January 2015
Published by
BroadLit ™
14011 Ventura Blvd.
Suite 206 E
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
Copyright 2015 © D. M. Pratt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-9905156-2-3
Visit us online at www.TruLOVEstories.com
This book is dedicated to my children for their love and belief in me. My sisters and friends for their faith in me. My friends and publishers, Nancy, Barbara and Cynthia and the BroadLit team. And to all the women who have been taught to want the happily-ever-after dream, but courageous enough to face reality and still be willing to fight for true love.
Contents
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Eve Dowling left Thibodaux Hospital and never looked back. After surviving thirteen months in a deep coma she’d returned to consciousness unable to remember huge chunks of her recent past. She remembered her childhood, her parents and relatives, her home in Chicago, high school, college and moving to New Orleans for her dream job at Southern Style Magazine. Her most recent and last memory was of a fabulous party at her favorite estate outside of New Orleans on a lush romantic night dancing sensually with a seriously handsome stranger. That dance led to the greatest seduction she had ever experienced in her life and ended with an orgasm so intense she was told she arched back and hit her head hard enough to give herself a concussion, which left her unconscious and in coma for over a year. When Eve finally awoke, she was greeted by the amazing, intelligent and seriously handsome man with whom she’d danced at the party.
If there was such a thing as love at first sight, she knew the moment she saw him she was his. Like Cinderella at the ball, he had pursued her, found her and stayed by her side during her dark sleep. Like Sleeping Beauty, when her eyes fluttered open, he was there, waiting and wanting her. To her utter surprise, he wanted to marry her and take her into his life with their beautiful … son; Philip: Okay, that was a shocker she hadn’t expected, especially because she’d slept through both the pregnancy and her son’s birth. The nurses had insisted jokingly that after being pregnant and going through the birthing process themselves while conscious, she should count herself very lucky. They had pumped her breast milk three times a day while she slept, fed her son and cared for her sleeping body.
Eve was convinced she was experiencing some type of fairytale syndrome, but her psychotherapist, Dr. Lisette Honoré, with her mountain of blonde hair and lizard green eyes, tried to convince Eve that her feelings were normal reactions to a set of very, very unusual events. As for Eve’s struggle to remember events from her life before the coma, Dr. Honoré said, “That’s just your mind dealing with the gap of time you spent in a coma. Sounds enter your subconscious while one is in an unconscious state. The conversations of visitors, television programs, radio shows that play in another room are carried into the mind through auditory nerves and translated into memory. Even smells picked up through the olfactory nerves can stimulate the mind and be translated into memory. Our brains try very hard to make rational sense of our lives, especially after this kind of trauma.”
“This kind of trauma?” Eve thought. She sounded so annoyingly logical. Eve had awakened into a ridiculously perfect life and, despite the rather scary missing pieces and the occasional flashes that came in shadowed and bazaar images that woke her from her sleep drenched in sweat, Eve told herself she shouldn’t care. She was happy. Right? So happy she promised everyone, especially the police, which the sordid details of her ‘accident’ were of absolutely no importance to her … and mostly that was true … mostly.
Beauregard Gregoire Le Masters was kind and patient during the months Eve was kept at the hospital for observation and physical therapy. Her muscles had severely atrophied and despite all those damn years at the gym doing classes,