Heartbreak

by Maria Hardin

For once in her life, shy Marianne Brennan tosses her old woman in the shoe personality and becomes a wilding — roadside sunflowers or wild strawberries — for Ryan Bach, ex-marine and ace reporter, to enjoy. At age nineteen, Marianne searches to navigate love through her stars. The Age of Aquarius rules if you’re a twentieth-century flower child — but for lonely beggar weeds in formal Victorian rose gardens?
Handsome, charismatic Ryan shares steerage with Marianne. Bit players flutter through their drama: Vietnam, Victoria Holt, seagoing captains and an ancient Greek enchantress, Circe.
Until heartbreak rolls into town …

185 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2015

About the author

Maria Hardin began life in the piney woods of Florida, though almost Alabama. Her parents wandered hither and yon before finding a bayou where her family of nine lived in genteel Southern poverty. The salty air of the bayou settled into her blood early and her heart beats with the tide’s rhythm whenever she travels to the Gulf.

As a young widow, she ran away from the bayou and came back home to a small village named Grace. Writing rescued this damsel from fire-breathing dragons.

The piney woods cast a powerful hold on her, but there’s a hunger for the acrid smells of bayou country too. The fiddler crabs scuttling away from low tide tease her back to the bayou if she spends too much time in the country.

The wild blackberries nestled under pines in the Wiregrass come June, taunt her to return and taste their sweetness …

As she spins around and around like a top, where she stops, only she’ll decide. More and more, Maria splits life between the two places.

After all, an hour and a half brings her from the bayou to the Wiregrass.
Even simpler is to travel from land to land via stories of the past.

Maria Hardin