Vital Temptations: A Heart's Betrayal
Description
<p>Dr. Bethany McNeal is living her dream as a pediatric resident in one of the most sought-after medical centers in Seattle. Beautiful and intelligent, she’s missing only one thing—love, which she put on hold to focus on her career after ending a tumultuous relationship. Everything changes when she meets Dr. Brent Anderson, a charming and handsome fellow resident. Despite her reservations, Bethany falls for Brent—hard. When she learns Brent is married several months into their relationship, she immediately breaks it off. After graduating residency and going their separate ways, Bethany tries to move on with another man—real estate broker and personal trainer Charles Blakely. But just when things get serious with Charles, she realizes she’s still in love with Brent, and she finds herself caught between the two men, facing a series of difficult decisions and harrowing events that will change her life forever. Will she be able to recover from the vital temptations that turned her perfect life upside down?</p>
Story Behind The Book
Inspiration is always an interesting topic. A few years after 9/11, I read an article that was not even a blip on the news radar−several paragraphs that drew very little attention.
"After being unearthed by grave-robbers in Guatemala, sold by black marketers and shipped in suitcases through Miami, confiscated by Customs and stored in a vault that survived the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, two dozen pre-Colombian artifacts are finally headed home."
I thought that the historical path of these artifacts could make for a great novel. It began in 1998 as U.S. Customs agents at Miami International Airport searched the suitcases of two New York residents flying home from Guatemala City. In the suitcases they found the artifacts. The couple insisted they had bought them at an open Indian marketplace and the pieces were not valuable. To support their testimony, a few innocent pieces were thrown in which are believed to have acted as decoys.
An authenticating process revealed that many of the pieces were pre-Columbian and the couple lacked the documentation required to remove historically significant items from Guatemala. The artifacts were confiscated and eventually made their way to New York where they were stored in the heavy vault at Custom House, 6 World Trade Center, in the World Trade Center complex.