Excerpt: 'If I Could Turn Back Time' by Beth Harbison

HEA shares an excerpt from If I Could Turn Back Time, the new romance by Beth Harbison.

About the book (courtesy of St. Martin's Press):

Told with Beth Harbison's wit and warmth, If I Could Turn Back Time is the fantasy of every woman who has ever thought, "If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, I'd do things so differently..."

Thirty-seven year old Ramie Phillips has led a very successful life. She made her fortune and now she hob nobs with the very rich and occasionally the semi-famous, and she enjoys luxuries she only dreamed of as a middle-class kid growing up in Potomac, Maryland. But despite it all, she can't ignore the fact that she isn't necessarily happy. In fact, lately Ramie has begun to feel more than a little empty.

On a boat with friends off the Florida coast, she tries to fight her feelings of discontent with steel will and hard liquor. No one even notices as she gets up and goes to the diving board and dives off...

Suddenly Ramie is waking up, straining to understand a voice calling in the distance...It's her mother: "Wake up! You're going to be late for school again. I'm not writing a note this time..."

Ramie finds herself back on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, with a second chance to see the people she's lost and change the choices she regrets. How did she get back here? Has she gone off the deep end? Is she really back in time? Above all, she'll have to answer the question that no one else can: What it is that she really wants from the past, and for her future?

EXCERPT (from chapter three)

The beeping was driving me crazy.

It cut through the thickest part of sleep, leaving about one blissful second for me to drift back away into oblivion before beep! again. Funny how sleep can be like that. So delicious, so comfortable, so necessary that even one and a half more seconds of it feel like heaven.

I would have given anything, absolutely anything, to stay in that deep, black unconscious state.

If that was what death was, bring it on. But no—beep ... beep ... beep ...

I batted my hand out in the direction of the sound—break it! stop it!—but the movement felt heavy and went without con- tact or landing.

Wait, where was I? This didn't make sense; the puzzle pieces were slow to slide toward each other. Alarm clock? I didn't even have an alarm clock! I used my phone now, a gentle piano trill to pull me back into the world, not some old-school LCD alarm.

I tried to open my eyes. God, it was hard. Like they were glued shut with Krazy Glue. That happened to me once. I was trying to put a mug handle back on and got a sudden, violent eye itch and went to touch my eye without thinking of the glue on my fingertips. You think it's annoying when you glue your thumb and index finger together? Try your eyelids! Nightmare!

I tried again, and slowly light and color filtered into my brain. My head was pounding. God almighty, I hadn't been this hung over in years. My head hurt, everything was achy to the point where I felt like I couldn't move, my mouth was as dry as cotton, even the top of my hand hurt—what did I do? How do you hurt the top of your hand?

Drunk. I'd gotten drunk. Anything can happen when you're drunk. All kinds of dumb, embarrassing things, in fact, do happen when you're drunk. So ... what? I'd been on the boat. Now I was in someone's bedroom somewhere—please, god, their guest bedroom—and someone had set an alarm. Great. Thanks a lot.

The beeping started to fade. Thank god. Got to love an alarm clock that gives up.

I blinked and squinched my eyes and the room began to come into focus. There was a red LED readout across the room that read 7:04. The room was light, so it must have been 7:04 a.m. But where the hell was I, that I—or somebody—needed to set an alarm?

My eyes rested on the door. I knew this place.

The beige door. The familiar full-length mirror on the back of it, reflecting the familiar dresser, with many instantly familiar colors and patterns on T-shirts and clothes that were hanging haphazardly out of the drawers.

I blinked again. And again.

What? This wasn't possible. A dream. A drunken dream? It seemed too sharp to be ethanol-induced, but maybe my brain had energy where my body did not.

I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, tried to quiet my pounding heart, and took another deep breath before opening my eyes again. I looked to the left. I was expecting—fully expecting— to see the red walls, the black accent paint, the simple lines of the hotel room I'd left before going out on the boat with my friends—but instead I saw the little rose-print Laura Ashley wallpaper of my youth.

And there on the bed next to me was the achingly familiar, sleeping, gray-muzzled face of my long-gone golden retriever Zuzu.

My exclamation roused her; those sleepy brown eyes, with what my mother always called "Cleopatra eyeliner" around them, opened for a moment, took me in, and closed again as she stretched her front legs straight out, groaned, and relaxed immediately back into a deep sleep.

"Zuzu ..." The word drifted from me, and the dog didn't move. She was used to me. I'd sighed her name so many times in teenage angst that she usually waited until the third or fourth repeat before actually believing me and responding.

I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I was frozen. This was a dream, obviously, but it felt so real that I didn't want it to end. Reaching for nothing would end it. I wanted to look around and memorize every detail, I wanted to take in the smell, the sound of the neighbor's lawn mower in the distance.

Find out more about Beth and her books at www.bethharbison.com.