Dark Brew
By Diana Rubino
Publisher: The Wild
Rose Press
Genre: Time Travel Romance
Two months in
the spotlight change Kylah McKinley’s life forever. Falsely accused of
murdering her husband Ted, she learns through past life regressions that she’s
the reincarnation of Alice Kyteler, a Druid who lived in 14th century Ireland.
Major events in her life parallel Alice’s.
Someone tried to
kill Kylah along with Ted in a hit-and-run. Who can hate them both this much?
Her journeys to the past as Alice give her the answer.
As Kylah’s trial
date approaches and she fights to maintain her innocence, she must learn from
her past or forever be doomed to repeat it.
Kylah shut Ted’s
den door. She couldn’t bear to look at the spot where he gasped his last
breath. His presence, an imposing force, lingered. So did his scent, a blend of
tobacco, pine aftershave and manly sweat. Each reminder ripped into her heart
like a knife. Especially now with the funeral looming ahead, the eulogies, the
mournful organ hymns, the tolling bells . . .
These ceremonies
should bring closure, but they’d only prolong the agony of her grief. She
wanted to remember him alive for a while longer, wishing she could delay these
morbid customs until the hurt subsided.
Throughout the
house, his essence echoed his personality: the wine stain on the carpet, the
heap of dirty shirts, shorts and socks piled up in the laundry room, the
spattered stove, his fingerprints on the microwave. But she couldn’t bring
herself to clean any of it up. Painful as these remnants were, they offered a
strange comfort. He still lived here.
“I’ll find that
murderer, Teddy,” she promised him over and over, wandering from room to empty
room, traces of him lurking in every corner. “I’ll do everything in my power to
make sure justice is served. Another past life regression isn’t enough anymore.
I know what I have to do now. And I promise, it will never, ever happen
again—in any future life.”
She inhaled
deeply and breathed him in. “Go take a shower, Teddy.” She chuckled through her
tears as the doorbell rang. She cringed, breaking out in cold sweat when she
saw the black sedan at the curb.
“Not again.” No
sense in hiding, so she let the detectives in.
“Mrs. McKinley,
we need your permission to do a search and take some of your husband’s
possessions from the house,” Nolan said.
“What for?” She
met his steely stare. “I looked everywhere and found nothing.”
“Mrs. McKinley,
the cupboard door was open, four jars of herbs are missing, and the autopsy
showed he died of herb poisoning. Those herbs,” Nolan added for emphasis, as if
it had slipped her feeble mind. “Foxglove, mandrake, hemlock—and an as-yet
unidentified one,” he read from a notebook. “The M.E. determined it was a
lethal dose.”
Sherlock Holmes
got nothin’ on him, she thought.
“Where’s this
cupboard, ma’am?” Egan spoke up.
“Right there.”
She pointed, its door gaping exactly the way she’d found it that night. Nolan
went over to it and peered inside.
“Ma’am, it would
be better if you left the house for a half hour or so. Please leave a number
where you can be reached,” Egan ordered.
Nolan glanced
down the hall. “Where is your bedroom?”
What could they
want in the bedroom? “It’s at the top of the stairs on the right. But we didn’t
sleep together,” she offered, as if that would faze them. It didn’t.
After giving him
her cell number, she got into her car and drove to the beach.
An hour later, she
let herself back in and looked around. They’d taken the computer, her case of
CDs, her thumb drive, her remaining herb jars, Ted’s notebooks, and left her
alone with one horrible fact: This was now a homicide case and she was the
prime suspect.
Diana’s passion
for history and travel has taken her to every locale of her stories, set in
Medieval and Renaissance England, Egypt, the Mediterranean, colonial Virginia,
New England, and New York. Her urban fantasy romance, FAKIN’ IT, won a Top Pick
award from Romantic Times. She is a member of Romance Writers of America, the
Richard III Society and the Aaron Burr Association. She lives on Cape Cod with
her husband Chris. Together they own CostPro, Inc., an engineering business. In
her spare time, Diana bicycles, golfs, plays her piano and devours books of any
genre.
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