortable, Lance’s snoring and restless turning kept him awake. Or maybe that was the mix of anger and regret swirling around in his gut thanks to Delta. Or maybe being told he couldn’t share a room with her had left him needing to share a room with her, chafing under authority.

 

Whatever the reason, he was glad for the morning. Breakfast was already being cleared away from the dining room as he made his way to it. He snagged an apple off a passing trolley cart of leftovers wheeling down the hall and ducked through one of the sets of French doors. The outer doors to the patio were open, the morning bright, a breeze stirring the drapes and bringing in the smells of wet earth and lake water. Guests lingered at the tables with coffee and tea, and only two of them were familiar to him. He’d thought he’d run into Delta, but then he remembered she probably had some damned photo something or other, and bit into his apple: it was a Granny Smith, tart and cracking. Then he joined Jordan and Tam where they sat talking about something that had Jordan leaning over the table in earnest, gesturing with his fork.

 

Better Than You: part 29

 

29.

 

Mike was waiting for her outside the main dining room in a clean white shirt and pressed khakis. He’d showered, she could tell, because his hair was soft and shining. He looked just the way he was supposed to. It was his smile that faltered her step.

 

It wasn’t the smile he normally gave her – boyish and excited, hinting at aren’t I cute and you’re smoking hot. She’d come to lean on that smile, had let it into the cold corners of her heart and let it warm her, had stopped trying to steel herself against it. This smile, though, as he lingered in the hall, was coolly polite and subdued. No great amount of affection shone through his eyes. His feelings or his pride…something was hurt, and she knew it was her fault because of what had happened upstairs.

 

Now she had a man to cheer up in addition to welcoming the guests that waited on the other side of the open French doors – she could hear the buzz of voices, knew that dinner wouldn’t be served until she’d done her little speech bit. She forced her lips – they were stiff and heavy with fatigue – into what she hoped was a genuine smile and sidled up to her fiancé, slipped her arm through his.

 

Better Than You: part 28

** Short one tonight. I'll make up for it tomorrow!

28.

 

“…and through there…”

 

Delta didn’t listen to flaxen-haired Tilda who’d greeted them on the front steps. As they passed beneath the cavernous, hand-painted ceiling – it was alive with a forest full of cherubs and lounging nude women – Delta’s eyes went past the grand stair that spilled down from the mezzanine, a waterfall carpeted in crushed red velvet, to the ballroom that lay beyond. She’d seen it online and in the brochures, but the glimpse of gilt-framed paintings, cathedral ceilings and terrazzo floors was enough to take her breath away.

 

That is, it would have if she wasn’t already semi-breathless with nerves.

 

Better Than You: part 27

**Since this is a prequel-turned-parallel novel, I want to touch on some scenes from Keep You in a new light, but won't be redundant with others. So if parts seemed skipped over, it's because the scene was already set in Keep You. This is more of a new look at certain interactions from the other side and bonus material, if you will. Hope you all continue to enjoy!

 

 

27.

 

The morning they were to leave for Ireland, Delta’s alarm was set for three, but her eyelids flipped open at two. Totally awake. Startled from sleep by some snippet of a dream that was already receding and she couldn’t grab hold of.

 

Something was wrong.

 

She was alone in bed because she and Mike had spent the night in their respective places. Her apartment was bare, only the bed remained and after she left today, the movers would come disassemble it and take it to her parents’ home where she would store it. She should have slept over with Mike, but she’d been kept here by this nagging sense that, for the last night it belonged to her, she should stay in the apartment.

 

And now she was awake, and something was wrong.

 

Better Than You: part 26

26.

 

 

Jo hated parties so much she wasn’t even sure hate was a strong enough word. She detested the strappy little dress and sandals her sister had let her borrow, abhorred the way her heels kept sinking into the grass, absolutely wanted to scream every time anyone looked at her like she wasn’t supposed to be there. She could feel their judgment because she’d felt it from others her whole life. Normally it didn’t bother her. After Delta’s invitation to the nightclub, it was chafing against all of her nerves.

 

When Jordan happened past, she snagged the sleeve of his jacket. “Stay with me,” her request was more of an angry hiss, and he turned a lazy look on her.

 

“Stay?” One of his brows lifted. “But I’ve got, like…” his eyes went to the sky as he counted in his head, “at least ten bridesmaids I wanna meet.”

 

“You wanna bang,” she said with a snort. “I’m sure their tastes are more expensive than you.”

 

Better Than You: part 25

 

25.

 

“Oh my God,” Louise sounded like she might hyperventilate. “Oh my God…oh, Delta. It’s…it’s…” she clenched both hands together under her nose, eyes saucer wide, lips pulled back from her teeth in a clownish smile that was more than a little bit horrifying. “It’s…” she reached for an adjective again, huge eyes riveted on the mirror Delta stood in front of. “It’s amazing,” she finally said, shaking her head, highlighted dark locks spilling across her shoulders. “Aaamaaaaziiing, Delta.”

 

Then why, Delta wanted to know, did you fight me so hard on it?

 

Better Than You: part 24

 

24.

 

 

A year seemed so long a thing on paper, but in practice, it was only a heartbeat or two. A snow, a storm, a hot night and cool morning. New blossoms and the curled, brown edges of failing leaves. It passed so quickly that few took true note of all the small things – the snowflakes and daffodil tufts and spreading branches of trees. Humans are so stuck inside themselves they see the passage of time from one angle, through one lens, never understanding how they can so deeply alter the lives of others.

 

Delta’s year was punctuated by phone calls and consultations, roses and tiny sample cakes, veils and dress fittings and a thousand emails between her and a woman named Maureen from Billingsly Castle in Ireland. And through all of it, her mother became the most vicious, hideous, hell-bent-on-perfection mother of the bride anyone had ever seen. Louise had one daughter, one wedding to plan, and it was to be an affair that rivaled the royals. By May, Delta felt stretched so thin she had to remind herself that it was her wedding she was slaving over.

 

New Cover Art

I wanted to do something different for my Better Than You cover and exercise my rusty art skills. In keeping with the shoe theme, Delta's had to be, of course, nothing less than fabulous.

I sketched out her stilettos on heavyweight sketch paper.

Then used oil pastels for color. As much as I crave realism in fiction, realism in art is something I just can't capture. So I went for an intentionally fuzzy look with this project. Bold and artsy rather than delicate.

 



Then I (after lots of trial and error because I'm not a bit tech savvy) added in the text, and there we have it: my new cover art.

Better Than You: part 23

23.

 

“Oh my GOD!!” Sydney’s excited screech belonged on the other side of a shower curtain in a Hitchcock film. “It’s gorgeous, Delta!”

 

She should have known that there would be no literature discussed today at book club. Marisa de los Santos’s second novel paled in comparison to the rock that sparkled on Delta’s finger, and all the girls, her mother included, had formed a jostling semi-circle around her chair, eyes wide and mouths open.