Love and Deceit: 10 Short Stories with Strategic Lies, Risky Tricks, and Tangled Lives

Love and Deceit's ten stories introduce sometimes-quirky characters who grapple with lies big and small.

Lost in Atlanta, Hiding from Love's Truth reveals why a woman would mysteriously abandon the young man she deeply loves and contact him 52 years later to ask forgiveness for something he never considered wrong.

Uncle Norbert's Naked Ambition describes a man’s desire for a crowning lifetime achievement, pursued with inept stealth, of convincing his extremely prudish wife to join a naturist club. Both husband and wife are willing to deceive the other for what they believe are beneficial purposes.

110 Percent Marriage Foolishness finds a former high school over-achiever struggling with life reversals. A self-deluding family friend helps in many ways, including trying to be a marriage matchmaker. Sometimes marriages that should work out don’t, while those that seem improbable do.

Refueling Love with Lies gives divorce lawyers a chance to rescue a marriage, and a clever wife the opening to wear a fetching emerald blouse, tell outrageous lies, and get exactly what she wants – even though plain honesty would have worked just fine.

Risky Adventures with the Mystery Visitor probes the anxieties of a man who is so distraught about a failed relationship that he’s willing to accept an intriguing offer of adventurous sex, and ends up with a blindfold covering his eyes and brain.

The Lazy Wish Fairy Makes Amends follows a man given the opportunity to fulfill his teenage fantasy of a relationship with an attractive older neighbor. Both parties engage in deception to try to get what they want. One succeeds. But can love survive such an audacious lie?

The Marriage-Counseling Genius features a car sales manager who offers free “professional” advice to a distraught man, trying to save a marriage because his cheating produced two divorces from two sisters. He’s also hopeful of reconciling with one of the sisters, and he doesn’t care which.

Happy Mother's Day, Unofficially is a tale of abandonment, a conspiracy of parental lies, a daughter’s unrelenting yearning for a dead mother, an apparent resurrection, and an opportunity for a relationship rescue through an unintended intervention.

Hurried Departures from Love and Hate explains how a marriage failed in perhaps record time, 80 minutes. Seeking reconciliation following a long and unexplained disappearance, the groom risks a painful and vengeful death after the bride goes full-out animal crazy.

The Goddess of the Pottery Vase unravels a web of deceit that leaves a woman reeling and wondering how she could ever have become involved in such a complicated, damaging relationship mess. The goddess knows plenty about that, and in her own way she tells a twisted tale that reveals deceit running in multiple directions. The spousal perpetrators are also the victims, and the apparent love winner becomes the love loser.