Love Pour Over Me

Denise Turney

Description

LET LOVE FIND YOU! MOVING ROMANCE NOVEL STIRS DEEP BELIEF IN LOVEPerfect blend of real life, beautiful romance story splendidly webbed with mystery, suspense, and an undying love. Fans of A Man Called Ove, Wounded, Thirteen Moons and Loving Donovan may fall in love with Love Pour Over MeAbout Love Pour Over Me Raymond is the only one from his neighborhood to make it out. Hes a gifted, loving man. His academic and sports successes earn him academic awards and highlights in Sports Illustrated and Track and Field News. Despite his success, Raymond feels alone, different from everyone else in the neighborhood.He is pushed over the cliff of fear early as an only child growing up in a home with a bullying, alcoholic father. Yet, his father is the parent who cared enough to stay. Without him, Raymond would have been shipped off to an orphanage. Raymond and his father live alone in West Dayton, rich with culture, yet the toughest part of the city. Nothing short of faith, love and courage can save Raymond, keep him afloat long enough to meet his soul mate, an unassuming, earthy woman with a penchant for art. But, will Raymond survive? And, what will Raymond do after he becomes witness to a murder his first night on campus at the university where hes won a scholarship? In spite of his wishes to avoid facing what hes witnessed, talk about the murder lingers. Its also at university where Raymond meets four guys, sure to become lifelong friends, one with a dark, dangerous secret. For Raymond, the stakes are high. So, Raymond has to run. But, is it enough? And, will Raymonds desperate attempts to avoid love threaten to keep him from the only woman hes ever truly loved, the woman he was born to love. Find out if love truly is enough. Get your copy of Love Pour Over Me now.

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456607715
• Langue: English

Extrait

Love Pour Over Me
 
 
By
Denise Turney
 


Love Pour Over Me
 
Copyright 2012 Denise Turney,
All rights reserved.
 
Copyright 2012
Chistell Publishing
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
Scriptures are taken from the
New International Version of the Bible.
Copyright 1985, Zondervan Corporation
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion
of brief quotations in a review or article,without written
permission from the author or publisher.
 
Chistell Publishing
3300 Neshaminy Blvd. Suite 589
Bensalem, PA 19020
 
Cover: Tywebbin Creations
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0771-5
 


 
Love Pour Over Me
People say that love is enough, but is it really ? Is some heartache too painful to recover from?
 
******
 
What early readers are saying about Love Pour Over Me :
“ Love Pour Over Me is a book that readers can relate to. It examines the human condition and splendidly shows how one can triumph over adversity.”
 
Adrianne Daniels
Ohio School Teacher
******
 
“With Love Pour Over Me , Denise Turney has done it again! Turney is a very talented writer who knows how to bring a story to life.”
 
Caroline Rogers
Co-Founder, C&B Books
******
 
About the Author of Love Pour Over Me :
Works by Denise Turney , international radio host and author of Love Pour Over Me have appeared in periodicals such as Parade, Essence, Sisters In Style, Madame Noire, Obsidian II, The Bucks County Courier Times, Halogen TV, The College of New Jersey Literary Review, Trenton Times and the Pittsburgh Quarterly
 
 
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the
greatest of these is love.”
I Corinthians 13:13
 


 
 
 
Dedication
 
For Gregory
 
SECTION I
Chapter One
It was Friday afternoon, June 15, 1984. Raymond Clarke lay across his bed. An empty bowl of popcorn was on the floor. Snacking did little to ease his excitement. In less than three hours his year round efforts to prove himself deserving of unwavering acclaim would be validated in front of hundreds of his classmates. Tonight was his high school graduation, the day he had dreamed about for weeks. He knew his grades were high enough to earn him academic honors. Even more than his grades were his athletic achievements. He hadn’t been beaten in a track race in three years; he won the state half mile and mile runs for the last six years, since he was in middle school. People would cheer wildly for him tonight.
The television was turned up loud. “Carl Lewis threatens to break Bob Beamon’s historic long jump record at the Olympic Trials in Los Angeles this weekend,” an ESPN sportscaster announced. “Beamon’s record has stood for sixteen years. Lewis . . . “
Raymond got so caught up in the mention of the upcoming Olympic Games that he didn’t hear the front door open.
“Ray,” his father Malcolm shouted as soon as he entered the house.
“What?” Raymond leaped off his bed and hurried into the living room. “Dad?”
“What? Boy, if you don’t get your junk--”
Raymond watched his father wave his hand over the sofa, the place where he’d thrown his sports bag as soon as he got home from graduation practice at school.
“Get this sports crap up,” Malcolm growled.
Silence filled the house.
Raymond grabbed his sports bag, carried it into his bedroom and tossed it across his bed.
His father exited the living room and entered the kitchen. Like a dark shadow, frustrations from spending ten hours working at a drab automobile plant where he drilled leather seats into one Ford Mustang after another while his line supervisor stood at his shoulder and barked, “Focus, Malcolm. Get your production up,” followed him there. It was in the furrow of his brow and in the pinch of his lip. “Ray.”
Raymond cursed beneath his breath before he left his bedroom and hurried into the living room. Seconds later he stood in the kitchen’s open doorway.
He watched his father toss an envelope on the table. “Letter from Baker came in the mail. Something about you getting some awards when—“ He reached to the center of the kitchen table for a bottle of Steel Fervor. He’d stopped hiding the alcohol when Raymond turned five. The alcohol looked like liquid gold. Felt that way to Malcolm too. “you graduate tonight.”
Malcolm took a long swig of the whiskey and squinted against the burn. He tried to laugh but only coughed up spleen. “You’re probably the only kid in the whole school who got a letter like this. Everybody up at Baker knows nobody cares about you. Letter said they thought I’d want to let all your relatives know you’re getting some awards so they’d come out and support you.”
Again Malcolm worked at laughter, but instead coughed a dry, scratchy cough that went long and raw through his throat. “We both know ain’t nobody going to be there but me and your sorry ass. Don’t mean nothing anyhow. They’re just giving these diplomas and awards away now days.” On his way out of the kitchen, bottle in hand, he shoved the letter against Raymond’s chest.
Raymond listened to his father’s footsteps go heavy up the back stairs while he stood alone in the kitchen. When the footsteps became a whisper, he looked down at the letter. It was printed on good stationery, the kind Baker High School only used for special occasions. Didn’t matter though. Raymond took the letter and ripped it once, twice, three times --- over and over again --- until it was only shreds of paper, then he walked to the tall kitchen wastebasket next to the gas stove and dropped the bits inside.
“Ray.”
He froze. From the sound of his father’s voice, he knew he was at the top of the stairs.
“Give me that letter, so I’ll remember to go to your graduation tonight.”
Raymond twisted his mouth at the foulness of the request, the absolute absurdity of it. He didn’t answer. Instead he turned and walked back inside his bedroom. He grabbed his house keys and headed outside. At the edge of the walkway, he heard his father shout, “Ray.”
Raymond didn’t turn around. He walked down the tree lined sidewalk the way he’d learned to walk since Kindergarten – with his head down. He stepped over raised cracks in the worn sidewalk, turned away from boarded windows of two empty dilapidated buildings and told himself the neighborhood was just like his father – old, useless, unforgiving and hard.
A second floor window back at the house went up. Malcolm stuck his head all the way out the window. “Get your ass back here,” he hollered down the street.
Raymond sprang to his toes and started to run. His muscular arms and legs went back and forth through the cooling air like propellers, like they were devices he used to try to take off, leave the places in his life he wished had never been. It was what he was good at. All his running had earned him high honors in track and field. He was Ohio’s top miler. He’d made Sports Illustrated four times since middle school.
“Ray.”
“Yo, man, you better go back,” Joey chuckled as Raymond slowed to a stop. Joey, a troubled eighteen-year-old neighbor who dropped out of school in the tenth grade, leaned across a Pontiac Sunbird waxing its hood. “If you don’t, your old man’s gonna beat your ass good.”
“Aw, Ray’s cool,” Stanley, an equally troubled twenty-one-year-old who pissed on school and failed to get a diploma, a man who couldn’t read beyond the third grade level, said. He stood next to Joey. His hands were shoved to the bottoms of his pants pockets. “And we know the Brother can run. Damn. We all can run,” Stanley laughed.
“Ray, remember the night we ran away from that Texaco station, our wallets all fat?” Joey laughed. He talked so loudly, Raymond worried he’d be overheard.
“Thought we agreed to let that go,” Raymond said. He looked hard at Joey then he looked hard at Stanley and the nine-month old deal was resealed, another secret for Raymond to keep.
One glance back at his father’s house and Raymond started running again. He ran passed Gruder’s an old upholstery company and Truder Albright, a small, worn convenience store, all the way to the Trotwood Recreation Center six miles farther into the city.
Houses were larger in Trotwood than they were in Dayton, lawns filled with flowers that swayed in the wind; neighborhoods were quieter too. As a boy when his father drove him through Trotwood on the way to the Salem Mall, Raymond told himself that this is where his parents and he would have moved to and lived, had his mother not fallen in love with another man, had she stayed.
Raymond sat in the bleachers at the recreation center watching an intramural basketball game for well over half an hour, until he felt certain Malcolm had, in a rare respite, drunk himself into a modicum of civility. When he turned over his wrist and saw that it was after five o’clock, he ran every step of the six miles back home.
The living room was empty. Raymond heard a noise akin to the rise and fall of a buzz saw. He frowned toward the stairs and mumbled, “He’s asleep,” while he exited the living room and entered his bedroom.
ESPN was still on. He went straight to his closet and pulled out his favorite pair of black nylon dress pants, a crisp white button down shirt and a tie. Fifteen minutes later he was showered, dressed and standing in front of his bedroom mirror.
His father was drunk. That he knew. It always went this way, every night. Like a religious habit, he’d spent his childhood watching his father drink half a bottle of whiskey every evening after he arrived home from work. When he was a little boy, he’d sit across from Malcolm at the kitchen table swinging his legs back and forth like a pendulum clock watching Malcolm turn a new shiny glass bottle up until it reached empty. He always brought a toy into the kitchen with him then, a race car or a plastic airplane. He’d push the toy back and forth across the table and sing out, “Voom. Voom,” but he never took his eyes off his father. It was a t