Grief drove Alys and Fletcher apart. Their son’s destination wedding and the double-booked Valentine Suite bring them back together. Will their stay in the Valentine Suite heal their broken hearts or drive them further apart?

Readers who enjoy Marci Bolden and Kristin Hannah, will love The Valentine Suite by Tracy Broemmer, an emotional and healing, women’s fiction novel.

Blurb

Grief pulls some families together and rips others—like the Hollands—apart. Two years have passed since Alys and Fletcher Holland lost two of their children in a fatal accident. But time has done nothing for Alys’ broken heart.

Her surviving son’s destination wedding means a reunion for Alys and Fletch, who divorced shortly after the accident. Alys intends to keep to herself for the wedding festivities and hustle back home to her quiet, sterile life when the big day is over.

When the double-booked Valentine Suite at the Kahalina Resort puts Alys and Fletch in close quarters, Alys soon finds it’s difficult to ignore the man she fell in love with over twenty-five years ago. Fletch frustrates her, but he protects her, too, acting as a buffer between her and the rest of his family and their son’s wedding guests.

Will their stay in the Valentine Suite drive them further apart and send them home as strangers or will their time together in the suite mend their broken hearts and put their family back together?

Excerpt

Alys Holland rested her head on the lounge chair and closed her eyes only to open them immediately. She’d only just arrived in Palos Verdes earlier in the evening—after a four-hour flight, a thirty-four-minute wait at the rental car counter, and a quick stop at a liquor store in Redondo Beach. The next two weeks that stretched out before her beckoned, invited relaxation, respite, healing. The trouble with that being that she would need to tear the scars away and dig into the pain to heal completely.

She wasn’t willing to do that. Not for Iva. Not for Fletch or Claire.

Not even for Ledger.

Still, her chest felt squeezed, painfully so. Gasping to breathe, Alys leaned forward, coughing hard at the tightening sensation. Shoulder and neck pain were sometimes symptoms of a heart attack in women; she had read somewhere that coughing could save someone suffering a heart attack until help arrived.

She wasn’t having a heart attack, though. If Iva were here, she would tell her that. She would roll her blue eyes and laugh at Alys, though usually Alys laughed, too, and laughing together took the sting out of Iva’s words.

No heart attack, though at her lowest points—and there had been so many now—she would have welcomed it. Death, sure. If there was a God, Alys would have died two years ago. The fact that she hadn’t, that she still woke in a comfortable bed every day, was why she quit believing. She would take death, gladly, and she would take the horrible pain and die in the most horrible way possible.

If only.

She heard music in the distance. Someone trying to sing an old Foreigner song, though the voice most definitely did not belong to Lou Gramm. Was it still the same band who had played at the bar two years ago?

The bar—Howie’s, no use pretending she didn’t remember the name—was just north of the main hotel where she was now. Where she and Fletch had stayed then. Still part of the resort campus, it was a family friendly bar and grill, and when they had wandered there, hand in hand one night, there was a summer festival going on. Perfect for enjoying live music and cold beer while you waited for a table.

She and Fletch had grabbed a beer—Fletch was into weird IPAs at the time and he had ordered a Firestone Walker Mind Haze, while teasing her about her simple, safe lager—and wandered over to the fence to watch the sunset bleed dark purple and a deep, flushed pink over the ocean, already black with night.

Alys thought the music was mediocre, but mostly, she remembered that incredible sunset and the feel of Fletch’s warm, solid body at her side.

She sipped from her thick glass tumbler. The glasses—everything—here was nicer than her own personal belongings. Which was saying something, because she and Fletch had done well together, and they had amassed a lot of nice things.

Lost some, too.

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About Tracy Broemmer

Tracy is the author of the women’s fiction series, the Williams Legacy, and several stand-alone women’s fiction novels. She has recently dabbled in contemporary romance, as well.