Virginia Taylor - Author

Fatal Evidence
Kari Lemor
 
What you don’t know can get you killed . . .
Construction company owner Scott Holland doesn’t go looking for trouble, but he’s just stumbled on plenty. The rundown mill he’s bought is plagued with mysterious incidents, and his investment partner, heiress Heather Silva, is as stubborn as she is intriguing. Dumped by his ex because of his blue-collar job, Scott is wary of Heather’s privileged background. Yet he’s drawn to her independence and strength, especially as the “accidents” grow more terrifying.
Determined to succeed without anyone’s help—especially her wealthy parents—Heather clashes with Scott again and again. But a grisly discovery makes them both targets. Someone wants Heather and Scott silenced for good. And as a killer closes in, the only option is to trust each other—or become the next victims…
​
 
Early Praise for Fatal Evidence:
“Fatal Evidence is fun and flirtatious, the characters are nicely developed and the story is engaging. Lemor has brought happily-ever-afters and laughter into the hearts of readers.” ~ RT Book Reviews
 
“Fatal Evidence has the right amount of everything I love in a book: mystery, suspense, intrigue, sexual chemistry, family drama and great friendships. Throw in an heiress turned real estate agent trying to get out from under her rich family and her entitled role and add a blue-collared construction worker with a chip on his shoulder and it's perfect. …Enjoyed all the books in this series so far and loved the hint at the next to follow.” ~ Carolyn’s Book Reviews
 
“Lemor once again incorporates humor, romance and suspense to make this novel another must read!” ~ Goodreads
 
Excerpt:
“Hold still,” he scolded and pulled her tighter to his chest. “Now listen up while I give you the run down on the condos up here.”
He walked around the space as if he wasn’t carrying a full-grown woman in his arms. Damn impressive. The pectoral muscles beneath her hand weren’t too shabby either. Continuing on with his description, he seemed to not even realize she was there. At the windows, he set her down and stood behind her looking out, pointing to certain landmarks in the small mill town that you could see from here.
He had been affected by carrying her. The erection digging into her back was evidence enough. Good to know. Not that she wanted anything to happen. They were business partners now. They had to be professional.
“Ready to go?” His gravelly voice sent goose pimples crawling across her arms, and she rubbed them.
“Cold? You should have worn a warmer coat. You’ve lived in New England all your life. You should know April can be chilly. Plus the heat hasn’t been on in this building for years.”
“I’m fine,” she lied. The cold wasn’t getting to her. It was him and his annoyingly sexy presence. She wouldn’t tell him though.
“I’ll make sure to let you know when the permit comes through. If I don’t have it by next week, I’ll call and check on it.”
“Perfect, but remember I’m in on this too. If you need me to do anything, you only need to ask.”
“I will.” His sexy smile was back as he glanced up and down her body. “Ready for your ride down.”
“You don’t have to carry me. I’m fine walking.”
“And killing yourself by falling down three flights of stairs. Then where does my funding for this project go?”
“You already have access. You don’t need me.”
“Stealing from a dead woman, though. That just seems…wrong.”
The chuckle escaped before she could stop it. He seriously had a warped sense of humor at times. Moving closer, he placed his hand on her hip.
At her indignant look, he said, “You could always ride piggyback if you don’t like me carrying you.”
Scanning her slim skirt, she scoffed. “A piggyback ride? In this?”
“You could hike up the skirt then jump on.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
His eyebrows went up and down. “Very much.”
Closing her eyes, she sighed then held out her arms. “Fine, come get me, my prince. Rescue me from the dangerous crumbling castle.”
Scott sidled closer then ran his hands down her hips. One hand continued down her leg until it slipped under. His other hand caressed her back then he scooped her up in his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on as he trotted back down three flights of stairs. At the bottom he didn’t release her right away. And for some reason she didn’t tell him to.
His eyes roamed over her from head to toe and lingered on those heels. Slowly, he allowed her feet to slide to the floor, her body rubbing against his hardness, sending fluttering sensations through her blood stream. As her shoes touched the ground, he leaned in close, his manly smell assaulting her nostrils. Inhaling the scent, she waited for his next words.
His breath drifted across her cheek. “Next time, you should think about wearing a sensible pair of shoes.”
Buy Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Evidence-Love-Line-Lemor-ebook/dp/B06XJTM15L/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fatal-evidence/id1281322187?mt=11
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Kari_Lemor_Fatal_Evidence?id=spFTDgAAQBAJ
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/fatal-evidence
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fatal-evidence-kari-lemor/1125923156;jsessionid=79FF310157D3CC316AC9485EC149FA91.prodny_store01-atgap04?ean=9781516100743
 
Check out my other books in the Love on the Line series:
 
Wild Card Undercover:  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/book.aspx/34406
Running Target:  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/book.aspx/34984
 
 
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As my book Perfect Scents is about to be released, I thought I might write a bit about my own garden, which once upon a time used to be huge with a swimming pool and room for a tennis court. I don't come from a family of tennis players so we made a garden in that spot instead. I have no photos to show, because when we subdivided, I gave the garden pictures to the new owners who built a lovely house on that spot.
So, without half the garden and the swimming pool, I had almost no gardening to do, and the front was scrappy to say the least.
Time passes and as a person grows older, gardens become more important. I had a single viburnum that keep sending out more plants, and as it did so, I planted them as a hedge along the front. I added roses, because who can live without roses? And that became scrappy too. With the drastic water restrictions, my garden died in places. In other places, it overgrew. Then along came a spider, oops no, a gardener who told me I could easily make the garden lovely again if I stopped being so mean about paying for extra water. Therefore I stopped being miserly, because a pretty garden is food for the soul.
He has been adding more plants every week, cutting back, and fertilising. Who knew gardens needed so much fertiliser? I'll show a 'before' photo of the worst spot, along the side of my house. 

A few months late and spring has arrived. The garden has nowhere near reached its full potential, but already it is looking happy. The leaves are beginning to grow on the crepe myrtles which should shade this very hot spot in summer. The flower photos are taken from various parts of my garden.

​“When I was One, I had just begun.
When I was Two,I was nearly new.
When I was Three, I was hardly me."

​AA Milne said that beautifully. But when I was three I was determined to be me.

​For Christmas the year I turned three (I was a January baby) my mother gave me a wonderful doll. She was made of some sort of squishy plastic and she had a series of tubes inside that you could fill with water so that she either cried or wet her nappy. I dealt with the latter so early on that I can’t remember ever changing a nappy. Perhaps I was given this doll because my mother had a new baby at the time and we had to love her.
As a matter of fact, I don’t remember my younger sister being a baby. Likely I was too absorbed in my doll. First she had a magical wonderful name. Rubber Doll. She was my only doll and my mother had spent night after secretive night making clothes for Rubber Doll’s Christmas debut.
​
Rubber Doll had knitted underpants and a singlet, a pretty crocheted dress, a knitted coat, a bib, a hat, and mittens all in white. She didn’t ever have nappies, which is lucky bearing in mind that I ripped out her leaky innards.

Until I went to school, she was my best friend, despite me having younger and older sisters. Later on, I learnt to make clothes for her on the sewing machine, one of those foot pedal things. She was the best-dressed doll on the block, but never fashionable because she was a baby doll. I don’t have a single photo of her, because in those days we didn’t have a camera. We barely had anything, as a matter of fact.

When I was barely me, my father deserted my mother for a younger woman and left his wife and three children in a two bedroom house, the lease of which he had paid for a year. The new baby meant that my mother couldn’t work, so in those early days, so that we could eat, we had a lodger who occupied the front room, which was the biggest in the house. We four females shared a tiny bedroom that had a double bed my mother and baby sister occupied and bunk bed for my big sister and me. You could barely move around the beds.

We had to be quiet because of the lodger and I don’t remember a thing about him/her. I think he/she left before the year was up but that can’t be right. It wasn’t until my little sister was about three that my sisters and I moved into that big room. I would have been six. My mother kept the small bedroom as hers.

We lived in that house until I was eleven and we shifted to Adelaide into a worse situation. My uncle’s wife had run away and left him with two small children. We lived with him in my grandmother's house so that my mother could take care of my little cousins as well. About a year later, their mother came back and took them. Not long after that my uncle remarried and moved out. 

Now, for the first time without little children to care for, my beautiful and smart mother had a chance to find a good job. After that, she found a new rich husband, and she shifted out with my little sister, leaving my big sister, now seventeen and me, thirteen, to finish our education under the supervision of our grandmother who had recently retired as a teacher and returned to Adelaide too
.
Then my sister ran off and got married and I was alone with grandma and Rubber Doll, for whom I still made new clothes. Sad to say, she was by now crippled, Rubber Doll that is. One of her arms had worn out and broken off and the man in the doll shop didn’t have a match, so her left arm was smaller and darker than her right. I did worry, but she didn’t. She accepted her disability with charm and grace.

The time came that I married and had a lovely little daughter of my own. I couldn’t part with my old confidante, Rubber Doll, but my daughter was appalled by her. She would keep leaving her in strange places, like the incinerator or the back of the garden. Then one day Rubber Doll disappeared. If you don’t like sad stories do not read on.

Months later I had been shopping and as I was walking home, I spotted something in the gutter. I moved over and picked it up. It was Rubber Doll’s crippled arm. I took it home and cried. I’m crying as I am typing.

I think the dog next door must have found her and eaten the rest of her.
The moral of the story is ... no moral. Life happens. We all love something or someone and we can’t guard them forever. Eventually the equivalent of the dog next door will get them.
​
This is one of the reasons why I write romance – it keeps the dogs next door away.
 
"When I was Four,I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.”

This past couple of weeks has been incredible. My luck started when Kensington Books got me a Bookbub promotion, using Starling as a free book.
I don't have any idea how many free copies were taken but my Amazon ranking as an author went down/up to under 10,000 from in the hundred thousands. The first thing I noticed was that I began to get ratings for Starling on Kobo. Starling also began to get lots more reviews on Amazon and Goodreads as well as Google, iBooks, and B&N. Ratings too.
Lovely Starling had for some time been praised but from so few that my sales languished. I am now the delighted author of a book that many people love.
Of course you can't get lots of love without getting a little bit of hate too. I have one review that is hilarious in the explanation why the reader hated the book. Fortunately, I quite understand. I can be irritating, as many people will tell you, but I can also see the funny side when a reviewer goes to so much trouble to explain why she hated the book. She clearly read the whole thing which is flattering. When I hate a book I don't read on, which means that I can't give a rating because that wouldn't be right.
I also had one reviewer who didn't read my book but gave me a star rating based on what her bestie said. Tch tch. Amazon agreed that should come down.
Starling is no longer free but she is ranking higher and higher each day. The people who love her have bought the whole series, which was what my publisher hoped. This is very timely for me because I was going to write one more book and if that didn't take me where I wanted to be, I was going to stop writing.
Now I'm not going to stop.
​

​The set I am showing here is a box set designed for the play, Washington Square. Although the story was set in Victorian USA, the room had been designed by the mother of the main character forty years previously and was therefore a Regency room.
 
I donated my time to the XXX Theatre Company, which doesn’t don’t have an extensive budget. For this set, I needed to be able to seat eight actors at one time.
 
I used up old paints because the waste I found when I was picking around was appalling and I hand mixed each colour. I made or supplied everything on the set. Most of the furniture was mine, but I drew a design for the fainting couch, which my hero built for me. He also made the fender for the fireplace. I painted every picture hanging on the walls, some on disposable plastic plates, some on old cardboard, mostly copies of paintings I had also found in books, except the big one in the background. (Shown above with an inset of a portrait of the heroine's mother that sat in a silver frame on the mantle above the fire). I sewed the curtains and upholstered the sofa.
 
Because the director, whom I very much respect, was known for the fabulous costumes she designed, I kept the set simple. It was meant as a frame for her wonderful gowns with the blue background of the hall to set them off. A reviewer had a hissy fit about the staircase merging with the walls, but that was not only deliberate because of the fade out of the heroine standing there with a single candle for the final scene, but also perfectly in keeping with regency times.
 
Unfortunately the flats weren’t put together as well as I would have liked but that was due to a demarcation dispute, the de-mark being that the construction team was accustomed to designers who used masking tape to hide construction problems and me being used to a construction team who would construct. Stalemate.
 
Even years later I still see parts of that set used for publicity flyers.
 
You can show off a beautiful set or you can use a set to show off costumes. Actually, you can even do both at the same time. As a designer, you choose.
​

 

Ingredients.
1. Up to thirty inquisitive, quirky, appreciative, talented actors.
2. One director with a list of wants.
3. Tailor’s drafting paper, graph paper, masking tape, scalpel, pencils, scissors, glue.
4. Paint, brushes, rags, sponges, rollers, twigs, feathers, fishing line, crayons.
5. 28 hour days.
5. A heater.
7. A tolerant spouse.

Instructions.
1. Read the play.
2. Listen to the director’s ideas, nod, and agree.
3. Go home and work out the logistics, like how many actors need to sit, stand, or walk through doorways, how many entrances you need for the numbers entering and the speed of entry, how many fly bars the theatre supplies, how many trucks, and how many trapdoors.
4. Design something incredibly beautiful that will work like a dream.
5. Make a model or draw one.
6. Present your design to the director and explain why your design works without even hinting that his would not work logistically and would be as ugly as sin.
6. Keep cool when he has a tantrum and sulks for a day because he wants what he wants and new ideas are scary.
7. Plot with the lighting designer to overthrow the director.
8. Waste another day making a model of the set the director thinks he wants. Let him work out for himself why it doesn’t work and praise him when he thinks he thought of the design and colour scheme you presented to him in the first place.
9. Assemble and your workers. Explain the concept. This helps if you have chosen your painting team because they don’t understand what you are talking about, but they like working for you and know that everything, no matter how weird it seems, will look fantastic in the end.
 
Theatre sets have to be built in sections because they need to fit through doorways, hang from fly bars or be sent onto the set by a system of devices called trucks. When assembled, everything has to fit together seamlessly. Nothing is meant to trip up an actor or fall on him/her. Doors are not supposed to get stuck, props are not meant to be health hazards, though actors are trusting souls ... I digress.
 
Final sets are built once they arrive in the theatre. This can take a day or more, depending on the complexity.

​Then, hey presto, you have designed a fantasy space to show off a group of talented people who like nothing better than living another life for a while.

While I was writing Starling, I had a problem with the hero of the story, Alasdair. He needed to appear intimidating to my heroine but not to the readers. With this in mind, I decided he had to perform a mighty deed to show that, beneath his emotionless exterior lurks a man with a heroic character.  

​In the days of the early colonial settlement of South Australia, aborigines lived in and around the site that Colonel Light, the city planner, had decided to use as the capital city, Adelaide. Because hills lined the coast, the new settlement would be constructed in a long line in front. In those days, the River Torrens (named after the man who invented the Torrens Title, used worldwide) was the only close source of fresh water.
 
Collecting this water was a problem. Justifiably annoyed by having their land invaded, the native tribesmen kept in sight of the riverbanks, finding the desperate settlers easy targets for their spears. Not about to be defeated so easily, the settlers built tunnels to the river. They also built wells close to the banks for the same reason, using guards while the water was being drawn.
 
Thirty years later, after the city of Adelaide had been developed, and the wells and tunnels disbanded, my hero in Starling, Alasdair Seymour, has to rescue a child trapped in one of these disused wells. Knowing the well was too narrow for an adult and that the child was wedged, he tunnels beneath the child and drags her out via his tunnel.
 
This story was inspired by many stories of the same sort of rescue, one in Australia about the time I was writing the book. I’m not sure who the rescuers were, but a group tunneled overnight to get a child out of a pipe. It was televised and took many hours. Like the rest of Australia, I cried when the child was pulled out alive. The strain on the faces of the men, the lack of light, and the sheer heroism of this act was inspiring and of course I want my heroes to be inspiring.

​Alasdair had made his fortune by tunneling, though for profit until he needed to help the child.

Picture - The first bridge built in South Australia in 1843 with South Terrace in the background. Artist Alexander Murray.
 

​Once upon a time when I was young, I wasn’t interested in gardening. I thought it ought to be my husband’s hobby because he didn’t have one. He also didn’t want one, so we had a garden that was lovely at the back where we mainly entertained, and awful at the front. In the front we had trees and a single viburnum.

The viburnum was a pest that produced other viburnum. Mainly we shifted these to the back where they filled in the spaces.
​
Time puttered by and the front garden never got any better though the back was lush. More time passed and we subdivided. This meant more hours to spend in the now smaller garden. We added agapanthus to the front. I tried growing a few other plants but nothing ever looked right.

One day we fell in love with a holiday house on a half-acre block filled with fruit trees, vegetables, grapes, and roses. Roses, roses, roses. We made that garden a showpiece, full of life and joy. Meanwhile, our city house was dull and dry, and nothing grew.

Life and death happened, mainly death, and I had to sell the country house. To keep my memories of the best time in my life, I transplanted some of the roses from the country garden to the city. In amongst the lilly-pilly and crowds of agapanthus, the roses sulked.

The day-week-month happened when I was tired of seeing everything around me die. I dug out all the agapanthus and left myself an empty landscape, except for the tired lilly-pilly trees. They shaded too much and made the area impossible but I kept trying. Hoping to improve the look, I bought more roses. This cheered up the transplanted roses, but the garden needed a design rather than more plants. Then I had an idea.

First I had the two lillypilly removed. Then I shifted around the smaller viburnum that had taken root and had the large one trimmed severely. My first touch of luck happened when I saw on television how to stake down branches to form a hedge.
Within a year I had a viburnum hedge all around the front of the garden. I didn’t buy a single plant for this.

Then I separated out three day-lilies I had in the side garden and I divided my liriopes. Together, these formed a border. Done. I am finally happy with my front garden.
​
I finished clipping the hedge yesterday. It takes a week but I think it’s worth the effort.

​In the supermarket this morning, I was standing behind a man who didn’t appear to be able to speak English. The checkout woman totalled his goods and told him how much money she wanted. He started gabbling. None of his words sounded like real words, even foreign words, but somehow he made clear to her that he wanted cigarettes. She indicated the counter behind and he walked to the end of the checkout and to the other counter with bagged goods he hadn’t yet paid for.
This was taking longer than I usually wait. He then had to get through to her the cigarettes he wanted. She offered him three or four various brands because he refused to indicate but insisted on explaining in gabble. By this time, I had decided that he presumed he was being clear of speech and she was deliberately misunderstanding.
He grew louder and louder as he became more frustrated. Finally she showed him a pack that suited him. She then wanted him to come back to the register to pay for the goods he taken there with him. No matter what she said, he refused to go back to the checkout.
By this time the line behind me was filling. People were staring and beginning to mumble. I said to her, “Indicate with your hand what you want him to do. Make a beckoning movement.”
She did so and he completely lost his temper. I thought he was possibly the victim of a stroke. People who have strokes think they are speaking normally when they’re not. He was so angry that he was scary. He was waving his arms around and yelling. One of the guys who often works at the checkout finally came over.
We were all a bit scared by this time, but the moment the customer saw a male he calmed down and spoke in a normal tone, but still not with words. Another checkout woman took his money at the cigarette counter and added it to the total on the checkout. All was calmed, but I was a little perturbed that the customer was close to violence with the female checker but wouldn’t consider the same reaction with a male.
I’ll never know what his problem was but one of the first stroke victims I nursed was very like him. He would go into violent rages with all the nurses except me. I was never mean to him like the others. I never left him uncovered or without reachable food, and I always stayed patient when he got stroppy. His impatience was understandable when everything he said was gibberish and he couldn’t do anything without the aid of someone else.
It got to be that he was always ‘my’ patient when I was on duty. Sometimes I think I saw the suspicion of a smile on his face when I talked to him, and some days I talked my head off. That was because by and large he was left on his own unless he rang his bell. I told him jokes and stories about the other patients he couldn't see. I even told him I was in love with his doctor. 
By the time he had a second stroke and died, we were firm friends. He did jokey things in a grumpy way and he made me laugh. I cried when he died. I was the only person who did. I don’t remember him having any family.
That man today – I wish I could have helped. Everyone did but we couldn’t. No one was judging him. The line was hushed with empathy. Sad, really, when people want to help but don't know how.

In the past year, I haven’t had time to do this blog and from now on I’m going to try to do one per week. This morning I had brilliant ideas what to say, but I’ve had a couple of distractions and I have now forgotten, so I’ll begin at the beginning.
I was always an avid reader of historical literature, and I seemed to have read every story available, set in every country in the world but mine. Apparently, if I wanted to read an Australian story, I would have to plough through yet another set in NSW telling a dour story of the convict settlement. By the time I was 12 I’d had enough and couldn’t read another.
My state, South Australia, is the only one colonised by free settlers, but clearly a story set in the Utopia of the south would never interest anyone else in the world. Well, other than me. The day came when I started reading romance but the problem was the same as regards to setting. Aussie stories were always set in NSW. Some three or four years after I started reading romance, I decided I would write one set in colonial South Australia.
This was my first book, now named Nell, which no longer exists, but which I plan to rewrite next year. I sent the story off to Mills and Boon, who tactfully didn’t mention it but asked if I would like to try writing medical romances for them. They sent me a box of medical romances to read, and I understood instantly why they wanted someone with a nursing background to write romances for them. Their usual writers had no sound idea of the reality of the hospital world. I cleared that up.
At that stage, nurses were still trained in hospitals. I submitted a story about a normal young woman who didn’t stand behind a doctors ten years her senior and say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,’ and who clearly wouldn’t be interested in someone so elderly or admire an  arrogant piggish man. I wrote three of those but all were rejected, strangely. Then I went back to writing what I wanted, adding an agent. After many rejections from other publishing houses in other countries, I decided to aim for a new line in the USA, Blaze, which wanted sexy stories.
 As a midwife, I consider myself a sex expert. This comes from needing to know answers to questions my patients put to me about orgasms, contraception, circumcision, etc. I had to research so that I didn’t lead them astray with my wild guesses.
At that stage, most romance heroines were virgins but Blaze intended to cause a ripple. 50 Shades of Grey is an adaptation of my story but I didn’t write whippings or anything like that. The story featured a virgin who would have a fairly normal deflowering, learning the ropes without being tied up. If the line wanted sex, I would give the line sex. I think I must have had more than 15 sex scenes in that book.
I never sent it off because life happened to me at that stage, or because after the million rejections in my bottom drawer I’d had enough. Then, a generation later, Random Romance started up. I was tired of submitting my historicals to competitions, doing well, and still not interesting publishers, so I rewrote Dr No Commitment. I cut 7 sex scenes, changed the heroine’s virgin status, made her a trained nurse, and sent off the story. Then I had a heart attack.
I came out of hospital and found an email from Random Romance expressing interest.
What to do?
​This was an experiment to see if I could be rejected in Australia as well as every other country in the world. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted anyone to read the story. Finally I took a deep breath and agreed to sign a contract, making myself a published author at last, with my least expected manuscript.
​Who would have guessed?
Dr No Commitment is $2.99 cents, currently.