This week the spotlight is on Karly Lane
and we’re showcasing
Burnt
Karly Lane. Rural fiction’s favourite daughter.
Karly Lane lives with her extremely patient husband and four children in Macksville, on the beautiful Mid North Coast of New South Wales.
A certified small-town girl, she is most happy in a little town where everyone knows who your grandparents were.
Karly writes women’s fiction, everything from romantic suspense to family sagas and life in rural Australia. She fits in her writing around her chooks, dog, various adopted farm animals, school pickup and children.
Growing up, Karly and her family moved a lot with her father’s work, living in many rural communities. Many of her fictional towns are based on these places spread throughout NSW and QLD. Karly has since returned to the town where her family can trace its origins back to the original settlement to raise her own children.
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He came home to heal. She came home to start over. Can first love reignite without one of them getting burnt?
Sebastian Taylor and Rebecca Whiteman were country town high school sweethearts dreaming of a future together when an accident one night forever changed their destiny…
Eighteen years after the tragedy, newly divorced Rebecca returns to the small town she left behind, to start a new life. Seb, now an elite SAS soldier in the Australian Army, arrives home to his farm, injured and grieving, to face a town that hasn’t forgotten and a father who has never understood him.
Rebecca has enough problems of her own without adding Seb Taylor to the mix: a failed marriage, two children to support and a persistent mysterious caller. The last thing she needs is her first love making a sudden reappearance in her life. Seb doesn’t want to get mixed up in Rebecca’s life. He came home to heal his wounds, both old and new, but can he do it without getting burnt?
Excerpt from Burnt by Karly Lane
The sound of gravel under Rebecca Whiteman’s shoes was loud in the quiet night. The hospital was silent behind her. It’d been a long shift – one nurse down, and too many beds. She couldn’t wait to crawl into her own.
A small frown touched her brow as she got that strange feeling again, like someone was watching her. She’d been ignoring it for the last two weeks now, but it was getting worse. A shiver ran through her and goose bumps covered her arms.
Pressing the button on her key ring, she heard the comforting thunk as the car unlocked, a light glowing like a little beacon of safety inside. Quickening her steps, she slid in, locking the doors automatically after her. When she turned the ignition, the CD started where it had stopped when she’d arrived at work earlier that afternoon, the deep, sexy tones of Lee Kernaghan filling the car, crooning about his Goondiwindi moon. With Lee helping to push away the uneasiness, she reversed out of the car park, more than ready to go home.
Home. The thought sparked a collage of emotions: relief, sadness, guilt …
The tick-tock of the blinker interrupted her thoughts as she searched the empty street for traffic before pulling out of the hospital entrance and heading for the highway. While the streets might be quiet at this hour, the highway wasn’t – it never slept. Huge semi-trailers rumbled their way through town – a dot on their road map; just another sleepy rural community – as they continued up the east coast of New South Wales between Sydney and Brisbane.
After waiting at the traffic lights – a new set, put in to cope with the brand spanking new Woolworths on the corner – Rebecca drove past the landmarks that held so many precious memories. The duck pond, once a stinking, green eyesore, was now a well-maintained park, happily churning up large water spouts that helped agitate the water and deter the build up of weeds and algae. How many times had she brought the girls down here for a picnic and to feed bread to the ducks? As little kids, it had been the highlight of their lives whenever they’d been visiting their grandparents. Regret touched her as she realised she’d only brought the girls down here once since they’d moved back, and that experience had been less than memorable. All they did was fight and complain about how boring it was. Bored with feeding ducks at eight and ten years of age? What was the world coming to?
She slowed to a stop at the next set of traffic lights – yes, two sets, with a third barely a hundred metres further up at the corner of the main street. Macksville had hit the big time. Not every town this size on the Mid North Coast could boast three sets of traffic lights in a row.
Rebecca glanced over at the car dealership that had once been owned by her grandfather and his brothers. She could still remember spending the day there when she’d been about five. She’d been on one of her many visits and her nanna had had to go to an appointment, so the receptionists and mechanics had entertained her. It seemed mind-boggling that she was now a grown woman with children of her own.
The front light came on as she pulled up outside her home, and all feelings of unease vanished as she opened the front door and crept inside. She bit back a sigh. She’d built up years of distrust while living in the city, and still couldn’t get used to the idea of her parents leaving the front door unlocked for her at night. No matter how many times she reassured them that she had a key, they still left the front door unlocked for her when she did night shift.
Rebecca poked her head around the corner of the spare room her children shared and smiled as she saw the two small heads sound asleep against the brightly coloured floral pillow cases that had been hers as a child. The girls looked so young and precious. When they were asleep, they didn’t have that sad-eyed look that stabbed at her heart and made her itch to gather them close and beg for forgiveness. Turning away, Rebecca let out a long sigh and made her way to the kitchen to put on the jug.
Burnt is available in eBook and paperback.
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If you’d like to find out a bit of background on this book, please check out Karly’s blog post about Burnt, here http://www.karlylane.com/blog/when-fiction-meets-real-life.
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COMING THIS WEEK FROM KARLY - NEW RELEASE
Suspenseful, pacy and packed with romance, Second Chance Town is a scintillating novel that is sure to grow the fan base Karly Lane has established with her bestselling novels Poppy’s Dilemma and Gemma’s Bluff.
Read more about Karly and her books on Meet Karly Lane here on ARR
Or find Karly on her webpage KarlyLane.com
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