Thanks for being on my blog today, Peggy! Why don’t you tell us more about your upcoming release, Vanilla with a Twist.

My newest book release, VANILLA WITH A TWIST, is part of the Wild Rose Press new summer series, One Scoop or Two. When the call went out to write a summer story about anything related to ice cream, I knew I had to submit something.

Most of my books are contemporary romances, RomComs, and small town stories about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them.

VANILLA WITH A TWIST is no exception.

Tandy Blakemore, the owner of Vanilla With A Twist, was an unwed teenage mom who grew up on a dairy farm in Beacher’s Cove, New Hampshire. BC is a fictional seacoast town. If you know anything about New Hampshire, you know it only boasts about 17 miles of ocean front and I didn’t want to write a story set in one of the coast towns because I wanted to be able to manipulate the setting and make it my own.

That’s the control freak in me for sure.

Setting the story in a fictional resort town gave me a great deal of leeway in how I wanted the town depicted and how it related to my heroine and the decisions she’s made in her life.

Small towns, as anyone who lives in one will assure you, are hotbeds of gossip and have more per capita intrigue and scandal than the National Enquirer could ever print. As an unwed teenage mother in such a small town, where everything is insulated and isolated, Tandy had to grow a backbone of steel and a will to survive and thrive among her neighbors and the town’s wagging tongues.

And she did survive and thrive. In fact, her ice cream parlor is not only a town favorite, but a regional one as well. By living her truth, accepting her fate as a single mother in a town known for its old world thinking, Tandy prospered and showed everyone first hand what a formidable person she was. She never lost her small town girl innocence though, which was delightful to write.

Strong women who face obstacles and chaos who also are able to stand true to themselves are women I want in my books, and in my life.

Blurb

Tandy Blakemore spends her days running her New England ice cream parlor, single-parenting her teenage son, and trying to keep her head above financial water. No easy feat when the shop’s machinery is aging and her son is thinking about college. Tandy hasn’t had a day off in a decade and wonders if she’ll ever be able to live a worry-free life.

Engineer Deacon Withers is on an enforced vacation in the tiny seaside town of Beacher’s Cove. Overworked, stressed, and lonely, he walks into Tandy’s shop for a midday ice cream cone and gets embroiled in helping her fix a broken piece of equipment.

Can the budding friendship that follows lead to something everlasting?

Excerpt

For a few moments, she regarded him with a look his mother would have called insightful. The corners of her eyes narrowed, she dipped her chin a hair, and she pulled her mouth into another appealing pout he was tempted to kiss.

“I bet,” she said after a long, drawn-out sigh, “you were the kind of kid who took apart clocks and fans and vacuum cleaners to see how they worked.”

“It was more washing machines and lawn mowers and anything with a motor, but yeah. I was.”

She shook her head, her own lips forming a lopsided grin. “Your poor mother.”

“She survived.”

Tandy rolled her eyes and shot her hands to her hips. “So it’s working again?” She thrust her chin at the ice cream machine.

“For now.”

“Okay, well, I can live with for now. And you think you know the real reason it’s been acting up?”

“I definitely do. But like I said, the water to the machine needs to be shut off to fix it.”

“Okay. Well, we close at nine.”

“I’ll come back a little before then. Get things ready. Is that okay with you?”

“I guess it’ll have to be.” She bit down on the inside of her cheek as her brows pulled together. “And you’re sure you want to do this?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t offer, Tandy.”

Why her reluctance to have him help was such a turn-on was something he considered while he waited for his ice cream.

Buy Links

Amazon ~ Nook ~ Applebooks

Social Media Links

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About the Author

Peggy Jaeger is a contemporary romance writer who writes Romantic Comedies about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. If she can make you cry on one page and bring you out of tears rolling with laughter the next, she’s done her job as a writer!

Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, she brings all topics of daily life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she’s created the families she wanted as that lonely child.

When she’s not writing Peggy is usually painting, crafting, scrapbooking or decoupaging old steamer trunks she finds at rummage stores and garage sales.

A lifelong and avid romance reader and writer, Peggy is a member of RWA and her local New Hampshire RWA Chapter.

As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go “What??!”‘