WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? JANE RICHARDSON ASKS.

Hello, Jane,
Welcome to my blog. It's so nice to have you here. This is a book that intrigues me. As I posted, I read. It's definitely on my TBB list.

But first, tell us,

Who Do You Think You Are?

 Have you ever thought about just how many different people you really are?

We’re all quite capable of having multiple personalities.  We do it every day.  When you think about it, we all behave in different ways, not just in the different situations we find ourselves in, but depending on the people we’re with.  We pull different aspects of our personalities to the fore, depending on who we’re spending time with.  In essence, we become different people. 

How do you behave with your friends?  What about the one who’s quiet, thoughtful, considers a situation carefully before she forms and opinion or makes a decision.  Do you find yourself more likely to behave the same way when you’re with her?  The quieter, more considered ‘you’ takes over.

What about that zany, life’s-a-party friend?  Nothing seems to bother her, and she turns every possible negative into a positive, with flags on!  How much of that rubs off on you, and do you behave the same way with her?  Your own party spirit comes to the fore. 

Then there’s the friend who’s a great deal older and far more experienced than you.  You’re always asking for advice, learning from her stories.  You’re the pupil to her teacher.

Think about how are you with the other people you meet every day.  Children, perhaps your own kids and those of other people.  Colleagues and co-workers, strangers on the bus to work.  What about the assistant in the shop where you have a complaint, or the bank official who’ll decide whether or not you’ll get that loan?  We’d never behave exactly the same way with all of them.  So we bring forward different parts of our characters, put them on like a set of clothes, and become the person we need to be in any given situation. 

BUT, at the heart of it all, deep inside – you’re still you.  That spark of who you are, that little flame that burns deep inside that lets you know you’re still the same Jane at heart, or the same Lorrie, or the Mary, Polly or Susan.  That little spark of You-Ness, your individuality, is always there - thank goodness!

Now let’s go one step further, and then another.

First of all, imagine you’re in a situation where you have to be one of those other people all of the time.  Only when you’re completely alone can you let go of Party Girl, or Miss Quiet, or The Expert.  Hard work, huh?  You bet!

Now let’s add something else to the mix.  Now, while you’re being that other person, let’s suppose something really big, really momentous, happens to you.  Something like - falling in love.

For a moment, all you want to do is throw off that other personality and follow your true heart, that little spark of You-Ness.  But you can’t.

You can’t, because if you did – you’d be dead.

So what do you do?  Here’s what you do.  You do nothing.  You have to let it go.  And though it hurts to the quick, you’ve no choice.  Let it go.

This idea of having to be someone else so completely and utterly someone that’d you’d have to give of something as important as your shot at real love is one that fascinated me so much, I incorporated it into the story that became A Different Kind of Honesty.  When FBI Agent Tony Valentino is working deep undercover, one slip that reveals who he truly is means he’ll won’t survive.  One mistake, and he’s a dead man.  Then he meets Maggie Lawless, and he knows – he just knows- that she’s the one.  But he can’t tell her.  Like we said earlier, he has no choice but to let her go.  Pretend she never happened.

Is that the end of the story?  Of course not.  I’ll leave you with a short excerpt from A Different Kind of Honesty.  I hope it’ll make you want to read more.

Keep that little spark burning!

 

 

 

 

EXCERPT

“I don’t know how you did it,” Maggie said. “I mean, the name and everything, for all that time. Being someone else.” She glanced away and a look he couldn’t identify crossed her face. Confusion, perhaps? Anxiety. “Were you someone else?”

Tony thought hard, shook his head. “I don’t think so…not entirely.” He rubbed a finger across his brow. “It was like being both, me and him, all at the same time. Him on the outside, me on the inside.” He looked out across the room to the lights of New York, wondering. He’d never thought of it before, the way she’d asked, at least not coherently. “And you know what?” he said, still staring out of the window. “That was fine. Until one day something happened and I started to hate that name.”

Her voice was no more than a whisper. “What happened?”

“I met you,” he said simply. “I met you and I wanted to tell you everything. What I was doing, who I was. All of it.”

Maggie lowered her head and made a little stifled sound, a release of something. “But you couldn’t.”

“No.”

Tony closed his eyes, remembering that chilly fall morning. The cream and gold corridor outside her hotel room, her kiss still hot on his mouth as he started to walk away from her door. Something stopping him; a fine, invisible chain unravelling behind him and snapping him back, strained and taut. He’d slumped against the wall, his eyes running over the stupid over-elaborate plaster cornice that roped along the edge of the ceiling like frosting on a wedding cake. His fists bunched hard to his sides, pressing down as if he could push himself down through the floor, down into the earth till he had nowhere else to go but up, screaming the truth. The physical effort he’d made to stop himself from banging on the door and telling her everything, just to hear her say his real name over and over as they made love. When he pushed himself off the wall, the heel of his shoe had left a dirty half-moon on the flock paper.

He opened his eyes. He was still here in her room and she was there, quiet and unmoving. Just waiting; giving him his time, his space.

“No one knew everything,” he said. “Not my supervisor or the men I was with. Not my wife, my family. Only I knew it all and it filled me up, but it was okay. I was sorta big enough to hold it all, you know?” He lifted his beer to his lips, but changed his mind and put it down. “And then...you. You happened and that was somehow too big for me. I needed you to know it all too. I wanted you to have the truth.”

Behind him, Dinah began a new song. “EmbraceableYou.” Maggie moved toward him and set her glass on the counter beside his beer. She touched her fingertips to his face.

“I can have it now.”

Taking the half step that brought him close enough to lean his forehead on hers, Tony laid his hand over her fingers on his cheek; her mouth so close her light, hesitant breath brushed his lips.

“Maggie,” he said quietly, and felt her breathe in. “Six months…six months of dreaming about you, thinking I’d never see you again.” He slid his hand behind her head, the scent of her hair the same as before of roses, and something rich and heavy he couldn’t name. He buried his face in it, filling himself with her.

“I thought it’d kill me. But now, it’s like I died and came back to life.”

“I didn’t even know your real name.” Her fingers rested lightly on his chest as her voice wrapped itself around his insides. “All that time, thinking of you as someone else.”

Tony touched a finger lightly to her lips, hoping against hope. “That’s just a figure of speech, right? All that time, thinking of me?”

Maggie looked up, and her eyes were full of something he recognized deep inside, something familiar he tried to name, but the word escaped him.

“No,” she whispered. “Not a figure of speech.”

As he kissed her, the word returned. It was something that had eluded him all his life except for one short, perfect night—the one thing he needed above anything else.  And he knew now, just as he’d known then, that she was his only source, she was the beginning and the end.

The word was ‘honesty.’

 

*Wow, as I said, intriguing. Give us a little more, please, Jane.*

 

BLURB

Always the one who ends relationships before they’ve barely begun, it’s way out of character for Maggie Lawless to take a risk with a man she hardly knows…the man she meets in a seedy New York City diner has a truth about him, a sincerity like no one she’s ever met before. Tony Valentino is an FBI agent fresh from a long-term undercover operation that’s left his life in tatters. His marriage over, separated from his children and with nowhere to call home, he’s frustrated and angry. All that keeps him going is the sweet memory of a brief encounter with a beautiful woman, though it wakes him from crazy dreams that leave his mouth dry and his sheets soaked with sweat. When he meets her again, it’s obvious the fire that burned so briefly between them never really went out...but as their affair rekindles, both Tony and Maggie find the very people they thought they could trust are the first to turn against them.

 

*All I can say is, wow again. Where can we find your book?*

 

A Different Kind of Honesty is available from Muse It Up Publishing and all major e-book retailers.

http://museituppublishing.com/bookstore2/index.php?page=shop.product_details&product_id=431&flypage=flypage.tpl&pop=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1

Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Jane. I'm looking forward to reading this one.

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