Vanessa | edenfreed.com

This week we are featuring a romantic suspense author Alice Orr and her book A Villain For Vanessa, (Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 4)

But before we venture into her books, let us find out what cocktail is Alice’s favorite for a Friday night.

My favorite cocktail is a Cosmopolitan on the sweet side. I’ve been informed that Cosmos are no longer in vogue, but I’ll take the chance of being un-chic because I like the way they taste.

Ingredients:

1/2 oz Fresh lime juice,
1 oz Cranberry juice,
1/2 oz Triple Sec,
1 1/2 oz Citrus-flavored Vodka.

Preparation:

Mix all the ingredient in a shaker with ice. Strain into cocktail glasses. You can garnish with a lime wheel.

A Villain for Vanessa by Alice Orr

A story of tangled roots and tormented love.

Two families are shaken to their roots. Vanessa Westerlo must find her roots. Bobby Rizzo is torn between Vanessa and his true roots. They are all tormented by love – past and too present. Meanwhile a man has been murdered. And that is the most tormented tangle of all.

Alice Orr is known for “Delicious suspense spiced with a love story.” She does it again in A Villain for Vanessa.

A Villain for Vanessa is Book 4 of the Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series set in Riverton, New York. This book features the Kalli family and the fortunate people who find safety and welcome at the Kalli homestead on Riverton Road. A Wrong Way Home is Book 1 of the series and A Year of Summer Shadows is Book 2. A Vacancy at the Inn is Book 3 and introduces the Miller family of Riverton Road Hill.

A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 4

An Excerpt by Alice Orr

Suddenly, after two and a half decades of silence, Angela Kalli’s niece had decided to reappear. Bobby Rizzo’s legal training and life experience had taught him to ask one question when a person acts in an inexplicable way. What does she want? Whatever the answer might be, Vanessa Westerlo’s agenda was far down his list of priorities. He was here to protect Angela, even though experience had taught him something else too.

Family history is a tangled story with the truth nearly impossible to unwind. Many of those tangles had a secret at the center, like the secret at the center of today. He was the only person Angela had told about her niece’s arrival. She’d arrived at Bobby’s office a few days ago, more unhinged than he’d ever seen her.

“Why are you so upset?” he’d asked.

“You have to swear you’ll never breathe a word to anybody. Otherwise I’ll walk out now, and you can forget I was ever here.”

Angela perched on the edge of the chair by his desk like a frightened bird. He’d never seen her frightened, and he certainly didn’t think of her as a bird.

“If you are here as my client, I’m obligated to keep everything you say confidential.”

Talking like a lawyer to someone he cared so deeply about felt awkward, but it put her at ease.

“Then I am your client,” Angela said, settling down a little. “I need your help to bring my niece back into my life, whatever the cost may be.”

Bobby didn’t like the sound of that.

“What is it you want me to do?” he asked.

Throughout the conversation that followed, the voices of his common sense and legal judgement had screamed through his gut like a freight train telling him he was on a dangerous track. That train continued to roar as he paced the narrow airport terminal now, waiting for Angela’s niece to arrive.

Was she coming to Riverton to continue the feud he’d heard about that day between her mother and Angela? Was Vanessa Westerlo here to take revenge? Or could she be motivated by idle curiosity? Angela cared so much. What if her niece didn’t care at all? Indifference would be the worst kind of wound to a heart as open as Angela’s.

“I won’t let that happen,” he said aloud to the empty terminal.

By the time the plane landed and taxied down the short runway, Bobby was on the tarmac and ready, his resolve as unshakable as if he were in front of the toughest jury of his career in a case he absolutely had to win. Then he saw her and something unfamiliar and unwelcome happened.

Bobby experienced a powerful ripple, like a seismic shift along a crucial fault line far beneath his controlled surface, threatening to rise and turn him suddenly less resolute. All because of a resemblance that couldn’t have been more obvious between the aunt he represented and loved like a mother, and the niece this young woman had to be.

Thick, dark hair was the first thing he saw, with a kind of life that seemed to spring from a vibrancy at the center of her. She was halfway across the distance from the plane when she turned her head quickly. Angela made that same move when she was impatient, as she could often be, even with him.

More often though, she’d been his encourager, the person who scolded him back on track when he strayed off course. Without her, he would not have won scholarships to college and law school. Without her, he wouldn’t be what he had become. He steeled himself against his first startling reaction to the striking young woman headed toward him now, who was so capable of causing Angela pain.

“Excuse me. Are you Robert Rizzo?”

ALICE ORR is the author of 15 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells. A former book editor and literary agent, she now follows her dream as a full-time writer. A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 4 is Alice’s latest novel. Here’s what readers say. “I was gripped before I was off the first page.” “After this story, I have become an Alice Orr fan.” Alice is known for “Delicious suspense spiced with a love story.” She does it again in A Villain for Vanessa.