ebook of the month :: stonnington drive

A NIGHT WITH THE SOCIETY PLAYBOY ::  ebook

The location

I've set a couple of books on Stonnington Drive now.  It's a fictional street, but in my mind's eye I know exactly where it is.  Across the road from where I used to live was a gold course lined by a sweet creek.

In my imagination, Stonnington Drive is a wide tree-lined avenue lined with stately mansion on large half acre blocks backing onto that same creek.  The kinds of houses that could host the society wedding of the decade in their backyard.  The kinds of houses with gables, and wings and grand ballrooms.  The kinds of houses brimming with all sorts of family dramas going on behind those beautiful facades.

Caleb and Ava of  A NIGHT WITH THE SOCIETY PLAYBOY are by-products of that existence.  Ava ran from it, Caleb embraced it. Or did they?
  

The excerpt:

Stonnington Drive.  A row of thirty homes, no more, but a stronghold all the same.  It was the last bastion of the provincial old-fashioned good life to be found in what was now a relatively cosmopolitan city.

Stonnington Drive men wore suits long after they’d retired from high powered jobs in the city.  Stonnington Drive women believed in gin, tennis, and boarding school for the kids.

Ava believed it a suffocating, pulverizing existence.  The pressure to keep up with the Joneses, and the Gilchrists for that matter, had broken down her parents’ marriage in the most vociferous, public, ravaging way.  The run on effect had left her searching for guidance wherever she could find it.  And every day she’d been away from the place she thanked her lucky stars she’d managed to get out when she had.

For who knew at nineteen how strong one’s principles really were?  Another year there, another reason to stay, who knew...

She glanced over to her brother to find Caleb had joined him.  Damien had survived their childhood and made good.  But he’d been older.  Stronger.  Luckier.

The two men put arms around one another as they ducked heads and talked.  Best friends, even after all these years.  As close as brothers.  Closer even, considering her father had always treated Caleb like the second son he’d never had.

No wonder.

He was the perfect by-product of his upbringing; rich, good looking, arrogant, lackadaisical.  As such she ought to have felt ambivalent in his company, despite their friendship all those years ago.

So why, now, couldn’t she shake him off?

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