New Year by Bonnie Dee Page A

me, and the new year stretching out before us is looking bright.
     
     
    The End
     
    About the author: Bonnie Dee began telling stories as a child. Whenever there was a sleepover, she was the designated ghost-tale teller, guaranteed to frighten and thrill with macabre stories. She still has a story printed in second grade on yellow legal paper about a ghost, a witch, and a talking cat. Writing childish stories later led to majoring in English at college. She dreamed of writing a novel, but didn't have the necessary focus and follow-through at that time in her life. It was only in 2000 that she began writing again and became a multipublished erotic romance author. Check out her books at http://bonniedee.com and sign up for her newsletter for updates on new releases. Bonnie Dee is also on Facebook and Twitter.
     
    If you haven’t read New Life and want to know more about how Jason and Anna got together, check out the excerpt below:
    Since the car accident that caused traumatic brain injury, Jason has fought to regain his memories and the ability to organize thoughts and control emotions. His promising future shattered, he works as a night janitor in an office building and clings to routine to make it through his days.
    New lawyer Anna breaks down one evening after fumbling her first court case. Self-doubt brings her to tears in a deserted stairwell where Jason finds her and offers comforting words. From this unexpected meeting an unlikely romance begins.
    A casual coffee date soon leads to a deeper connection and eventually a steamy affair. But are Jason and Anna’s growing feelings for each other strong enough to overcome the social chasm that divides them and the very real issues of Jason’s disability?
    Excerpt:
    The first thing you need to know about me is I’m not retarded. Or mentally handicapped I guess is the polite term these days. But whatever you call it, I’m not that. I have a mental disability, but I wasn’t born like this. It took extra stupidity for me to get this way—driving drunk, shooting through the windshield, landing on my noggin, and scrambling my brains permanently. I don’t babble and I don’t drool, except sometimes on my pillow when I’m sleeping, but everybody does that.
    Anyway, that’s not the story I want to tell. Who really needs to hear about comas and thousands of hours of rehab? My story begins the night I was cleaning black shoe marks off the floor, which could be any night since my life became all about industrial cleaners and swabbing toilets. This particular night, I was buffing the corridor floor of the office building where I clean. I remember the Naked Farmers blasting through my headphones, when I saw a woman sitting in the stairwell, head down, shoulders hunched and shaking.
    My first thought was to pass by, concentrate on polishing the floor, and leave her in peace to cry. Everybody deserves privacy. But after I’d polished a few more feet, wall to wall, I turned off the machine.
    I don’t like interrupting my routine. If I stray from my list of tasks, I tend to get confused. Memory lapses and trouble with organization—a couple of party favors I took home from a college kegger one night. But people are supposed to be kind to each another, right? So I paused the Naked Farmers in the middle of the line about “pray to Jesus but keep a shotgun handy when the Four Horsemen come to call” and pulled out my earbuds. I could hear the woman’s sobs echoing in the stairwell.
    When I got close and she lifted her head, I recognized her face. At first I thought it was from a long time ago, like back in high school, or maybe during my time in the hospital. I suck at placing people since my memory’s shaky and time kind of shifts on me sometimes. Then I remembered I’d seen her here in the law offices on the second floor as she was leaving work and I was arriving. She’d passed me in the hall and smiled like people do at janitors, polite but barely making eye contact. I