Strawberry Wine - Michelle Hughes Remember Your First Love

This Valentines Day, Tears of Crimson invites you to remember  your first love.... with Strawberry Wine.

Everyone remembers their first love.


Luke Parks was mine. My first kiss, my first love and my first broken heart. He swept me off my feet with just one look and after a summer of awakening my body to passion left me broken. He was twenty-four and to a girl of sixteen, I'd never been prepared for the devastation of loving and losing so completely. Time, like all things moves on, but my heart never fully recovered from watching him drive off down that country road out of my life.

Fate. Can you really escape your past?

I grew up, finished college and moved to the big city. I thought I'd left all those memories behind, but fate can be a real bitch. I'm a journalist now and my first real assignment throws me face first back in front of Luke. He's opening a new tattoo parlor in Chicago and they want me to get his story. One look into his blue eyes and I'm remembering drinking strawberry wine and the summer nights we spent sharing everything but my virginity.

It was inevitable that he'd be my first lover.

The last summer night we'd spent together, I was determined to give him the one thing I'd kept from our relationship. At the last moment I'd balked but like I said, fate. There was no doubt in my mind that now that he was back in my life, I'd end up in his bed. My only sanity? My best friend and roommate, Jake. He's that guy that you can always depend on, the one you have to call your friend because he's just too sweet to be anything else. Fate was impossible to resist, so I could only hope when Luke destroyed my soul again, Jake would be there to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes your heart has to be broken before you can really understand love.


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Behind the Book:   Writing Strawberry Wine was like taking a walk down memory lane with all the tears, joy, and reminders of what it was like to be young and in a love for the first time.  I'll admit it, it broke my heart but in a very good way.  I'm hoping that's what readers feel when they take the journey with me.  I struggled with the title and changed it a dozen times, because it reminded me of a song I'd heard.  The problem was no other title really worked for this book and I came to the decision that those memories playing around in my head were there long before that song became a thought, and well it just had to be this way.

This is romantic fiction, but as with every book I write a small piece of my soul finds it way inside the pages.  Strawberry Wine just happened to hit me twice as hard.  I can't tell you how hard it is to write when tears are streaming down your cheeks.  It brought back so many things that I'd left in the past on purpose.  Maybe in a way writing this book was therapeutic for me.  I could ramble on for days about how much I needed to write this story, but I won't.  I hope you enjoy the journey.