It’s always a pleasure to showcase my fellow romance authors, especially my publishing siblings from The Wild Rose Press. WRP has a new series out this summer, One Scoop or Two, fun, short beach reads that feature ice cream and a beach setting. My contribution, Gelato Surprise, will be released this summer. Let’s have a look at Peggy’s contribution to the series, a sweet, contemporary, small town romance. Dont you just love this cover?

Tandy Blakemore spends her days running her New England ice cream parlor, single-parenting her teenage son, and trying to keep her head above financial water. No easy feat when the shop’s machinery is aging and her son is thinking about college. Tandy hasn’t had a day off in a decade and wonders if she’ll ever be able to live a worry-free life.

Engineer Deacon Withers is on an enforced vacation in the tiny seaside town of Beacher’s Cove. Overworked, stressed, and lonely, he walks into Tandy’s shop for a midday ice cream cone and gets embroiled in helping her fix a broken piece of equipment.

Can the budding friendship that follows lead to something everlasting?

Excerpt:

For a few moments, she regarded him with a look his mother would have called insightful. The corners of her eyes narrowed, she dipped her chin a hair, and she pulled her mouth into another appealing pout he was tempted to kiss.

“I bet,” she said after a long, drawn-out sigh, “you were the kind of kid who took apart clocks and fans and vacuum cleaners to see how they worked.”

“It was more washing machines and lawn mowers and anything with a motor, but yeah. I was.”

She shook her head, her own lips forming a lopsided grin. “Your poor mother.”

“She survived.”

Tandy rolled her eyes and shot her hands to her hips. “So it’s working again?” She thrust her chin at the ice cream machine.

“For now.”

“Okay, well, I can live with for now. And you think you know the real reason it’s been acting up?”

“I definitely do. But like I said, the water to the machine needs to be shut off to fix it.”

“Okay. Well, we close at nine.”

“I’ll come back a little before then. Get things ready. Is that okay with you?”

“I guess it’ll have to be.” She bit down on the inside of her cheek as her brows pulled together. “And you’re sure you want to do this?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t offer, Tandy.”

Why her reluctance to have him help was such a turn-on was something he considered while he waited for his ice cream.

I asked Peggy about her inspiration for this story.

My new novella from the Wild Rose Press VANILLA WITH A TWIST is part of the publisher’s new summer series ONE SCOOP OR TWO.

When the call for story submissions went out to the author network, the premise for the series was anything that centered around ICE CREAM.  The stories had to take place in the summer, near or on a beach, lake or water resort, and have something to do with an ice cream stand, a social, even a cream churning festival. All the stories are inspired by the hot days of summer and those iconic times and happy memories of sharing ice cream with friends, family, on a date or vacation.

Or in these times, a staycation.

I’d had a small town romance story idea running through my mind for a while before I found out about the new series, and once I did, I knew what I wanted to write. The tricky part was setting it in New Hampshire, my home state. Hey, write what you know, right? Hee hee. Or in my case, where you know.

If you’re familiar with the state you realize it boasts a very short ocean coastline.  Portsmouth and Hampton Beach aside, there were no resort towns I wanted to set the story in, so I invented a fictional coastal town called BEACHERS COVE. Beachers Cove is just a twenty minute car ride from Portsmouth, so I could give the book some local color, second hand, in the descriptions of the town and the outskirts.

My inspiration for the story was a girl with a past teenaged, unwed pregnancy and I wanted to explore how something like that can impact someone who lives in a small, isolated community.

Tandy Blakemore got pregnant at barely 16, the baby-daddy an itinerant worker her father hired to help during calving season at the family dairy farm. Before Tandy ever knew she was pregnant, the boy was long gone. When you grow up and live in a small town, everyone knows everything there is to know about you and your secrets become the possessions of the populous.

Tandy kept the baby, finished high school and then stayed on the farm. Once her grandmother and mother died and Tandy saw her future as only a housemaid to her father and brothers, she decided to leave the farm and take her 8 year old son with her. Through a small inheritance left to her by her grandmother, Tandy was able to set herself up in business and take care of herself and her son financially.

I simply adore a strong female character. In my own life I don’t know one woman in my immediate realm who doesn’t have a steel rod for a backbone. I’ve also met a great many single mothers in my lifetime – many of them teenaged moms – and every one of them also possess personal wills forged in steel.

VANILLA WITH A TWIST is a glimpse into one of these strong female’s lives. Tandy’s the kind of women who can take care of herself and isn’t looking for an HEA with a man.  But if a handsome, loving, and funny man came to town out of the blue, well then….

Good news! Get your copy now and save!

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0868XXYQC

Nook https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/vanilla-with-a-twist-peggy-jaeger/1136710329?ean=2940162687870

Applebooks  https://books.apple.com/us/book/vanilla-with-a-twist/id1505095515

About the author:

Peggy Jaeger is a contemporary romance writer who writes Romantic Comedies about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. If she can make you cry on one page and bring you out of tears rolling with laughter the next, she’s done her job as a writer!

Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, she brings all topics of daily life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she’s created the families she wanted as that lonely child.

When she’s not writing Peggy is usually painting, crafting, scrapbooking or decoupaging old steamer trunks she finds at rummage stores and garage sales.

A lifelong and avid romance reader and writer, Peggy is a member of RWA and her local New Hampshire RWA Chapter.

As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go “What??!”

Connect with Peggy Jaeger:

Website: http://peggyjaeger.com/

Blog: http://peggyjaeger.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peggy-Jaeger-Author/825914814095072?ref=bookmarks

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peggy_jaeger

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13478796.Peggy_Jaeger

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/peggy-jaeger

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Pintrest: https://www.pinterest.com/peggyjaeger/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peggy-jaeger-296ab878/

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00T8E5LN0

Authors database: https://authorsdb.com/community/15814-peggy-jaeger

Triberr: https://triberr.com/tribe/strong-women–loving-men

Header image by RitaE from Pixabay