Welcome to the tour for Alice's Portrait by Juliette Harper! This is a sci-fantasy novel that is adult but clean and appropriate for young adult readers.
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Alice's Portrait by Juliette Harper
A year after Kate, Jenny, and Mandy Lockwood inherit The Rocking L, the sisters try to concentrate on their collective and individual futures. In the previous book in The Lockwood Legacy series, Baxter’s Draw, the women made startling discoveries about their father’s secrets, but are mistaken in their belief that everything has now come to light. In Alice’s Portrait, the ghosts of Langston Lockwood’s past once again confront his daughters, forcing them to re-evaluate their understanding of their father and of what it means to be a Lockwood.
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Excerpt;
“Do
you remember that time you shot the rattlesnake by Daddy’s foot?”
Jenny asked.
Kate
did remember. She was 16 years old and they were loading hay at the
barn. Langston was right in the middle of one of his rants, walking
back and forth from the barn to the pick-up, throwing bales of hay
for Kate to stack. As she reached down to catch a bale, she realized
her father was passing right by a coiled rattlesnake with every step.
“Daddy.”
Langston
continued his tirade, his boot coming down right by the snake as he
returned to the barn.
“Daddy,”
she tried in a louder voice.
His
answer was another hay bale flung angrily in her direction as once
again her father turned on his heel and stalked back to the barn.
The
sliding back window of the truck cab was open. Kate reached inside
and angled a 30-30 rifle out of the rack, carefully passing it
through the window. This time when her father came out of the barn,
she said, “Goddammit Langston Lockwood, stop.”
He
did, his left foot falling right by the rattler. The snake drew back
to strike. Kate shouldered the rifle, aimed, and blew the snake’s
head off.
Langston
didn’t move. He looked down at the snake and up at this daughter.
“Why in the hell didn’t you say something? You got blood all over
my boot.”
“Why
in the hell wouldn’t you shut up and let me say something,” Kate
countered hotly. “And be glad it’s the snake’s blood and not
yours.”
“Huh,
talk louder next time, Sister,” he said, putting the bale in his
hands on the tailgate. “You’re gonna clean that rifle when we get
back to the house,” he added crossly. But then, on his way back to
the barn he said over his shoulder, “Damn good shot.”
Kate
shook her head as she re-lived that afternoon. “I was shaking so
bad it’s a wonder I didn’t blow his foot off. What in the world
made you think about that?”
“You
had ways to connect with Daddy,” Jenny said. “You’re a hell of
a shot. You’ve never been thrown off a horse. You could out bluff
him at the poker table, and then you learned to out drink him. The
old bastard wouldn’t bend enough to say it, but he respected you. I
had nothing.”
“Honey,”
Kate said, “that’s not true. You worked as hard on this place as
I did when we were kids. You could have made that shot same as me.”
“The
shot isn’t the point,” Jenny said. “I could do all of those
things, but never well enough to suit him because of the one thing I
did do well. Draw. I lived ranch life, but I was more interested in
capturing it with my pencils, teasing the emotion out of a pen full
of shearers or the hungry look in a dogie calf’s eyes when it’s
begging for a bottle. I felt it all and I wanted to share it. He
didn’t want to feel a damned thing and I was a constant reminder of
that.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliette Harper is the pen name used by the writing team of Patricia Pauletti and Rana K. Williamson. Like the characters of their debut series, The Lockwood Legacy, Juliette is a merging of their creative energies. Pauletti, an Easterner of Italian descent, is an accomplished musician with an eye for art and design. Williamson, a Texan from a long line of hardheaded Scots, knows the world of the Lockwoods like the back of her hand.“We decided to write under a pen name because neither one of us by ourselves could have created Kate, Jenny, Mandy, and their world,” says Pauletti. “Juliette is a little bit of us both. We want to be her when we grow up.”
“Patti teases me that I just don’t want to own up to writing a book with romance in it,” Williamson adds, “but that’s not true. I like the Lockwood women and the way they tackle everything life throws at them. And before we’re done, they’ll be ducking a lot. I imagine coming into the office every day and saying, ‘Okay Juliette, what’s going to happen now?’ She tells us, and we get it down on paper.”
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GIVEAWAY
The author will be giving away $100 Amazon Gift Card (INT) to the winner of the below Rafflecopter. The giveaway ends May 20th.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
This event was organized by CBB Book Promotions.
Thank you so much for hosting this giveaway.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the giveaway! Love the excerpt. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great giveaway!!!
ReplyDeleteGreat,thanks for the post and the giveaway :)
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