Teaser For Elle's Side of the Story

A Girl Like That is my latest novel being groomed in the stables for release in the spring. This time, the main character is someone you know--Elle McLarin--with her version of what happened in The One, and so much more. Here is a brief summary:

What would you do if you were thirty-seven and single with no family ties and a bad girl rep that you can’t live down? That’s exactly the situation Elle McLarin finds herself in as A Girl Like That opens. Mean girl Elle McLarin desperately needs to reinvent herself. Growing up with her grandparents in their small North Carolina mountain community after her teenage mother, who named her for a fashion magazine, ditched the idea of motherhood and disappeared, Elle found her upbringing to be tougher than most. Add to that a near-tragic mistake—drugging high school hunk Kyle Davis at a party, which landed her in prison for a year—and Elle has long since paid her debt to society. Nineteen years after being dubbed Badass Barbie in high school, and with her grandparents now passed away and her illegitimate son joining the Army, Elle is ready to pull up her bootstraps—and her roots—and courageously go where no one will know her, or what she did.

In coastal Wilmington, Elle opens a bakery called Bake My Day with the proceeds from selling her grandmother’s cabin. Hoping to turn her life around, she still struggles with her constant Good Elle/Bad Elle inner dialogue. But Elle’s electric and budding new relationships help her to move outside of her head to grow the possibilities that surround her if she can prune away the damaged debris from her spirit. Then, just when her new life begins to take root, and love could be a possibility for Elle, a remarkable event brings Elle into the limelight, causing a jealous bystander to uncover Elle’s sordid past, threatening to expose her and drag her under once more.

Told in the first person, readers will get to hear Elle’s side of the story that began in the pages of my first novel, The One. Elle makes cameo appearances in the next two books of the series, though A Girl Like That is a stand-alone novel. If you are meeting Elle for the first time, you may hate her initially, and possibly grow to love her, but it is quite likely that you will not forget her!