Second Honeymoon

By Katherine Moore

Second Honeymoon

Sometimes you don't need a second chance as much as you need a second opinion.

Amelia Davenport is struggling with her marriage. Sam's not a bad guy but he's not at all like her reckless, charming, irresponsible first husband Laurent Lavollie. They're teetering on the edge of divorce when…

…Laurent shows up on their doorstep and she and Sam are dragged into his drama. There's no love lost between the two men but when Amelia is kidnapped, they join forces to rescue her, a journey that will surprise and change them, while revealing some unexpected secrets.

Sometimes it's not just first husbands that need a second chance…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Valentine Publishing
• Release date: Jan 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215615959

Book preview

Chapter One: Sam

The first thing you should know about me is that I’m not physically impressive in any way. I’m not ugly, because ugly can be wildly sexy, especially if you’re a rock musician or French, but I’m not handsome either. I’m…pleasant…looking. Average. Someone you wouldn’t really look at twice and even if you did, wouldn’t remember an hour later. And that’s okay. I don’t need your seal of approval to feed my self-esteem.

You might not want to sleep with me, but I’m someone you’d trust with your money. Which is fortunate, because working with money what I do for a living. And I’m not talking about managing your grandma’s savings account. I handle big money. Money in dollars and euros and yen and Bitcoin and pesos. I’m the Vice President in charge of International Banking for an extremely large financial institution. I manage nearly a quarter million employees. And for that, bland looks and good table manners will take you pretty far.

Sure, handsome guys have an advantage. (Not so much beautiful women. They still have an uphill battle.) A handsome guy, someone who can become the face of a brand, that’s a huge plus. But it won’t necessarily get you the key to the executive washroom. Guys envy guys who have game. But if you look at the list of most powerful people in the world who have their own companies, a lot of the men who run things are kind of…nebbishy.

To be kind.

People are so used to this trope that when they look at me, they don’t see an average guy with a baby face and an incipient dad bod. They see a master of the universe in a well-cut Brioni suit and a Saint Laurent tie. They relax and hand me their money.

I like my job, most of the time. It’s rarely boring and I’m really fucking good at it, which is nice. But I didn’t achieve my success just by hard work and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Basically, I gamed the system because I had a secret weapon. Kind of a super-power really.

I have an eidetic memory.

I know a lot of people are skeptical of the whole photographic memory thing. They tend to think of it as a carnival trick or some kind of scam. As well they should because it doesn’t really exist. But eidetic memory? That does exist. In fact, some studies say up to fifteen percent of children are born with the ability to remember prodigious amounts of information.

The trick is to retain it into adulthood, which is pretty rare. Writer C.S. Lewis had an eidetic memory. Astronomer Johannes Kepler. Arturo Toscanini, the Italian conductor, and Klaus Kinski, the German actor were also similarly gifted. Tesla. Leonardo da Vinci.

Not that I’m comparing myself to Leonardo da Vinci, who was a once-in-a-millennium genius. It’s just that being able to scan and recall pages and pages of text or numbers is an incredibly useful skill if you’re a banker. It makes me look like a freaking badass, especially when I can compose email messages in seven languages without using Bing Translator because picking up languages easily is another benefit of the condition.

So, I have my fans.

One of them used to be my wife. Amelia hasn’t been a fan of mine for a while now. And I’m not sure what to do about that. I’m not her first husband and I think the only reason she hasn’t pulled the trigger on a divorce from me is that she doesn’t want to be, in her mother’s words, a two-time loser.

There’s still a lot of shame going on out in the world, and some of it comes from the people who are closest to you. My mother-in-law Verna thinks saying that sort of thing to Amelia is tough love, when it’s actually a