Chiaroscuro: Light & Dark

Book 2: Drawing Lessons Duet

by Julia Gabriel

Genres: Friendship; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Second Chance Romance

Synopsis

What would you risk for forgiveness?

Marie and Luc are starting over in Paris. But trouble lurks in paradise. When Marie returns from a weekend in London with her best friend, her life changes overnight. Luc is gone. And she’s pregnant with his child.

She waits months for him to return. When the baby is born without any word from Luc, she does what single mothers do. She pulls her life together for her daughter and starts over. New city. New job. New friends. All she wants is to be a good mother. All she wants is a normal life with no surprises.

Then she gets the biggest surprise of all.

Luc returns. He wants another chance.

Can Marie ever trust him with her heart again? Can Luc ever trust his own?

Release date: June 3, 2016

Publisher: Serif Books

Print pages: 260

Sample

Eleven months later

The pain was its own anesthesia. Marie fought to stay alert as the gurney sped down the hallway. A tornado of French swirled around her head, with the occasional lapse into English to calm her. Valerie Marchand clutched her hand as she ran alongside. It wasn’t supposed to be Valerie’s hand, though Marie was most grateful that Valerie had been home when her water broke. And eternally grateful for all she’d done for Marie in the past nine months. Housed her, fed her, cried with her.

When the gurney hit the doors to the operating suite, Valerie’s fingers fell away.

“I’ll be waiting outside. You’re doing great, Marie. She’s almost here.”

Marie wasn’t doing great. Not generally and certainly not at the present moment. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. This wasn’t how her daughter was supposed to be born. Marie had envisioned the birth of her first child as a happy, joyous moment. Physically painful, sure. But she would be surrounded by love as she struggled valiantly through labor, then overcome by a wonderful peace when her red-faced and wrinkled daughter was laid, swaddled in a blanket, into her waiting arms. Followed by a passionate, grateful kiss.

Instead, she was headed into surgery alone—in a foreign country where she still barely spoke the language—to have her daughter cut out of her womb. They might as well cut out her heart while they were at it, as far as Marie was concerned. Her heart was a dead organ, and she had no more use for it.

She felt the wheels of the gurney lock into place, then a needle stab her arm. Her legs and back and stomach were already numb from the epidural. Her eyes struggled to focus on the whirl of activity around her, the doctor and nurses prepping for surgery. She was frantic to wipe her eyelashes but afraid to move her free arm and even more afraid to call attention to her tears. To her terror and cowardice and despair. A big blue screen appeared in front of her face, blocking her view of what was to happen next.

Even then, she had been certain he was going to burst through the doors at any moment, call her name, grab her hand. There would be apologies for being late and she would tearfully forgive him. But when she felt the tugging sensation in her abdomen and heard the startled cries of her daughter, she knew.

Luc Marchand—her lover and friend, her teacher, the only person who had ever really seen her, the father of her child—wasn’t coming back.