In the Midnight Rain - Softcover

Wind, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061030120 ISBN 13: 9780061030123

Publisher: HarperTorch, 2000

Synopsis

Looking For The Past...

Ellie Connor is a biographer with a special talent for piecing together fragments of the past. Her latest project, though, promises to be her most challenging--and personal. Not only is she researching the life of a blues singer who disappeared mysteriously forty years ago, but Ellie is also trying to find the truth about the parents she never knew. The love child of a restless woman who died young and an anonymous father, Ellie has little to go on but a faded postcard her mother sent from a small East Texas town--the hometown of her latest subject.

Could Mean Finding Her Future

It is there that Ellie meets Blue Reynard, a man with deep roots and wide connections who may help her find answers. With a piercing gaze and cool grin, Blue is as sultry and seductive as the Southern night air. Beneath his charming surface, however, lies a soul damaged by loss. Despite her better judgment, Ellie finds herself irresistibly drawn to Blue's passion--and his pain. But Ellie's been lured by sweet talk and hot kisses before. How can she possibly stay with blue when every instinct tells her to run?

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Wind is a former newspaper reporter and award-winning romance writer who lives in Pueblo, Colorado.

From the Back Cover

Looking For The Past...

Ellie Connor is a biographer with a special talent for piecing together fragments of the past. Her latest project, though, promises to be her most challenging--and personal. Not only is she researching the life of a blues singer who disappeared mysteriously forty years ago, but Ellie is also trying to find the truth about the parents she never knew. The love child of a restless woman who died young and an anonymous father, Ellie has little to go on but a faded postcard her mother sent from a small East Texas town--the hometown of her latest subject.

Could Mean Finding Her Future

It is there that Ellie meets Blue Reynard, a man with deep roots and wide connections who may help her find answers. With a piercing gaze and cool grin, Blue is as sultry and seductive as the Southern night air. Beneath his charming surface, however, lies a soul damaged by loss. Despite her better judgment, Ellie finds herself irresistibly drawn to Blue's passion--and his pain. But Ellie's been lured by sweet talk and hot kisses before. How can she possibly stay with blue when every instinct tells her to run?

Reviews

On a quest both professional and personal, biographer Ellie Connor accepts the invitation of experimental botanist and music lover Laurence "Blue" Reynard and heads for Pine Bend, TX, to gather information on an obscure Thirties blues singer and, if she can, learn something about her unknown father. However, her search nets her far more than she expects, and Ellie is suddenly faced with a surprising family, the answer to a mysterious disappearance, and a love she never hoped to find. Compelling, complex protagonists, three-dimensional secondary characters, and a simmering sexual tension result in an intense, poignant, and beautifully rendered romance that is also filled with rural small- town ambiance and threaded with descriptions so vivid that the seductive sounds of the blues and the sultry heat of a Southern summer almost rise from the pages. Wind (Rio Grande Wedding), who also writes as Barbara Samuel, is a RITA Award-winning author and lives in the Southwest.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Sometimes, when the wind was just right, she could hear the blues.

Once the rainy winter passed into spring, she liked to sit on her porch late at night, held in a kind of wonder beneath the moon and tall pines. She rocked in a cane-bottomed chair, smelling the green and copper moisture coming off the water, and she listened, nodding in time as cicadas and crickets whistled their song to the night. From the dark trees sometimes came the whirring, nearly silent beat of wings, followed by a swallowed screech of death, a sound not everyone could hear, but she did. She heard everything.

What she liked best was hearing the blues. The music sailed down the channel made by the river, ghostly guitar and haunted harmonica, even the hint of a man's ragged voice. It came from Hopkin's juke joint, upriver a mile or two on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River, and spilled with yellow light and blue cigarette smoke into a forest as dark as sin, as warm as a lover's mouth. It floated toward her over the stillness hanging above the water. Sometimes she imagined they were playing it just for her.

She'd close her eyes and let that music creep under her skin, seep into her bones. She let a part of herself get up and dance while she rocked steady in her chair. Every so often, she let that ghost of herself sing along while she silently nodded her head to the beat. The slow, sexlike rhythm filled her with memories of a man's low, dark laughter and a baby's sweet cry; with the song of Sunday-morning church and the blaze of morning over the east Texas pines.

She rocked and danced, nodded and sang, and thought as long as she could die with the blues in her ears, everything would be all right.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperTorch
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061030120
• ISBN 13: 9780061030123
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416