Margins
Love Me to Death book cover
Love Me to Death
2010
First Published
3.89
Average Rating
98
Number of Pages

True love can transcend time and death, but can it survive revenge? Don't miss this fan-favorite novella from New York Times bestselling author Maggie Shayne, available as a standalone ebook for the first time! Five years ago, a burning house forever changed the lives of five teens… and ended a sixth. Years later, summoned to a gravely injured friend's bedside, David Nichols must face the town he fled. Tormented by dreams of the dead girl he'd once loved, he's become a firefighter in a futile attempt to save enough lives to balance out the one he took. Until he sees a woman who should've been dead… and his friends start collapsing, one by one. Sara Jensen's life flips upside down when she's suddenly plagued by fire-ravaged nightmares and a dream man who seems to touch her very soul. When a friend recalls a local tragedy from her childhood, Sara visits the town to make sense of the mysterious events. But her arrival sets off an eerie chain of events she must solve, especially if she wants to save the flesh-and-blood version of the man she thought only existed in her dreams… First published in 2010

Avg Rating
3.89
Number of Ratings
70
5 STARS
31%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Maggie Shayne
Maggie Shayne
Author · 106 books

I live in the teeny, tiny town of Taylor, NY, (Alliteration Alert!) though my mailing address is Cincinnatus, my telephone exchange is Truxton and I pay taxes and vote in Cuyler. All of these are at least in the same rural county in the southern hills of New York State; Cortland County. There are more cattle than people here. The nearest “big” cities are Syracuse and Binghamton and they are an hour away, in different directions, and not really all that big by most standards, though they both seem humongous to me. I look out my window to see rolling, green, thickly forested hills, wildflower laden meadows and wide open blue, blue skies. My road is barely paved. The nearest neighboring place is a 700 acre dairy farm. My house is a big, century old farmhouse. I moved in here after my divorce in 2006. Just a little over a year later, the house, which I had named, SERENITY, burned. It was 99% gutted, and I lost my two dogs, Sally, an 11-year-old great Dane, and Wrinkles, my 14-year-old, blind bulldog. This was the culmination of my Dark Night of the soul, which had seemed to hit me all at once in 2006-2007. My mother died that year, after a 14 month battle with pancreatic cancer. She was only 60. The youngest of my five daughters had left home that same year, and while that’s not a tragedy at all, it felt like one to me. Then came the divorce. And finally there was the fire—it seemed my darkest night wasn’t quite finished with me after all. I had lost almost everything before that point, and as I poked through the wet ashes and soot the next day, I realized that I had now been stripped all the way to the bone. No better time to start over. (And no, I didn’t come to that realization that day—there were a few days of wallowing in pity first, particularly the day after the fire, when I hit a deer and smashed up my car, which I was practically living in!) That’s when I started to laugh. Just sat on the side of the road as the deer bounded, uninjured and carefree, out of sight, and laughed. It was just too ridiculous at that point, to do anything else! And from there, I picked myself up, and brushed myself off, and said, okay, there’s only one way to go from here. Forward. And that’s what I did. There I was at the age of harrurmphemmph, living in my one, mostly undamaged remaining room, with a dorm-sized mini-fridge, a futon, a TV, my cat (nine lives!) and a laptop. And not much else. (Though thank goodness the room that survived the fire, was a room that had its own attached bathroom!) Since then I have rebuilt my beloved home, which really has become my haven, my “Serenity.” I share it now with my fiancé, Lance, and we have accumulated quite the little family together. “Little” being a relative term. We have a pair of English Mastiffs, Dozer and Daisy, who weigh 203 pounds and 208 pounds respectively, and a little pudgy English Bulldog named Niblet, who is bigger than both of them, inside her mind. We also have the aforementioned cat, Glorificus (“Glory” for short,) who adores her canine pups and keeps them firmly in line. And we've acquired a pair of stray cats as well, a mother and son, Luna (Lulu for short) and Butters aka Buddy. Lulu showed up pregnant during a lunar eclipse, had a litter, and vanished again. We found homes for all the kittens except one. Butters. We got him fixed and kept him. A few months later, Lulu returned, again expecting. This litter was born on the "Monster Moon." Again, all the kittens were spayed and neutered and placed in homes, and this time we got Lulu to the vet in time to spay her before the cycle could repeat. Glory is not amused. She has a story of her own, my old Glory cat, having been with me before the Dark Times descended, she went through it all with me, moved with me, survived the fire, and remains with me still. She's tolerating the newcomers. Barely. My partner is an artist, a mechanic, a welder and an inventor, and the rumors are true, he is much younger than I

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