Playing Love's Refrain

Takira Lathan’s life revolves around her restaurant. She owns it, cooks in it, and is one hundred percent dedicated to its success. Her life starts to veer off course when money goes missing and so does her restaurant manager, leaving her in the lurch. Most importantly, raising her young nephew was never anywhere in her plans.

Dante Groves could be the answer to Takira’s prayers. She’s an excellent manager and is totally at ease with children. She’s also mature, kind, and unashamedly butch. Takira can’t help being attracted, but Dante’s emotional baggage from her last relationship has left her way too wary of romance.

Betrayed by those they trusted, Takira and Dante must rely on each other to create a recipe for success, both in business and in love.

Would you trade the life you have for a chance at a life you’ll love?

Devri Cahn is poised on the knife edge of getting everything she’s always wanted: an enviable rental empire in Brooklyn, guaranteed top-tier income, and elevated social status in the cutthroat world of the NYC lesbian elite. It’s finally all at her fingertips, so why does she want to leave it all behind?

Siobhan Byrne has returned to her tiny rural fishing village on the southern coast of Ireland with one goal: to buy the rundown cottages by the sea and turn them into slick, modern holiday rentals. After university in Dublin and some real-world experience, she’s determined to reach her goal of marketing Ireland’s undeniable pull to rich American tourists. It’s about time Ireland stepped into the twenty-first century, and she’s the woman for the job, especially if she gets filthy rich doing it.

Devri and Shiv never expected their feelings for each other to linger, but sometimes the search for what you’ve always wanted leads home, to the one you've always needed.

Kirsten Lindquist has enough on her hands juggling the demands of her work as an orchestral music librarian. Substitute horn player Shay Bradley has been hitting on her for years, but Shay is known for being an operator, so Kirsten avoids her advances, until she can’t resist. She is just beginning to get to know the new personnel manager, Stephanie Wellford, when the orchestra is shocked by the sudden deaths of three musicians and a string of suspicious accidents.

Kirsten, Shay, and Stephanie believe that the events are related, but they aren’t certain how to prove it. Things get more complicated when Shay backs off to hide her depression and Stephanie admits her crush on Kirsten, but they need to stick together to figure out who is responsible for murder—before they become the next victims.

As a doctor, Mick McVey knows what a mental health crisis looks like. Her own still takes her by surprise. When she inherits a house from the grandfather she’s never met, she puts herself on sabbatical and travels to the small hometown of the mother who abandoned her. It’s a temporary solution.

Mick might not be grieving her grandfather, but to her new neighbor Katy, his death is one blow too many. Mick’s arrival feels like Katy’s chance to forget her ex and her struggling cinema and reinvent herself. She’ll finally get her hot rebound and make this year her year.

When the COVID-19 lockdown traps both women in situations they’d convinced themselves were temporary, they’re forced to face what they really want from their lives, and who they want to share them with.

The last thing rock star Harper Cushing needs right now is this attraction to her grandmother’s helper, Frankie, even if she is sneaky-good on the guitar. Returning to her favorite childhood spot, Gram’s nostalgic general store, Harper confronts life-altering decisions: Gram’s future welfare, selling the store, and reassessing her own fast-paced “high life.” If only she could pull it all off without breaking everyone’s heart—including her own.

Having made her own life-altering decision three years ago, Frankie Cosgrove is guardedly single and set to harvest her first cranberry crop. She’s devoted to her elderly storekeeper friend, so when the famous Harper arrives, hell-bent on making changes, Frankie’s defenses rise.

At least they admit to mutual concerns for Gram and the store, and even each other’s heartfelt intentions. But the unexpected musical accord they strike sounds a whole lot like falling in love. Has harmony finally found them?

Suri Daniels, a beautiful and troubled woman, is the descendant of a family of supernaturally gifted women, known as the Blessed, and literally holds keys to gateways between the earthly plane and seven powerful gods. A series of tragic losses and a stipulation in her grandmother’s will has her returning to the family’s home in New Orleans, unaware that she will need to step into the role of Orisha priestess and escape the attention of a powerful demon. To top it all off, she must accept the help of a Cambion—Lyla Jefferies, a dark supernatural being she has spent her life avoiding. What’s worse? She can’t help being drawn to Layla in ways she doesn’t understand.

Being the child of a top-tier demon and a human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the past two hundred years, Layla Jefferies has lived a life of quietude. When an unknown force draws her out of seclusion, the pull is too strong to ignore. Layla is tasked to assist with protecting the gateways and saving Suri from becoming a vengeful demon’s avatar. Falling in love with her is definitely not part of the plan.

Layla and Suri are brought together by fate to defeat the darkness threatening to tear their world apart. What they don’t expect to discover is a love that might set them free.

Content advisory: Opening chapter includes a depiction of sexual violence and rape.

Dear Reader,

I wrote The Blessed to honor the resilience, strength, and faith of my community’s ancestors. To tell a story, in my own way, of their survival in a world that treated them as less than the lowest of creatures. A world that continues to methodically strip away our sense of selves as humans and our culture as a people. Layla is the embodiment of all People of Color, particularly Women of Color, in this country and the suffering they have endured, which was violent, painful, and has lasted for generations. I choose to honor all those women like Layla, her mother, and grandmother who survived and rather than turn to violence themselves, chose to stand tall and lift their community up.

The Blessed begins with an act of physical violence to represent how some People of Color were brought into the world. Just as we survived our violent past, so does Layla. Just as we did not allow what was wrought upon us to break us, to take away our capacity to love and cherish others the way we were not, Layla also does not let her circumstances break her. She turns that violence into the resolve to help her community. In the process, she finds a love that strengthens her even more.

You may feel discomfort when reading Layla’s beginnings as it mirrors the pain of the past. Atrocity and its generational impacts should not feel comfortable or easy. But her story is ultimately an uplifting one of family, faith, culture, and love that I believe you will enjoy. I hope you see The Blessed as honoring the struggles of my ancestors and accepting the blessing of life, faith, and love that they have bestowed upon me as a result of their survival.

Forever thankful, always grateful, abundantly blessed,

Anne Shade