Keep Coming Back To Love | Christa Maurice

When I was working on Keep Coming Back To Love I knew Candy had an assistant, but when they appeared at Angie and Alan’s backyard party in Try a Little Tenderness lo and behold the assistant had been promoted to publicist (Ty didn’t know when he was on the phone with her at the hospital.) She was also Indian (which was a surprise to me.) As Ryan and Taylor’s story progressed, it became clear that Ryan’s friend Mick was a lot more messed up by their sordid past and that Sarina had to be his soulmate.

Then I started their book and there were more fun surprises in store for me. (Honestly, you’d think I didn’t make these people up.) Chief among those delights was seeing Candy from a different angle. In Keep Coming Back To Love, she grew from teen girl to grown woman, but that story was all about her feelings for Ty. In this book, she is a mentor to Sarina and she’s awesome! Sarina’s parents are really fun too. They’re wise in ways that Sarina doesn’t appreciate yet. They’re also a little ridiculous. Sarina thinks they’re not ambitious, but look at their hobbies! Her mother builds doll houses—elaborate, wired for electricity—doll houses. And she builds a train set to the same scale as the doll house. Sarina’s father likes to cook and sew. He made Sarina a Belle costume when she was a little girl. His cooking is terrible because he doesn’t pay attention to the details, but also because he’s trying to make things that are way beyond his capabilities. They are both very ambitious, just not about their jobs.

Getting to see Mick learn that all relationships aren’t like the twisted relationship he had with Mrs. Spencer was painful though. He really does not understand and there are several scenes where he and Sarina are talking but they are not having the same conversation. When the realization did dawn, it was uplifting. Sarina needed to learn it wasn’t all about her. At the beginning of the book, she feels like it is (and in many ways it is.) As things progress, she’s trying to figure out Mick through the lens of it being about her, and failing, until she finds out about Mick’s trauma. In that moment, she finally becomes the person she’s been working toward the entire book.

I think readers of the Drawn To the Rhythm and Rock And Roll State Of Mind series will enjoy this a bit more because there are so many cameos. Readers of Keep Coming Back To Love will especially enjoy seeing what was going on while Candy was catatonic in the hospital when June got sick. It can be read without having read the other books, but I enjoy spotting those kinds of references so I can’t help but put them in myself. (Castle and the Firefly references anyone?)

Pssst – here’s that excerpt:

“So this time I was wrong. How many times has that happened?”

“I don’t know because I always did what you thought was right. Maybe you were wrong before and we lost chances to get out of the hole we were in because you didn’t want any of us to reach out and take the help that was offered.”

“We don’t need to argue about this.” Gale stepped between them.

“Really? That about Lisa?” Ryan glared at both of them.

Gale tensed. “Don’t mention Lisa.”

Sarina grabbed her phone and called Candy. If she was in the middle of making Rice Crispy Treats, it might be answered by her daughter June, but June already knew how to relay correct information over the phone at seven. Her brother was less reliable, but he did know how to pass the phone to someone who was.

The phone rang six times before shunting her to voicemail. Weird. Candy’s phone always got answered, even if it wasn’t by Candy. Sarina dialed again.

“Hello?” A man’s voice. Candy’s phone could have been stolen. That would explain why there was no answer before.

“Who is this?”

“Tyler. Who is this?”

“Sarina. Where’s Candy?” And Tyler who? In the background, Sarina could authoritative voices ringing off hard surfaces.

“Candy’s…distracted. Wait, you’re her assistant.”

Close enough. “Yes.”

“Candy’s daughter is sick. We’re at the hospital now.”

“Sick?” Sarina checked the time on her computer. “Candy only left two hours ago. What happened?”

“They think it’s meningitis. Whatever you needed, you’re going to have to handle it yourself.”

Sarina heard Candy talking in the background about vaccinations and then Suzi saying she was sure Candy had done everything she could. Of course, Tyler Franklin, the singer of Touchstone. The other male voice she could hear in the background must be Suzi’s husband, Brian Ellis, bassist in Touchstone. “How long is she going to be distracted?”

“It’s her daughter,” Tyler said. “As long as it takes.”

Sarina blew out a breath. That had sounded pretty insensitive. For someone whose livelihood was saying the right thing at the right time, she was bombing. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. I need to know how far out to clear her calendar.”

“Yeah, sorry. Stress. At least a week. The poor kid is really sick.”

“I’ll take care of it.” How? Both of them had been overscheduling themselves in anticipation of Candy’s premonition of disaster that had happened before they were ready. “Tell Candy the office is under control.”

“Honey, at the moment I could tell Candy the moon was made of green cheese and she’d keep talking about vaccinations and June being cold and Luke Skywalker.”

Wow, Candy must be really upset. She didn’t even handle Mark Hamill. “Take care of them.”

“I’m on it.” He hung up.

All of this happened from Ty’s POV in Keep Coming Back To Love (Ty, who is terrified of doctors and hospitals, went to the ER because Candy needed him. What a guy.) I knew at the beginning of the book that this would come up and I dreaded making it work. In the end, it fit in like I had planned it this way all along. I suppose I sort of did, but if you consider that I wrote Keep Coming Back To Love in Abu Dhabi in 2012 and Love Me Tender in Ohio in 2016, it’s sort of amazing that it worked.

And the Mark Hamill thing? That happened. I mean to say, it happened in Candy’s book. June got sick and some kind stranger helped Candy get the kids in the car. Candy didn’t realize who the kind stranger was until her son Joey started talking about Luke Skywalker. It seems like the kind of thing Mark Hamill would do.