Today to celebrate the Publication Day of Little White Secrets by Carol Mason, I have a great extract for you to sample. Before we get to it, here's a little about the book:
A daughter pushing the limits. A marriage ready to crack. A secret that can break them.
For
Emily Rossi, life may not be perfect, but it’s pretty close. She has a
great career, a house in the country, a solid marriage to Eric and two
wonderful children—tennis superstar Daniel and quiet, sensitive Zara.
But when her fourteen-year-old daughter brings home a toxic new best
friend, Emily’s seemingly perfect family starts to spiral out of
control.
Suddenly Zara is staying out late, taking drugs and
keeping bad company. And just when Emily needs Eric to be an involved
father, he seems too wrapped up with his job in London to care. What’s
more, he’s started drinking again.
When a dark secret from the
past emerges, Emily’s life is turned upside down. Struggling to protect
the people she loves, can she save her damaged family? Doing so may mean
keeping a secret of her own…
Extract
In
the beginning of the book Eric and Emily have been invited to their friend’s
wedding anniversary party. After the event, Charlotte, sends Emily a video
taken by a fellow guest. Emily is horribly embarrassed by it. Up until this
point she’d thought Eric’s little white secret – his drinking - had been kept
within their four walls. Little does she know there’s actually a much bigger
secret he’s keeping.
‘I
love my food,’ he was saying to a rather stiff couple of bookish types, who
looked cornered. ‘Basically, if there’s an avocado in it, I’ll eat it.’ He
swayed a little, clutching his whisky glass high up by his chest. ‘I bloody
love avocados! I bet you don’t love them as much as me. I love them so much I
could marry them.’
The
stiffs couldn’t bring themselves to look amused, even out of charity, as though
Eric’s inanity might be catching. On he prattled about avocados.
Ugh! I groaned, and switched off.
‘No!’
Charlotte said when I rang her and she was done laughing. ‘That’s not the best
part! Didn’t you see the rest?’
The
‘rest’, when I looked again, was Eric even more hammered, looming over a
startled, fair-haired young woman. ‘I’m a weak man. A bad person. No, you don’t
understand . . . I mean a bad
person. I’ve done things . . .’
Hiccup. ‘Things I’m not proud of . . .’ He was hanging on to his
whisky glass for dear life, talking off to the side of her head like he was
losing focus, clearly oblivious to the iPhone camera that was trained on him.
‘Where’s my wife, anyway?’ He turned and scanned the room for me, as though he
was trying to peer through molasses. ‘I need to find my wife . . .’
His bleary gaze finally returned to the blonde’s ear. He suddenly looked somber, haunted. ‘Let me
tell you I love my wife. Have you met her? She’s the best… the best person. I
don’t deserve her. I will never deserve her
. . .’
The
videographer got bored and panned to someone else.
‘He
was drunk,’ I said to Charlotte, flatly, feeling uncomfortably exposed. ‘He’s
under a lot of pressure. That’s how he relieves his stress sometimes.’
If she was thinking, Do you have any
idea what he was talking about?, she
had the good grace not to ask. As I was, I couldn’t have enlightened her.
Copyright Carol Mason 2020
About the Author
Carol Mason was born and grew up in the north-east of England. As a
teenager she was crowned Britain’s National Smile Princess and
subsequently became a model, diplomat-in-training, hotel receptionist
and advertising copywriter. She currently lives in British Columbia,
Canada, with her Canadian husband. To learn more about Carol and her
novels, visit www.carolmasonbooks.com.
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