This is the second of four videos of Erica Smith and Will Hardy reading excerpts from Red August.
In this chapter, titled Talking to Strangers, August/Red is working at an apothecary in town, of which “Wolf” is a customer. He enters the shop and August hides when she sees him. This is their second encounter, the first being on Halloween night the year before. That night August immediately felt attracted to her new neighbor, but he wouldn’t give her his name. He didn’t even shake her hand when she tried to introduce herself, telling her they couldn’t be friends in such a small town.
You can watch the first video in my previous post, or go to YouTube HERE.
This reading was done at the lovely Scarborough Fair Bed & Breakfast in Baltimore.
Book Synopsis
What if you found out that you were descended from a long line of clandestine fighters, and that your family was still at war? Or that the love of your life was something other than human? August Archer thinks she’s a normal teenage girl—even though she has been having disturbing and erotic dreams about wolves lately. Still grieving over the loss of her bookish, charming father, and wondering over his final gift of a red hooded cloak, August is uprooted from her New York City apartment to a tiny town in Maryland, and the rambling Victorian house where he grew up. There she meets a wise woman with a gift for herbal medicine, the gentle old man who keeps the house in repair and the grounds thriving, and her new neighbor: an enigmatic, irresistibly fascinating man who refuses to talk to her, yet who seems to know her better than she knows herself, and fuels her most intense romantic fantasies. But it’s when August begins to coax her feisty Scottish grandmother out of her self-imposed catatonia that a strange tale of werewolves and hunters emerges—one in which the man of her dreams may be her family’s oldest enemy—in this modern-day telling of the Red Riding Hood story.
H.L. Brooks 