Hello! Back again at Love Bytes, and happy to announce the winner of the $10 Gift Certificate offered last week is Serena. Congrats, Serena!

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The answers to last month’s matching ‘quiz’? Here they are:

• Yes
• Delsyn’s Blues
• Falling Snow on Snow
• Because of Jade
• Finding Jackie
• Sunset at Pencarrow
• Loving Luki Vasquez
• Saving Sonny James

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About Sylvre Linings

I did re-establish the group, and it’s up and running well. If you indicated interest in joining and I didn’t send you an invitation by message, it wasn’t deliberate! Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SylvreLinings/. Everyone interested in being part of a group for good news and happy moments, please join! The more the merrier and probably the more interesting, too.

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An excerpt from Work in Progress (almost finished), The Holiday Home Hotel.

The idea that the pillow smelled like Gunner Schiller was the most ridiculous Daren had entertained in a very long time. A fantasy, and not even a welcome one, because if indeed Gunny did show up in his life, Daren wasn’t about to jump for joy. He might long for the man’s touch in an unguarded moment, but in truth he’d never forgiven him for abandoning him, never stopped being angry that Gunny had turned what started out so sweet into something ugly, never stopped loathing him for being spineless. Daren didn’t dwell on these feelings often, because they hurt, and he’d rather savor the good life he’d made for himself than get bogged down in bitterness.

But now, with the remembrance of that awful time—laced with the many hard lessons men had taught him after that until he’d left civilization behind—Daren found the disappointment and pain was all still there. He stopped himself before letting it turn to rage, but yeah, he could have taken it that far. He walked out into the now cooling winter air, called Lelia, and when she came and jumped up to put her front paws on his shoulders, bent to bury his face in her thick white scruff.

And smelled daffodils.

Surprised out of his pique, Daren sniffed again.

“You smell like spring, Lelia.”

Daren then decided he definitely had overtaxed himself, what with being tired and then expending all that energy on a years old resentment that had no place in today’s world. The pillow never smelled like Gunner Schiller. Why would it? What kind of strange coincidence would bring an ultra-exclusive Christian from North Dakota to the Holiday Home Hotel, where diversity in everything was celebrated above all else and the whole purpose was inclusion. It would never happen. It hadn’t happened. Daren had imagined the scent because he was undersexed and overtired, the latter also explaining why he could have sworn he heard Lelia answer his statement about the smell of her fur with a laugh and a somewhat haughty “of course!”

He turned around and went back to the house, walked straight into his bedroom, kicked off his shoes, and fell on the bed. Just before he fell asleep he remembered to text Larin and let him know he needed a few hours. Just after he fell asleep, he dreamed the sweetest, hottest dream of Gunner Schiller he’d ever had. He woke up grouchy and not at all well-rested.
He wanted to go back to sleep, but he was way too disturbed to attempt it, so he got up and went for a traipse in the snow, grateful for Lelia’s company. As he often did when he took her for a walk, he let her lead the way. And when she led him to a dry log bare of snow that invited a sit-down right next to a bank of blooming Nootka roses, he made up all kinds of reasons why the little spring oasis could exist on this bitter winter day on the western slope of the Cascades. It was sheltered, he reasoned. An underground hot spring, perhaps. A quirk of the air currents.

One thing he didn’t consider even for a fleeting instant was the magic of an intervening goddess.

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Thanks for reading! See you next month.