A warm welcome to author Amy Lane joining us today to talk about new release “A Few Good Fish”.

Bill Bob

By Amy Lane

 

I am used to requests for different characters. “More Dex and Kane!” “More Mackey!” “More Lucy Satan!”

 

But I have to admit, requests for Billy Bob took me by surprise.

 

Billy Bob is Jackson’s snaggled-toothed, tatter-eared, recently spayed, three-legged tomcat.  He was originally Siamese and before the “unfortunate incident” that cost him his leg and his balls, he humped everything that moved.

 

Including the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Albert.

 

Billy Bob is Jackson’s best friend. Jackson lets him out every night and Billy Bob chooses to come back. (Of course, this activity stops after the “unfortunate incident”. Billy Bob’s favorite activity becomes eating, and they have to worry about what’s happening on the kitchen table when they’re gone.)

 

And you’d think someone like Ellery—someone with an immaculate house who had needed to petition for a goldfish while growing up—would cause a stink about Billy Bob, uh, stinking up his house. But for Ellery, the cat has come to represent something else entirely.

 

This cat holds the keys to Jackson’s soul.

 

Ellery scrubbed at his face with one hand and—incongruously enough—petted Billy Bob as he sat on the table with the other.

Jackson’s snaggletoothed, three-legged battered Siamese cat looked like an escapee from a horror movie about cats, but boy, had he been glad when Ellery had gotten home that morning to feed him and clean his litter box.

For his part, Ellery was getting more and more used to the creature’s way of closing his eyes and purring until he drooled—usually all over Ellery’s suits, but Ellery didn’t care. He’d never owned a cat before, but this cat certainly decided he owned Ellery as well as Jackson, and that was fine all around.

Where Jackson went, Billy Bob went, and right now the cat wasn’t moving from Ellery’s house off American River Drive.

 

Ellery is reasonably certain that as long as the cat stays on his kitchen table, Jackson will stay under his roof, and given that Jackson was a bit of a tomcat himself, Ellery is relieved.

 

Billy Bob is Jackson’s touchstone, his brother in spirit, the one creature who has never let him down and never denied him affection.

 

And Ellery knows that’s a hard scale line to measure up to—but he also knows why it’s necessary.

 

Jackson was a tomcat too. He was a wanderer, who gave affection to everybody but loyalty only to only a select few. He only trusted what he had in the now, and never had faith that anything good—like love and security—would be left over for him in the next day, or week, or month.

 

But Jackson fed Billy Bob, gave him unconditional affection, and talked to him like he mattered, and that damned cat kept coming back, until finally he and Jackson were inseparable.

 

Ellery has the same plan to keep Jackson. Feed him. Give him unconditional affection. Treat him like he matters.

 

And God, he wants Jackson to stay.

 

So Billy Bob is Ellery’s road map to how to keep Jackson, and Jackson’s roadmap for how to respond to love.

 

Funny, how something as unexpected as a snaggle-toothed three-legged tomcat can come to mean home.

 

The car was sturdy and it performed, and better the car than Jackson, even though Jackson left little rolled-up receipts and fast-food wrappers in the back—an obsessive habit Ellery hadn’t had the heart to break.

Jackson’d had so few things that were his in his life. That habit, the duplex he’d been living in when they met, a battered car, and a battered three-legged tomcat.

And Ellery.

The car had been destroyed in their first week and his half of the duplex shot up and then donated to young people getting their life back together. The tomcat was currently living in their house and had adopted Ellery, making Jackson not sole owner anymore.

 

 

Ellery knows he has Jackson because Billy Bob’s his now, too. But like any cat, you need to keep feeding it so it’ll come back. Ellery needs to feed Jackson all the love he can stand.

 

And then feed him some more.

Blurb

 

Fish Out of Water: Book Three A tomcat, a psychopath, and a psychic walk into the desert to rescue the men they love…. Can everybody make it out with their skin intact?  PI Jackson Rivers and Defense Attorney Ellery Cramer have barely recovered from last November, when stopping a serial killer nearly destroyed Jackson in both body and spirit. But their previous investigation poked a new danger with a stick, forcing Jackson and Ellery to leave town so they can meet the snake in its den. Jackson Rivers grew up with the mean streets as a classroom and he learned a long time ago not to give a damn about his own life. But he gets a whole new education when the enemy takes Ellery. The man who pulled his shattered pieces from darkness and stitched them back together again is in trouble, and Jackson’s only chance to save him rests in the hands of fragile allies he barely knows. It’s going to take a little bit of luck to get these Few Good Fish out alive!

Buy Links: 

Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

Mother, knitter, author, wife, fur-baby wrangler, dreamer–Award winning writer Amy Lane writes romance because the voices in her head are real and she wants them to be happy at the end.