Read an #Excerpt from Mornings on Main by Jodi Thomas

Mornings on Main
by Jodi Thomas 
Hardcover, 336 pages
Expected publication: April 10th 2018 by Harlequin Books
ISBN 0373804172

From the beloved and bestselling author of the Ransom Canyon and Harmony, Texas series comes a powerful, heartwarming story about generations of family and the ironclad bonds they forge 

Jillian James has never had a place she could call home. So when she lands in the sleepy Texas town of Laurel Springs, she’s definitely not planning to stay—except to find a few clues about the father who abandoned her and destroyed her faith in family.

Connor Larady is desperate: he’s a single dad, and his grandmother, Eugenia, has Alzheimer’s. He’s the only one around to care for her, and he has no idea how. And now he has to close the quilt shop Eugenia has owned all her life. When Connor meets down-on-her-luck Jillian, he’s out of options. Can he trust the newcomer to do right by his grandmother’s legacy?

Jillian is done with attachments. But the closer she grows to Connor and Eugenia, the higher the stakes of her leaving get. She has to ask herself what love and family mean to her, and whether she can give up the only life she’s ever known for a future with those who need her.

AMAZON | B&N 

Excerpt:

Connor Larady looked up from the copy machine he’d been trying to murder for an hour. “Morning,” he said as he set down his latest weapon of destruction, a screwdriver. “May I help you, miss?”

The woman clamoring through his office door was tall and slim enough to be a model. With hair in a ponytail and little makeup, she could have still been in her teens, but the wisdom in her big, rainy-day-colored eyes marked her as a good ten years older.

He shoved his tools aside, walked over to the front desk and tried to find a scrap of paper to write on. No one ever came into a newspaper office without either wanting some¬thing written, or rewritten.

You’d think a writer would have a pen and pad handy. Only he wasn’t much of a writer, and this wasn’t much of an office. The Laurel Springs Daily had been whittled down to little more than a weekly flyer and a spotty blog of what was happening in town when he got around to it, but he kept up the office his father and grandfather had both run.

Considering himself a good judge of people, Connor had a premonition he’d be filling out a free obit form or a lost dog report, also free.

There were some days he’d thought of combining the two columns in the weekly paper. The header could read LEFT TOWN FOR PARTS UNKNOWN. The byline could be Those Recently Departed or Run Over.

The woman moved one small step closer. Connor had no idea if she was just shy or half-afraid of him. Maybe his grand¬mother and daughter were right: he was starting to look like the mug shots on the Dallas nightly news. Hair too long, this was the third day he’d worn the same old wrinkled shirt, and he hadn’t bothered to remove the raincoat his gram said only a vampire would wear. 

He’d tried to tell them both that he didn’t have time to commit a crime. He was too busy running the town and keeping up with them. His grandmother had taken to wan¬dering off alone, and his daughter was worse. She preferred wandering off with any pimpled-faced, oversexed boy who had a driver’s license. Between the two of them, his curly brown hair would be gray before he turned forty. That is, if it decided to stay around at all. 

Connor shoved his worries aside and waited for the attrac¬tive stranger to say something. Anything. Or run back out the door. He didn’t much care which. He had more than enough to deal with this morning, and he didn’t want to hear a com¬plaint. Everyone thought if you were the mayor, you loved listening in detail of what was wrong in town.

About Jodi Thomas:

New York Times and USA Today's bestselling author Jodi Thomas has published over 30 books in both the historical romance and contemporary genres, the majority of which are set in her home state of Texas. Publishers Weekly calls her novels "Distinctive...Memorable," and that in her stories "[tension] rides high, mixed with humor and kisses more passionate than most full-on love scenes." In 2006, Romance Writers of America (RITA) inducted Thomas into the RWA Hall of Fame for winning her third RITA for THE TEXAN'S REWARD. She also received the National Readers' Choice Award in 2009 for TWISTED CREEK (2008) and TALL, DARK, AND TEXAN (2008). While continuing to work as a novelist, Thomas also functions as Writer in Residence at the West Texas A&M University campus, where she inspires students and alumni in their own writing pursuits. http://www.jodithomas.com/