We’re thrilled to be revealing the cover for Cassondra Windwalker’s Hold My Place, which follows an unsuspecting librarian who falls head-over-heels for a married man, but when she finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance, she discovers her new husband’s past wives have all met early deaths—and some aren’t ready to let go yet.
Releasing on January 25th 2022, Hold My Place is now available to pre-order. Read on to discover the cover, synopsis, and an excerpt!
When librarian Sigrun falls head-over-heels for the sophisticated and very married Edgar Leyward, she never expects to find herself in his bed—or his heart. Nevertheless, when his enigmatic wife Octavia dies from a sudden illness, Sigrun finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance worthy of the most lurid novels on her bookshelves.
Sigrun soon discovers Octavia wasn’t Edgar’s first lost love, or even his second. Three women Edgar has loved met early deaths. As she delves into her beloved’s past through a trove of discovered letters, the edges of Sigrun identity begin to disappear, fading into the women of the past. Sigrun tells herself it’s impossible for any dark magic to be at play—that the dead can’t possibly inhabit the bodies of the living—but something shadowy stalks the halls of the Leyward house and the lines between the love of the present and the obsessions of the past become increasingly blurred—and bloody.
EXCERPT
This wasn’t the romantic yearning penned by the writers of Regency romances or those luridly illustrated books whose covers featured bodybuilding Highland chiefs dressed in nothing but kilts. This was a blood-sickness. If I could have driven him from my thoughts, I would have, so wretched and ragged I felt with the constant pluck, pluck, pluck of his absence on my consciousness. He was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. My brain conjured endless contrived conversations between us as I roamed the deserted stacks at work. I dreamed of him and woke, sweating, consumed with a strange, excited anxiety, staring into the darkness and unable to retrieve any details of his phantasm.
By the end of the second week, I realized I must have secretly hoped time and distance would prove some antidote to his wonderful poison, that space would clear my vision, show me all we were was crass and common and selfish and fleeting. Hoped I’d save myself from myself before it could go too far. While he could still maintain some pretense of honesty. Hoped all the peacock feathers and stardust would show themselves only false hope and detritus in the end, cheap and pathetic and completely beneath me.
Instead, day and night, each cell in my body tended toward an intersection that hourly grew farther away. We’d exchanged numbers, true, in some unspoken nod toward a potential apocalypse we both wanted to pretend was impossible. A mistress—no, that’s not right. As much as my inner melodrama-mama craved the title, I knew I hadn’t earned it. I wasn’t even an illicit lover. Just an unacknowledged friend. Regardless, an unacknowledged friend can’t send texts. Can’t cling for survival in the awful isolation of quarantine to another woman’s husband.
You might assume that didn’t matter to me, that I wouldn’t have attached myself so hopelessly to him if it had, but it did matter, more than I can express. Even now, after all this time, I sometimes dream of those jade eyes bidding me goodbye. I wake up, breathless, choking, my throat full of aquamarine waters and my fingers dripping with seaweed. I think: I nearly drowned there, and something in me is disappointed I survived when I might have been subsumed by her. Other days, I imagine I see her eyes flashing at me beneath my lashes in the mirror, and I wonder which of us truly made it to the surface in the end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cassondra Windwalker is a poet, essayist, and novelist presently writing full-time from the southern Alaskan coast. Her novels and full-length poetry collections are available online and in bookstores.
