When the Stork Delivers Your Baby
LEANING ON AIR lands on my doorstep
Hi Friends,
After the raft of late nights and early mornings I’ve come to anticipate during launch month, I curled up for a snooze Tuesday afternoon, then awoke to a SPECIAL DELIVERY from Tyndale! My very first soft and hard cover copies of LEANING ON AIR!
Below is the moment I first saw my beautiful new baby. I’m giddy.
Here’s how I’d describe her:
She’s a layered tale of wonder, loss, and restoration—a love story (and a companion to the award-winning Sugar Birds). Her protagonists’ relationship is intimate and heartrending and soaring. Early reviewers are saying they’ve never read a novel like this before.
Here’s the gist:
Ornithologist Celia is passionate, adrift, and yearns for affection. Equine surgeon Burnaby is autistic, principled, and Celia’s touch makes his skin crawl. Even so, after a whirlwind summer, they elope on a whim and plunge into the most unusual romance of her life.
After a decade of marriage, the two have found a unique and beautiful rhythm. Then tragedy strikes while Celia hunts for the nest of a research hawk near the Snake River. Reeling with grief, she’s certain Burnaby won’t understand her anguish or forgive the choice that initiated it.
She flees to kindness at a remote farm in Washington’s Palouse region, where a wild prairie and an alluring neighbor convince her to start over. But when unexplained accidents, cryptic sketches, and a mute little boy make her doubt her decision, only a red-tailed hawk, the husband she can’t touch, and the endangered lives of those she loves can compel her to examine her past—and reconsider her future.
*******
Want a peek at her fingers?
Think of these opening pages as her very first ultrasound.
Enjoy!
(Preorder her HERE and that stork will land her your hands week of May 7.)
*******
Chapter 1 ~ Celia
Scrape
Northwest Washington State, 1997
Above the pond, a cloud of gnats shimmered in the June morning as a Canada goose rousted her brood through reeds of yellow iris toward a floating gander. On the opposite shore, Celia Burke leaned against a fat alder tree and watched the goose family cross the pond like a giant centipede.
Over them all, its white head a beacon in the green-black needles of a Douglas fir, an enormous bald eagle aimed its beak toward the paddling geese. Celia raised her binoculars slowly, anticipating the apex bird’s strike, her eyes peeled for the twin metal leg bands her grandmother had spotted during repeated sightings of this aging raptor.
She didn’t wait long. The eagle lifted its wings in feathered angles, flapped, swooped, and snatched a downy chick from the swimming spine of birds. The gosling’s parents—their honks frantic, necks extended—launched their heavy bodies after the attacker. But the eagle rose nimbly out of range, the chick in its talons.
Celia dropped her field glasses and sprang from beneath her tree’s leafy cover. The raptor passed overhead, swift and low and parallel to the narrow road beside the pond, the gosling a mere ladder’s reach away.
She sprinted after it, her ridiculous urge to prevent the baby goose’s demise as reflexive for her as breathing. For the next few seconds, she chased the eagle, propelled by the illusion that she could mob the raptor like a crow, that she could startle it into dropping the chick. She ran with abandon, watching the bird, not the ground, prepared to catch the baby when those wicked feet let go.
Instead, a rise in the country road caught her sneaker edge and sent her sprawling. Midair, she twisted, then hit the road’s rough surface in a skid. From her outstretched right arm to her ankle—wherever her tee and jean shorts weren’t covering skin—gravel, secure in its tarry substrate, scraped her raw. The spectacular tumble entered her memory in vivid, agonizing slow motion.
A goldfinch sang from a nearby field. Celia lay in the road, listening to it and a distant rumble. Numbed by endorphins from her sprint and the sweet relief of adrenaline, she felt oddly peaceful. Only her hip throbbed. Detached, she envisioned its purpling contusion as she ran her tongue over her teeth. Finding them intact, she inhaled a lungful of fresh rural air. On her exhale, a wave of pain arrived with a motorcycle’s roar.
And with a motorcycle. Its tires crunched the shoulder’s gravel as the engine’s RPMs slowed and stopped. A kickstand scraped, and heavy footfalls hurried toward her. She pushed herself to an upright position with her good hand.
“No paralysis. That’s favorable.”
She twisted toward the deep, steady voice and craned her neck at the helmeted man in a brown leather jacket and goggles who shaded her like a tree. A smiling tree, with a two-day’s growth of blond beard and a wide mouth of straight white teeth.
She rolled her shoulders. “I couldn’t jump off a dime right now.”
“Think you can stand?”
She nodded, reached, and the man pulled her upright with a leather-gloved hand.
“Oof. Hip pointer.” Groaning, she cupped the bony protrusion at the top of her pelvis with her uninjured hand and winced at the condition of her other palm—and the arm attached to it. Blood dripped from her elbow.
“No doubt.” He scanned her body-length abrasion. “I do not believe that hip is your immediate concern.” Stripping gloves from huge hands, he pulled a thermos of water and a packet of gauze from a saddlebag on his bike, then held the supplies toward her. “May I?”
“Let me get this right. I trip, out here in the boonies, not a soul in sight. Fast as gossip you show up out of nowhere with road rash supplies.”
“Ha.” He crouched, inspecting her bloody leg. “I’m still awaiting permission.”
“Fine. Have at it. I’ve got a mile hike home and I’m not going to carry half the road with me.” She plucked a seed-sized stone from her forearm and flicked it away. “Dang. I’m sandpapered.”
“An apt description.” He turned from her to the bike, removed his helmet, and placed gloves and goggles inside it. His hands made one smoothing pass over corn-colored hair.
Celia eyed the backs of his ears, tight to his head, their lobes plump and flared. She’d know them anywhere, though nothing else about him matched the seventeen-year-old she hadn’t seen for . . . what, almost twelve years? Well, apart from that hair. And his height, though this man seemed even taller.
“Burnaby?”
He answered with a grin, also unfamiliar. Back then, she’d spent a summer coaxing the corners of his mouth to rise.
“Hello, Celia.”
*****
Such a glad day. Thanks for celebrating it with me. 🧡
Love,
Cheryl
P. S. You can find the book lots of places. Click a link and PREORDER now.
Congratulations, Cheryl, so happy for you! Can't wait to see this one leave the nest and land in people's laps!
Cheryl, I'm so glad that as a "radiologist/reader" I was blessed to see an early ultrasound of LOA! Loved it then and even more so now. Thank you for sharing the joy with us as you unwrapped your beautiful new baby (and in hardcover, too!)