Trucker Frank Bartlett is driving through an abandoned, old, Kentucky ghost town and offers to give a ride to a pretty girl named Angela who has been stranded alone in the rain. They become acquainted and eventually fall in love. But everything isn’t what it seems between the two of them. Eventually, secrets are revealed…

This was a really good short story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked the main couple. They both have had troubles in the past and I was curious to find out more about them. I also wanted to see what was going to happen as the plot unfolded. I liked the part at the carnival, it was sweet and fun. There were some surprises and twists to the story as it went along. I enjoyed how everything turned out in the end.

A touching, romantic, and captivating read by Bobby Underwood. ( )

“The first time I saw her she was standing along a lonely backroad in the cold Kentucky rain. There was not another car in sight--broke down or otherwise--but even if there had been, she’d have looked out of place. She was elegant and beautiful in some indefinable way that transcended reality; she seemed more a mirage in the rain, or some angel washed down from heaven in the storm. And yet, there existed a glimmer of the everyday about her at odds with her otherworldliness.”

This is noir at its best.
Nothing is as it seems for our two main characters, David and Angela. Both carry potential deadly secrets, and how they deal with these secrets with each other provides all the fire and passion that makes the story so great and unforgettable.

“It is one thing to be physically naked before someone you love, exposing all those perceived blemishes and misshapen contours which, in our own eyes, make us less beautiful and desirable than someone else, but quite another, after having done so, and finding love and acceptance, even adoration, to tear beyond soft flesh and brittle bone, and reveal a cancer on our soul so dark and ugly and malignant that we cannot imagine another human being not turning away in horror.”

The main value of the story is the exciting journey these two must make under some very dark clouds, but Underwood still manages to open an umbrella of hope, which makes for such enjoyable reading.

“It was a delicate dance we were navigating, our movements careful and measured; both of us, for different reasons, were surprisingly fragile, and a little unsure of our feet. Neither of us wanted the music in our hearts to stop playing…”

There is a tenderness underlying the gritty foundation that makes the reader care deeply about what happens to these characters.

“Angela became both a miracle and a revelation, managing to retain her feminine elegance while allowing herself to be completely vulnerable; giving me her love, and herself, with the wanton abandon only found inside the spicy covers of paperback originals from decades ago. I rewarded her with unabashed love, spoken with both words and touch. Every whispered word of tenderness I felt in my heart, and sensual adoration I felt elsewhere, was returned to me in kind.”

The superb ending is on-the-mark great writing that no one does better than Bobby Underwood. This is a page-turner worthy to be counted among the best in noir fiction. ( )