Welcome Author Peggy Jaeger!
Hello everyone and welcome to my site! Today I have Award-Winning Author Peggy Jaeger visiting with her new release, Vanilla with a Twist!
Be sure to read the excerpt and grab a copy of the book for a sweet summer treat!
GENRE: Sweet, contemporary, small town romance!
VANILLA WITH A TWIST
Tandy Blakemore spends her days running her New England ice cream parlor, single-parenting her teenage son, and trying to keep her head above financial water. No easy feat when the shop's machinery is aging and her son is thinking about college. Tandy hasn't had a day off in a decade and wonders if she'll ever be able to live a worry-free life.
Engineer Deacon Withers is on an enforced vacation in the tiny seaside town of Beacher's Cove. Overworked, stressed, and lonely, he walks into Tandy's shop for a midday ice cream cone and gets embroiled in helping her fix a broken piece of equipment.
Can the budding friendship that follows lead to something everlasting?
READ AN EXCERPT
“Nope. Proprietary is my middle name.”
He laughed. “Mine’s Basil.”
She tilted her head. “Your initials are D.B.W, like in dubyuh?”
His wince was as charming as his smile. “I know, pretty awful, right? In school, I was called D.B., which is even worse.”
“What do you like to be called? Deacon? Deke?”
“Deacon’s fine. Is Tandy short for anything?”
“Nope. It’s actually a mistake.”
“How so?”
“The nurse at the hospital who filled out my birth forms had a bit of a hearing problem.” She rolled her eyes at the story her brothers loved teasing her with. “My mother wanted to name me Sandra after her own mother, and then call me Sandy to distinguish the two of us. The nurse heard it as ‘Tandy’ and recorded it as such. My father found it hysterical, so the name stuck. It’s kind of unusual, so...” She lifted a hand in a there- you-go gesture.
He flicked her a lopsided grin again. “It is, but lovely, too.”
Heat flew up her neck and sprinted to her cheeks.
“One of my partners says he doesn’t care what you call him, but don’t ever call him late for lunch.”
He shook his head and forked in a chunk of his lobster. When, a half second later, he sat back and closed his eyes, a tiny moan blowing through his lips, she knew he was having a moment.
“Good God, this is even better than advertised.”
“Yup,” she said. Deacon opened his eyes again and focused on her face.
“This is another of those recipes Ricky refuses to share,” she told
him.
“That’s too bad, because this”—he lifted his filled fork—“is something I’d love to reproduce when I’m back home.”
“Where’s home? I don’t mean to be nosy, but you sound like you’re from the East Coast, only...not.”
“You’re not being nosy. We’re sitting, enjoying a meal, and getting to know one another.” He took a sip from his own water bottle as his gaze held hers. “I grew up in Rhode Island, but for the past fifteen years, I’ve lived in New York. Manhattan.”
“I’ve never been.”
“To the city?”
She shrugged and popped in another knot. “To New York.”
His eyebrows rose again.
“I’m the poster child for small-town girl. Born, bred, lives, and will die here. I’ve only been out of New Hampshire once, in middle school, for an all-states band contest.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Boston.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Not exactly international travel.”
“Nope. Took a school bus. Competed. Lost. Came home. Didn’t even have time for any sightseeing.”
“Now, that’s a shame. Boston’s a great town. I have an off-site office there, and I usually go up once a week on business.”
“What do you do? If I had to guess, I’d think something in”—she tilted her head again as she regarded him—“finance. You look...I don’t know.” A quick lift of her shoulder and then she said, “Successful.”
His laugh was swift, open, and free, and she felt it all the way to her toes.
“You make it sound like a curse.”
“I don’t mean to, sorry. It’s been...a while since I’ve been able to sit and chat. Running the shop is a twenty-four-seven life in the summer months, and it doesn’t give me time for other things. Like making small talk.” She glanced out at the water.
He was quiet for a moment, studying her, while she tried to hide the heat slipping up her neck again from her confession by dipping her chin.
“I can understand that. My business occupies my life twenty-four-seven, too.”
“And yet you’re here, on vacation, so you’re able to take some time away from it.”
This time his laugh held a darker, strained note. He shook his head and dropped his gaze to the water bottle in his hands. “This isn’t exactly a vacation,” he told her. “Not in the true sense.”
“A vacation’s a vacation in my book.”
“In mine, too. Usually. But I didn’t plan to take these three weeks away. I was, well, the best word is coerced.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peggy Jaeger is a contemporary romance writer who writes Romantic Comedies about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. If she can make you cry on one page and bring you out of tears rolling with laughter the next, she’s done her job as a writer!
Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, she brings all topics of daily life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she’s created the families she wanted as that lonely child.
When she’s not writing Peggy is usually painting, crafting, scrapbooking or decoupaging old steamer trunks she finds at rummage stores and garage sales.
A lifelong and avid romance reader and writer, Peggy is a member of RWA and her local New Hampshire RWA Chapter.
As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go "What??!"
WHERE TO FIND AUTHOR PEGGY JAEGER
Website: http://peggyjaeger.com/
Blog: http://peggyjaeger.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/peggy_jaeger
Peggy_Jaeger BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/peggy-jaeger
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/peggyjaeger/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peggy-jaeger-296ab878/
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00T8E5LN0
Authors database: https://authorsdb.com/community/15814-peggy-jaeger
BUY LINKS
Nook https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/vanilla-with-a-twist-peggy-jaeger/1136710329?ean=2940162687870
THE GOOD HUMOR BAR
Who doesn’t like ice cream?
I mean, except for lactose intolerant folks and diabetics, isn’t ice cream a food group for most people?
I know it is for me.
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, then Staten Island, NY, my favorite ice cream was the kind you got from your neighborhood Good Humor man.
Never heard of him? Oh boy, have you missed out on a slice of real, home-grown Americana!
100 years ago, in 1920, confectioner Harry Burt created a chocolate coating comparable with ice cream. The problem was it melted lickity-split when placed over the dessert. Burt’s son suggested freezing the coating over their vanilla ice cream bars and adhering a wooden stick into its center so it wouldn’t be messy to eat.
VIOLA! The Good Humor Bar was born!
Before big box stores became the rage, the ice cream was sold on carts, wheeled around neighborhoods. These carts eventually became a fleet of trucks with the classic and iconic Good Humor logo on the sides. Good Humor men wore white uniforms with caps and every kid I knew wanted to grow up and be a GH Man just to wear the cool uniform. I think eating all the leftover ice cream was part of that job description, too!
A massive fleet of Good Humor trucks still roam the streets during summer in certain areas, their calliope music blasting from a bullhorn a signal to all the kids in a neighborhood to come running with their coins and dollars.
You can buy most Good Humor flavored ice creams in stores now, but the memories I have of hearing that tinny music and running out into the street to get a special treat is something that has never left me. It’s a memory, time-stamped on my childhood.
While my new ice cream-themed book VANILLA WITH A TWIST is set in a seaside boardwalk ice cream parlor, I took the wonderful and delicious memories I have of that Good Humor ice cream and incorporated them into Tandy Blakemore’s love of all things ice cream related.
