Book no. 2 in the ‘In Love with Love’ series …

‘It’s a gift to be shown something that allows you to make a difference and alter the outcome of someone else’s life.’

‘However, the weight of the responsibility that goes along with that is huge and what about the ethics?  The thing I have to ask myself, is how did my actions change the future?’ Holly Elizabeth Atherton.

Holly is the envy of all her friends, she has lived with the gorgeous Will for five years and supported him every step of the way.  His IT business is about to go global and they are on the verge of having all their dreams come true!  A life split between homes in the UK and Los Angeles beckons, offering them a glamorous and exciting lifestyle they will both fit into quite perfectly.  So when Will pops the question, why won’t Holly say ‘yes’?

A series of terrifying encounters unleashes an inherited psychic connection within Holly.  Her ‘perfect’ life is turned upside down as she struggles with the reality of her ‘gift’.  Help comes from a chance meeting with medium Peter Shaw and she discovers that she is also being given healing and protection by the spirits of two people.  One of them is her best friend’s brother, Nick, who died suddenly in tragic circumstances. Holly finds herself confiding in him in an attempt to sort out her own life.

She begins to sense that the path she’s on isn’t the one she’s destined for, but is it too late to change things?  The thought of hurting the people she loves the most causes her to bury her emotions, until fate takes a hand………..

Published by Heartfelt fiction: available in eformat & paperback

AMAZON: https://smarturl.it/NeverAlonebyLBHalton

Life’s all about the choices we make …

HOUSE FOR SALE

When I met Will Cameron it was lust at first sight, but love came bounding in shortly afterwards. If tall, dark, and slim with a gorgeous body and a well-defined six-pack is your idea of perfection, then Will is perfection personified. As usual, the heavens were smiling down on me because he also happens to be a genuinely good person beneath all that macho beauty. His one fault is that he’s much too clever for his own good. He’s married to his work, but as his special girl I come a very close second. Lucky, lucky me.

I’m Holly by the way, Holly Elizabeth Atherton. Age twenty-three, long, naturally blonde hair, sickeningly thin without having to try and I’m a Gemini. My mother says you can never be too thin or too rich. My father keeps telling me I need fattening up, worried I’m following the thin trend, but that isn’t me. Fortunately I can eat like a horse without having to think about calories at all. My friends envy me for that, but it hasn’t always been a plus factor. Will nicknamed me Chick when Alice, who was my best friend at high school, told him they used to call me chicken legs. Going to an exclusive girls’ school we had little on which to focus; not having boys around made life quite dull.

Something I learnt early on in life is the sad, but true, fact that more opportunities seem to open up if you come from an affluent background. My father, David Miles Thomas Atherton, owns a chain of estate agents. He also has a large personal property portfolio and is regarded as being an astute businessman. He dotes on me, although I have to work equally as hard as anyone else to earn my salary.

The wonderful thing about having a father who thinks you are the sunshine in his normally serious, and often grey, life is that he’s kind and generous. That’s why he invested in Will’s company. The fact that it became an enormous Internet success overnight is down to Will’s genius. He seems to have this natural instinct that allows him to spot a niche in the market that’s waiting to be filled. Will sold the first business and made a lot of money for himself and my father, then started business number two. We live together in his penthouse flat on the top floor of a converted former pin mill. Sitting on the edge of the small town of Ardington, to the east we look across towards Stroud and to the west we look out across open fields that seem to go on forever.

So I’m golden girl, not because I brought Will and my father together, but because things seem to turn out well for me. So far my life has been fairly straightforward. Life and fate have been kind to me; I’ve had more than my fair share of luck. One thought has always worried me though; it constantly niggles away in the back of my mind. What happens if one day my luck suddenly runs out?

I suppose it’s about whom you know, how much money you have—which makes life an awful lot easier in so many ways—and a pretty face. And that’s me. I don’t mean to sound as if I take it all for granted or that I’m being smug, because I try my best not to do that and I’m not (smug that is). I do appreciate what I was born with and I try hard to live up to the expectations of my parents and the people in my life who matter to me the most.

My brother Matt isn’t easy to impress and I suspect it’s because he thinks I’ve had it rather easy. I don’t think for one moment that we were treated any differently when we were growing up, but Matt seems to spend his life worrying and looking for problems. My approach is to do my best and worry about a problem only if and when it arises.

Geminis are by nature good communicators. We are talkative and versatile, add to that an entanglement of paradoxes and you have a mix that allows those born under that sign to see beyond stereotypical confines. I accept people as they are and that helps when I’m dealing with people from all walks of life.

The best part about being an estate agent is the moment when you usher a potential purchaser over the threshold for the first time and suddenly it hits them. Full on. They’ve found their perfect house and the smiles keep getting bigger and bigger, as you walk them from room to room. It’s a magical moment. The emotion is one of intense excitement. You’ve found them the house in which they might spend many happily married years, or perhaps raise their future family and hopefully live a contented life. In my rosy-hued picture of life, things like divorce, betrayal and disappointment don’t get a look-in. I’m optimistic enough to hope it reflects the minority and not the vast majority. I have absolutely no idea whether that is factually correct, but you have to live your life believing in good things, don’t you? The alternative is simply much too depressing.

Most intriguing of all, is the fact that whether a property is old, new, large, small, ugly, or beautiful, each one has its own story to tell. It never occurred to me until fairly recently that the history of a house could be a problem for me. Everything was fine until Matt insisted I show the Hayworths’ house, even after I asked him if someone else could be assigned to it. He thought I was dismissing it because it wasn’t anything special and it was half an hour’s drive from the office—but that wasn’t the reason at all.

I will never forget that Thursday, the first time I saw number twenty-two Bisley Rise, set in the idyllic and sleepy village of Rosegrove….