Finders Keepers
by N.R. Walker
Publication date: February 2nd
2018
Genres: Adult, LGBTQ+, Romance
BLURB
Needing a change of scene,
Griffin Burke moves from Brisbane to Coolum Beach to start a new job. The
beautiful white sand, aqua-coloured ocean, blue skies, and summer breezes are
everything he longs for. What he finds is a mud-covered dog, lost and hungry,
with a nametag and a phone number.
Dane Hughes is stuck in Surfers
Paradise at a week-long work conference when he gets a phone call from his
distraught mother. His dog, his fur baby, Wicket, has run away. Unable to leave
and feeling helpless and miserable, he gets a text from a guy. “I think I found
your dog…”
Griffin and Dane start talking,
and Griffin agrees to look after Wicket until Dane can collect him. With a few
days left before his new job starts, Griffin takes Wicket on some coastal
adventures and sends Dane photos of their fun, and so the start of something
new and kind of wonderful begins.
Griffin might have moved to
Coolum in search of a new life, but what he finds is so much more. What he gets
to keep just might take some four-legged help.
EXCERPT:
I
got all moved into my new place and had everything unpacked on day one. I’d met
my downstairs landlady for the first time as the two bulky removalists were
lugging my bed up the stairs. I was at the bottom of the stairs watching them,
not entirely ogling, when a tiny, five-foot-tall woman stood beside me.
She
didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the men straining to get the
wooden bedhead up the flight of stairs. Still without looking at me, she
hummed. “Nice arse.”
I
almost choked on my sip of water. “Uh…”
“Don’t
tell me you weren’t looking. I might be a little hard of hearing, but I ain’t
blind.”
Right
then.
I
held out my hand. “Name’s Griffin Burke.”
She
shook my hand, and her hard, firm grip surprised me. She looked kind of frail
at first, but then I noticed her tattoos. Her entire right arm was now a
mottled, wrinkled mass of blue and coloured ink on sun-leathered skin. Given
she looked to be in her seventies, she must have had a full sleeve done forty
or fifty years ago.
Jesus.
“Bernice
Warren.”
She
was wearing a sleeveless tank top and a flowing skirt. Upon closer inspection,
she looked like a hippy that peace, love, and time forgot. Her face had seen
too much sun as well, wrinkled and leathered, though I imagined she would have
once been stunningly beautiful. Her blue eyes still had spark, her long
once-blonde hair now ash grey.
“Come
with me,” she said, turning on her heel and walking toward the roller door.
When she turned, I noticed her left arm. Old, mottled blue tattoos went to her
elbow, as well as two scars that looked like lightning strikes. They looked
surgical and my first thought was shoulder reconstruction, but then I noticed
one scar ran underneath her shirt and up her neck. She turned the latch on the
roller door, and using her right arm only, lifted the door to review a storage
space. Inside was a lawnmower, wheelbarrow, and some gardening tools.
Ah,
right. I was the resident mower of lawns.
“I’d
do it myself,” she said. “But the old arm doesn’t work like it used to.” She
lifted her left arm rigidly. It didn’t hang useless but there was definitely
restricted movement.
“It’s
fine,” I said. “I don’t mind mowing lawns at all. My weekends will be Monday
and Tuesday though, not Saturday and Sunday. If that’s okay?”
“It’s
fine. Don’t much care what day you do ’em.” She nodded to herself. “Last tenant
was a nice girl. Started out with good intentions, and she was gonna do all
sorts of things to help me out, but that didn’t last long.” Bernice looked up
at me and stared for a good long minute. “You’re not the churchgoing type, are
you?”
“Uh…”
“I
don’t mind if you are, I just don’t wanna offer you one of my special brownies
and for you to totally hash out on me and start mumbling biblical shit at me
every time you see me.”
I
fought a smile and lost, and I tried not to laugh but couldn’t help that
either. “Not biblical. Not in that sense, anyway. Unless you consider my
earlier staring at that guy’s arse a religion. As for the special brownies, I
haven’t had any for a while. Not since college, anyway.”
Bernice
grinned and nodded slowly. “So you know what I mean when I say special brownie.
Not like the last poor girl who thought it was my grandma’s special recipe or
some shit.” She shook her head slowly. “Dunno what she was thinking. Do I look
like Betty Fucking Crocker to you?”
Author Info
N.R. Walker is an Australian author, who loves her genre of gay
romance.
She loves writing and spends far too much time doing it, but
wouldn’t have it any other way.
She is many things: a mother, a wife, a sister, a writer. She has
pretty, pretty boys who live in her head, who don’t let her sleep at night
unless she gives them life with words. She likes it when they do dirty, dirty
things... but likes it even more when they fall in love.
She used to think having people in her head talking to her was
weird, until one day she happened across other writers who told her it was
normal.
She’s been writing ever since...
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