K is for Katherine

My theme for A- Z is the year my book takes place, 1881. I'll be posting about people, places, and random facts about the year as it relates - however distantly - to my book, West of Paradise.

Katherine is our heroine, who thinks a trip to the past will cure her restless heart. Which it does, but not the way she thinks. Here's how it begins...

     Katherine was bored.

     It was a new experience. To be sure there had been moments of boredom, brief interludes that had passed before they’d really begun. But those moments had been tiny fragments of her life, fleeting bits of time that were over before they had a chance to settle.

     What she felt now was complete and utter boredom.

     She glanced over at the king size bed where her fiancé sprawled inelegantly beneath satin sheets, one arm draped over the bedside. Moonlight flooded the room and bathed his form in quicksilver light. Perfect, she thought, he was as perfect a man as she could have imagined, from his silky black hair to his manicured toes. What was there not to like? He was intelligent, funny, sensitive when it mattered, and an excellent lover. But the longer she studied him the more she realized that there was nothing about him she loved. She had no desire to snuggle close, no desire to kiss him as he slept, and not the slightest inclination to wake him and share her troubled heart. And she knew at that moment, despite the barrage of protests she would hear, she would not marry Antonio D'Salvatore.

     ***