Ritual and Rebirth

By Rebecca Milton

Twelve years of literary drought. She has a strange winter ritual that leads her into a summer of grumbling at tourists and avoidance. He has returned home to open his grandfather’s book store, see the ocean, jump start his life again. She is a curmudgeon. He is an optimist. She is hiding. He is seeking.

Can this writer, this architect and a cage in the front window of a book store lead to a lasting romance?

Most likely not, the shelves are stacked against them, but, then again, who would have thought The Odessy would have caught on like it did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AmorBooks.com
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005865191

Rebecca Milton

Rebecca Milton writes sizzling erotica and romance for the thinking person. On her free time she enjoys taking her Alaskan Malamute for long, long walks. He enjoys it too.

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Ritual and Rebirth

by

Rebecca Milton

Copyright 2022 Rebecca Milton

Distributed by Smashwords

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Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic sexual content and is intended for those over the age of 18 only.

***

Summer was approaching. Spring, with its floral explosions and it’s instinctual calls to rut and multiply, was spreading it’s engorged labial region and birthing the infancy of summer. It’s birth was marked by longer days, warm, starry nights, followed quickly by the feted, crimson afterbirth known as... Tourists.

The quiet desolation cloaking the streets of my little harbor town would soon be ripped asunder by the cloying madness that is the tourist season.

The arrival of summer also marked the end of my winter hibernation and the completion of my pre summer ritual. For the past 12 years, I have spent the winter months, beginning with the turning of the leaves, cloistered in my little house, writing my next book. I spent from the end of September to the beginning of May, hunched over my ancient Olivetti, feeding it paper, tapping the keys and filling page after page with words. Sentences. Ideas. Plots. Characters. Transitions. Twists and turns.

I subsisted on coffee, cigarettes and take out meals from The Fisherman’s Net, one of only three restaurants that operated year round in Bluffton. The other two probably have better food but, they are too far to walk to and I am a woman of deeply entrenched habits. Also, ‘the Net’, as the locals call it, still sells me full bottles of Jack over the bar. Another one of my hibernation staples. Five days before the resorts plant their umbrellas on the beach and the first of the beachcombers takes up residence in one of the many rental cottages that ribbon the coast, my yearly ritual plays out.

I rise with the sun, which is something I normally do anyway, but this day is different.