Her Name Is Trouble: A small-town contemporary romance (The Daimsbury Chronicles Book 2) by Zee Monodee Page B

Missy. You never did. I should’ve seen that yesterday itself but I was an arsehole and clung to unjustified anger.” He paused. “Can you ever forgive me?”
    In her reply hung his future. His life as he now conceived of it consisted of nothing more than making Iris Ann ‘Missy’ Taylor feel everything good the world had to offer.
    “There’s nothing to forgive, Luke.”
    He blinked. “How can you say that?”
    She gave him a tremulous smile. “I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long, you cannot imagine. One where I’d get a second chance at life. A second chance with you...”
    Could she really have said that? Hope burst in his chest and powered through his every cell. He took a step closer and reached up to touch her cheek.
    “It’s yours,” he said. “ I’m yours.”
    “Really? You...you mean that?”
    She’d tilted her head when she asked that question. So adorable. His Missy.
    “Every word of it. How can I prove it to you?”
    “There’s no need to.”
    On that smile and gasped exhale, she wrapped her arms around his neck and threw herself at him.
    Thank goodness for the brace, otherwise he would’ve found himself once more on his back with her sprawled all over him.
    She kissed him, and he kissed her back. Cheers and hollers from the restaurant greeted their reunion, and he pulled her close to him, vowing to never let her go from his life.
    Missy broke away from the kiss and stared up into his face with wide, jade-grey eyes. “Actually, there is something you could do...”
    His heart hammered away. “Name it.”
    “Could you...” She bit her lip and glanced at the village green. “Could you put on those breeches and the white shirt then come out of the pond like Mr. Darcy?”
    Luke chuckled. What was it with women’s fascination with that fictional bloke? Still, if that’s what it took for her to become his...
    “Anything for you,” he said, and kissed her again.
     
     
    The End

 
    Author’s Note
     
    Dear Reader,
     
    Like it always happens with me, I didn’t plan to have Daimsbury spin out on me into a full series. It happened by itself. Luck by chance, I like to call it.
     
    For, you see, this all started with Megha Saran, whom you meet in this story. As a cancer survivor myself (2x breast cancer), I wanted to write about a young woman who’d been through the same trial as me. I gave her pretty much my own background—a hybrid of Indian culture with British modernity minus the island girl angle.
    Around this same time, Kate Middleton was bursting onto the scene back in the day and there was a lot of hype and exposure relating to the small village she grew up in.
    I knew I wanted that kind of setting for Megha’s story, and from this spin came ‘the’ family of the area, the Trammells, and Magnus along with it.
     
    But a small village needs to be peopled, so I started imagining who existed in this world. The Morellis, Magnus’ siblings and his best friends—Lars Rutherford and Stellan Elricksen—Megha’s father, Jari, and her surrogate father, Ben. Finn and Patrick at the hair salon. Before I knew it, Daimsbury had exploded on me. My drawing board had so many colours and links on it that it looked like a too-happy clown had barfed confetti all over the place!
     
    Then came a call for short stories from an established publisher. Since I already had Daimsbury set up, I used the world. That is how Bad Luck With Besties , the story of Liam Morelli and Honor Whelan, came into existence. I was all set to have The Daimsbury Chronicles pubbed out…but things didn’t go as I planned and everything came to a standstill around this exact period last year.
     
    My bestie and the sister of my soul, Natalie G. Owens, pushed me to look at my options, and one of these was self-publishing. I think by then, push had come to shove for me and I took the plunge. It hasn’t been an easy journey—rather rocky, in fact—but I seem to now be finding my footing so here’s this series