Love's Unexpected Embrace

By Katherine L. Moore

Susan Drake works as an educator with a local school district.  A single divorced mother of two boys after a failed marriage of ten years.  Romance is one of the farthest things from her mind after surviving a philandering and emotionally abusive husband. Living alone in the large city with her sons, she unexpectedly finds love again within the arms of someone from her past.

            Joseph Bennett left home over ten years ago but now has returned home after a tour of duty in the military.  At a community function welcoming home their returning soldiers, Joseph meets and becomes reacquainted with a former high school sweetheart.  Several years has passed since he last saw her, but to him Susan is still as beautiful as ever.

They are drawn to each other.  Memories of young love not quite forgotten resurface.  Susan and Joseph explore the possibility that they were truly meant to be together. She feels that their passion for one another is an all-consuming connection, as it grows.  They have all but moved in together.  But there is trouble on the horizon for the lovers as unexpected and untimely events in their relationship are revealed.  Will the love they share be enough or does fate have other plans for them…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Moore
• Release date: May 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393551324

Katherine L. Moore

KATHERINE L. MOORE Katherine Moore, author of Elementals Mystic Warriors, the first book of her Mystic Warriors series, lives in Houston, Texas.  She is a native of Louisiana, which is where the basis for her love of reading and writing began. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Houston-Downtown.  She is a mother, business owner and a former educator.  While in her role as an educator she helped spread her love for reading and writing to expand the minds of the students she taught. Coming from a large family of eleven children, reading and writing gave her a way to have a space that she didn’t have to share.  She tells friends and family that she writes for herself because it gives her a sense of freedom.  With this freedom comes the ability to create characters and settings that are not locked into any one realm or reality.  When she writes she becomes a part of her characters. They exist in the domain, time and space that she creates. The fact that she has the capability of presenting her characters, that create pictures and emotions that stimulate the mind is an ability that she feels blessed to have.  “I love storytelling… paranormal-romance filled with action, sometimes conflicting personalities and intrigue is what I present…”, says Katherine Moore.  She attributes the love of her preferred genre of writing to the stories and legends handed down from the elders that surrounded her in her youth.

Book preview

The year was 1980.  In the city that I lived some people considered it not to be a very good year.  It was the year of the heat wave that everyone so proudly proclaimed they survived.  The weather really took its toll on the sick and elderly who had limited funds and could not afford to purchase air-conditioning.  There were reports of people suffering from heat exhaustion and heat stroke in their own homes.  It was the kind of sweltering temperatures that baked the land. You could literally fry and egg on the sidewalks and electrical fans were doing no damn good for anyone. They only circulated the heat, something that I knew of first hand.  For this story’s sake you can just call me Susan Drake.

IT WAS SPRING TIME and hot as hell. It was early April when I moved out of my two-bedroom apartment into a larger house.  My children were growing up and they needed more room and a yard to play in.  Some of my acquaintances thought I needed my head examined leaving the comfort of a place that was air conditioned to go to one that was not. This move was important to me because I actually hated apartment living.  It felt cramped and closed in, with the inability to move around and no space for two little energetic boys to play.  When they came home from school, they were forever stuck within the confines of four stereotypical antique white walls... just restricted.  The top priority of our personal need of not being confined and having freedom of movement was the necessity of providing running space for two growing boys.  That driving need to not be confined brought me to seek out a nice little house with a yard. But there was one drawback, no air conditioning, and I was pregnant expecting my third child! This move was also a decisive one in that the house was less expensive than the apartment I had been living in.  The air conditioning problem for my little home was solved by my close friend and confidant Sandy Brown.  Sandy was one of the few people outside of my sisters that knew about what was happening to me.   

Surviving a ten year bad marriage and coming out the other side intact for me was a blessing and a new beginning.  This pregnancy was a shocker.  One out of wedlock!  I was already the mother of two little boys from my previous marriage and I thought that I had taken precautions to avoid this kind of situation.  The little wonder growing inside of me you could say was totally unexpected.  This coming after years of separation, my divorce from my previous marriage had just been granted in November of the prior year.  When I realized I was expecting the unforeseen gift of a baby growing within my womb you could have knocked me over with a feather. I was almost speechless with the exception of the utterance of one of the dumbest questions directed at my doctor, How did I get pregnant?  Those exact words came from my stunned mouth.  Dr. Lewis chuckled and raised one eyebrow but before he began to speak, I threw up my hand in a gesture of exasperation to stop his words and I continued to speak. 

Doc, you know what I am asking and it is not the obvious. 

I took a deep breath and exhaled it in an effort to