Spellbound: Out Christmas Day– Now Available for Pre-Order!

So, much to my surprise, it looks like I’ll be squeezing another release out this year just in time for the holidays! It’s called Spellbound and while it is clearly sports-themed, it is technically a paranormal romance. I think. I did surface-level research on it, not gonna lie. But I’ve had this story in my head for a few years now and while it might seem like a departure on the surface, I think most of my readers will quickly find that it’s typical C.L. Donley style.

It’s actually a melding of two book ideas. I’d had this tiny idea of a guy who starts dreaming of this girl and then meets her in real life. It’s been done before, I get it. But I didn’t have much else beyond that premise, and I doubted I had enough of a concept to make an entire book out of it so it was just sort of in the back of my mind. A little while later, while doing research on Rich Little Poor Girl, I’d come across a few resources that inspired this Friday Night Lights type story which I really liked, but had the same problem where I felt like it wasn’t enough for a whole book.

So when my brain hollered out, “why don’t you just smush those two concepts together” I was like:

If you’re paying attention, Rich Little Poor Girl was three years ago. So this book has been in the pipeline for a while. And this year I finally felt like it was time to take a crack at it.

So the story starts out following our hero Colin Schaeffer, a star quarterback who plays for Omaha and has been having a recurring dream about a woman he’s never met. Eventually, he meets her, a physical therapist by the name of Kaya Simmons. The sparks are immediate, as well as the questions, the implications, and the unforeseen challenges. Once they meet, which is pretty early in the book, the rest of the story follows them as they try to navigate being a couple with this overarching sense of destiny hanging over their heads.

Colin and Kaya

I went back and forth on the inspiration for Colin’s character, but Kaya’s was pretty much always Kelly Rowland. I really wanted a classic all-American football player look that could also convey vulnerability/underdog/everyman vibes and what can I say I love Matt Saracen, lol. If I were to compare this to an existing book in the catalog, I would compare it to… maybe Halcyon. It’s one of my more original stories, even though the concepts may be derivative. It doesn’t follow any particular trope and the emphasis is on, as always, the emotional journey of the characters.

So yeah, while it’s more of a romance with a slight magical realism component, personally I’m a bit intimidated by the genre to consider it a paranormal or even an urban fantasy. Hence why I haven’t used a different pen name or anything. And I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m trying not to give too much away here, haha. It’s sort of my take on a Twilight Zone love story, but at its heart is a story about the concept of two people being made for each other and if circumstances change who we are or reveal who we are– a common theme of mine.

Enjoy!

Spellbound: Sneak PeekChapter 2

The sound of creaking wood lets him know he’s dreaming. Not just creaking wood, but the sound of bare feet hitting the floor. That’s the combination that lets him know he’s dreaming the dream again.

It’s the same dream he’s had since he was a kid, and the only thing about it that’s changed over the years is how it makes him feel.

The first time he ever dreamed it, he was six years old. In the dream, he was a grown-up.

At that age, being an adult was like being a unicorn. It was far off, unattainable. That fact alone was enough for him to never want to wake up.

He remembered the ornate circular window filtering a bright morning orb of sunshine into the room like a spotlight. It landed on the rough white blanket he was sleeping under that was like a giant hospital bandage in his memory. That along with the skeletal wooden slats, horizontal along the walls let him know that he was in some kind of attic. But he was in a bed.

He somehow knew there was a girl. Running the sink in a bathroom, he could hear.

She came out in a shirt that barely covered her legs, legs that were brown. In fact, all over she was brown. All of her except the white shirt she wore that had a single word scrawled across it in a cutesy font.

She tugs at the hem of a shirt that she knows is not big enough. At least, that’s what he thought at the time. It took a few more years of having the dream before it occurred to him that maybe she was cold.

But the first time he had the dream, when he was six, the one thing that tore his attention away from all the strange details in it was sitting up, looking down, and seeing his limbs underneath the covers. Stretching so far down like two narrow tree limbs that they seemed to touch the edge of the bed ahead.

The legs didn’t look quite right. Basically, they looked like his own current legs, only elongated as if he were some sort of cartoon character. But he was six, and his mind did the best that it could.

I’m big, he would marvel. It should’ve woken him up immediately, so stark was the realization of him still dreaming. But lovingly it would linger a little, right before he gently woke up.

“I had that dream again, bro.”

He’d told one person about the dream by the time he was 17. His high school friend and fellow Union teammate Ian Chambers.

He wasn’t sure why he told the most random person about one of his most treasured secrets. He supposed he wanted a random person’s opinion. Wanted to say it out loud to someone he knew wouldn’t dismiss him, or try to humor him.

Once he became a teenager he relished the recurring dream, which still floated to him once in a while. Once a year, twice, he couldn’t be sure. He just knew it was never enough times. He could give three shits about being big in the dream then. At that point, it was all about catching every glimpse of the half-naked girl coming out of the bathroom and heading over to his side of the bed.

It was then that he was able to notice more details. The soft, mature tone of her melodic voice. He was able to see the water droplets on the inside of her shirt where her body was still wet in places. The shirt read “flirt,” incidentally, and was pale pink, not white.

She was the perfect body type he could tell. Her hair was parted in the middle and cut into a short bob with cute bangs that framed her oblong face. If she hadn’t pulled the hem of the shirt down to cover her legs, warping the front of it he could’ve seen the outline of her tits. But he was sure they were perfect too.

“Bruh, you don’t even know any black women,” Ian Chambers crudely observed. Colin knit his brow in confusion. It was a general statement that was just untrue enough to puzzle him.

“I know plenty of black girls,” Colin assured him. “Brandi. Taylor, Shay’s gorgeous—”

“Cheerleaders don’t count,” Ian shot back.

“Why not?”

“Bro, I’m talkin’ about black… women.”

Ian was black and Colin could only guess what he meant by that, since Ian himself was the middle in a big family of brothers and little sisters, and yet somehow managed to never share the same space with a single black girl in their high school. Conspicuously so, rounding the corner just as they were leaving, or never discussing them even if they were mentioned by name. Either Ian was in some way protective or wanted to distance himself from the association entirely. Or maybe secretly dressing up as all of them, who knows. Whatever it was, he was committed. Besides, it didn’t matter.

“Well, that’s the thing— I don’t think I’ve met her yet. I mean, I know I haven’t.”

“You think it’s a premonition?”

Colin gave his friend an admiring look for the accurate word.

“It has to be.”

“Why does it have to be?”

“Why else would I be dreaming about a woman I don’t even know? Since I was six?”

“Wait, you met her when you were six?”

“No, I mean I’ve been dreaming about her that long.”

“And in the dream y’all are doin’ it?” Ian confirmed. Colin’s pants stirred.

“No, I mean… maybe we were, but I think I’m like… just waking up.”

“And she comes out the bathroom naked? In an attic?”

Colin felt a strange mixture of zeal, joy, and jealousy to hear someone else talk about it. It made it real. He better not even think of jacking off to her.

“She’s wearing a shirt,” corrected Colin.

“That’s it?”

“Jesus, Ian,” he said with frustration. Only because he didn’t know that for sure and he didn’t want to say that because it would just lead to another question like, “what do you mean you don’t know?” and the thought of it pissed him off. He wished he could know for sure.

“Hey, you brought it up,” Ian reminded him, tossing up both his open palms. “So is that why it took you so long to lose your virginity? You think this is like your future wife or something?”

Colin fought an eye roll, even though Ian was right.

He wanted this girl to be the one. The only one, the way it felt in the dream. He wanted it all to make sense as soon as possible. He still maintained senior year was a perfectly reasonable time to lose your virginity, however.

“Probably,” Colin shrugged. “I think maybe we’re soul mates or something,” he casually tossed out, testing his friend, ready to laugh along if need be.

“Think she’s somewhere dreamin’ about you too?” Ian asked insightfully instead.

At that, a shiver went through him and he coughed to cover it. “Maybe.”

“Do you even like black women like that?” Ian remarked in some kind of disbelief. It was over-emphasized as if to betray distaste but again Colin detected something protective in it.

“I like that one,” Colin assured him as he laced up his cleats.

The day his mother died was the day he began to associate the dream with bad omens. It’s strange losing your mother when you’re on the verge of not needing her anymore, in the way that sons need their mothers. A queer sort of anguish. He wouldn’t say that he was a mama’s boy, but he also wouldn’t say that he was the kind of son that took his mother for granted. At least he didn’t think he was.

He’d always been closer to his father who was like the sun. Football was the moon. By day, his father guided him. To football. And by night, when it was dark and quiet and he was alone, football guided him.

But his mother, he supposed, was maybe the stars, or the wind, or the tides. His mother also knew all the equipment down to the jock strap. His jerseys were always clean, his transportation from practice to tournaments always punctual, the snacks she brought always tasty, her feeble shouts from the stands always supportive, strangely formative. Never the expectant “that’s how you do it!” from his dad, who always expected greatness from Colin and always got it.

But it was because of his mother’s, “shake it off, shake it off,” that he always heard, whether what’d just happened was good or bad, that he was who he was.

Maybe his mother had been the moon. And when he witnessed his dad fall apart, he knew that for him, she had been the sun.

It was an away game, six hours from his alma mater but only about 45 minutes from his family home in Omaha.

If only he’d had time before the game to drive home. If only he’d told his mother to tell his sister Janna to fuck off, so that she would’ve skipped their previously scheduled nail appointment. So that she could ride with Dad instead of taking her car on wheels with almost no tread during a snowy night, and wouldn’t be rushing to get to a shit game they were going to end up losing. Of course, his not playing could’ve had more to do with that than their opponent having the home advantage.

He would never know. All he knew was that right after kickoff he was being pulled out of the game within the first scrimmage. And when he looked at his coach’s devastated eyes— and then his younger brother’s catatonic face next to his father’s crumpled frame there on the sidelines of the field— it took about ten full seconds for his frustration to die down, for his invincibility to wane.

For the first time in a long time, something was wrong. Really wrong.

He wished there was some hospital to go to, some ambulance to run down. Some brief period of hope that there was one last thing he could say to her. But there wasn’t. She was already gone.

He was frighteningly jealous of anyone who got to have those hours before the game, those minutes. His father, his brother, those nail technicians, anyone on the road that night. Even his sister got a few before she’d called Dad, who was already in the stands.

But Janna also had to watch their mother’s life slowly drain away as she begged her to hold on, so it was an irrational ember of resentment he could never let surface.

That same night Colin had the dream.

He hadn’t wanted to see her that night, this girl from whenever. But he’d had no choice. The familiar sounds of a creaking wooden floor began and out she came, prancing around in her sleep shirt, greeting the day and him with that formidable smile.

This time he didn’t try to change anything, didn’t try to notice any clues, he just succumbed, feeling awash in love for this stranger about whom he knew nothing, except that the two of them had no secrets.

He watched the dust play around in the spotlight of the sun where it hit the tribal embroidery of the white blanket, waiting for consciousness to take to subtly take him away. This time, he wouldn’t take it for granted. “Goodbye,” he whispered, his own voice waking him in the soft dawn.

When he was a senior in college, every attic apartment he saw advertised caught his eye. Even though he was in a long-term relationship with a girl at the time that he thought could be the one. But he couldn’t bring himself to propose to her, and she wasn’t waiting around.

By then the dream had made a complete change of association in his mind. The dream seemed harmful and intrusive. It was starting to pose a threat to his actual happiness.

He found it hard to commit to anyone, not knowing if this person would ever actually cross his path, replace the hole that the loss of his mother had left. Whenever it seemed like he was getting a grip, the dream would come back to him, as if to warn him not to.

Once he went pro, the dream came back less and less. He would sometimes be on the verge of forgetting about it entirely until he’d be dreaming he was in the middle of some press conference naked, running down an endless corridor in some nameless stadium. Then the sound of creaking wood and bare footsteps along the floor would make his heart skip, everything would go dark, and then suddenly there it was, just as vivid and immovable as ever.

Having dreamed it roughly a thousand times, every detail memorized, he found that he noticed the most when he wasn’t looking for anything. He noticed his own feelings in the dream, that if he could get himself out of the way and let the dream play out, there were some already there. A deep familiarity that he’d never felt. Not so much of him knowing her, but of her knowing him. There was a naked level of acceptance that had always been there, that he’d taken for granted over the years and now craved, and it made him wake up weeping.

“Maybe the dream isn’t about a person. Maybe it’s your inner… I don’t know. I’m just saying, maybe the dream is just about you.”

“I’d agree with you, but… you’d think some part of it would change by now.”

He was having lunch with Samantha Myers, his former fiancee turned media agent and best friend-in-law. Samantha once thought she was in love with Colin, until she realized he wasn’t in love with her. She couldn’t figure out why. Not out of vanity, but because she didn’t understand why a man like him would simply keep her around as if out of fear.

Samantha wasn’t particularly attracted to her current husband Matt, but when he worked up the courage to steal her away from Colin, all that changed. And when Colin put up exactly no fight to stay angry at either of them, their relationship turned fully platonic. It wasn’t until Samantha had moved on and taken him on as a client that Colin even worked up the courage to tell her about the dream.

“I gotta say, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard maybe ever. You should talk to a therapist.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I mean at this point, it’s like your brain is torturing you or something, right? You gotta find out what this is.”

“It’s getting a lot less frequent. Last night was the first time in a couple years, maybe.”

“Still. I mean it gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps? Really?” wondered Colin.

“Yeah,” she insisted. “Like, what if she’s some murder victim or something? Like Sixth Sense?”

“Holy shit, Sam.”

“Sorry, you know how I am. Too much ID channel,” dismissed Sam with a jostle of her briefcase. “So you ready for Monday or what?”

“Wake up ready, go to sleep ready.”

It was something Colin said a lot. He was starting to notice it getting less and less true but he didn’t know what that meant, so he pretended it meant nothing. If it was about his football career, he had to ignore it. For his own sanity.

Sure, the love of the game had taken a few blows since going pro, gaining an image, a lifestyle. But there was nothing else in the world he could do, and he was determined to do it until they kicked him out. He was simply surprised he was still here, that they still wanted him. Homegrown or not, there were younger, flashier players out there.

“SportsCenter’s doing a segment on the dream team. Probably have a crew out at the facility after practice.”

“The ‘dream team,’” Colin scoffed. “Did you come up with that?”

“I don’t know who came up with it.”

“I don’t have to talk to ‘em do I?” he whined.

“Since when have you ever been camera shy?” Sam ribbed him through a bit of her strawberry salad.

“I’m not but I don’t like that Misha chick they always send to sneak attack us with contract questions.”

Samantha shook her head. “It’s not that kind of segment. Thirty minutes, tops. Talk to them about Victoria House if you want.”

Victoria House was a charity that taught college kids the dangers of driving drunk. He sort of fell into doing it. Sam said he needed to find a cause to care about, he didn’t have one, so he picked this one and named it after his mother, who was technically killed by a drunk driver.

But in his mind, a sober driver would’ve probably leveled her anyway given the conditions that night. The booze might’ve saved their own life. He saw the van, the roads.

She simply shouldn’t have been driving that shitty van. Alone. And he didn’t know how he could’ve known that better than his own father, the one who was the most incapacitated after.

“Even I’m not dumb enough to expect Sports Center wants to hear me talk about charity work for 30 minutes.”

“I didn’t say the segment would be 30 minutes, I’m saying they need 30 minutes of footage. If you and Matt ham it up I’m sure they’ll just use that.”

“Jesus,” he muttered.

“Hey, you want it all to stop, just say the word,” Sam threatened good-naturedly.

“Yeah right,” he smirked. “What would you do without your star client?”

“Probably be better for my marriage,” she muttered with wide eyes.

“Speaking of which, Matt thinks I should shop around.”

“Oh he does, does he?” she chuckled.

Colin shrugged imperceptively. “I’ve been thinking about it a couple years myself.”

Sam said nothing, only furrowed her brow as she rummaged through another choice salad bite. “‘You never told me that.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Not until I had to.” He could count on Samantha to catch his drift. She did. She made a face like she was impressed.

“Well, no time like the present,” she said with imposed self-imposed casualness. “You want me to put some feelers out?”

He didn’t answer yea or nay, he just sighed. “This absolutely positively cannot get out.”

“Trust me, I know. I negotiate your salary, remember?”

Samantha’s phone warbled and she picked it up without excusing herself and began talking. Colin dropped a Benjamin on the table as Sam climbed out of the booth and he followed behind. He nodded to a couple of rubbernecked guys leaning back on their bar stools before escorting Sam out the door.

Spellbound is now available for pre-order exclusively on Amazon. Also in Kindle Unlimited!

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