Meet the Characters, part 4

-- Brian and Avonlea from Portrait of an Unlikely Affair series (In other words, a series of improbable events.)

Welcome to part 4 of my character introduction! If you missed the first two, you can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

As I’ve said in the previous three posts, February is celebrated as the month of 💘love!💝 I say every day has the opportunity to be Valentine’s Day so why save it for just one mere day or month? 🥰

Despite how you feel about the actual day itself or whether you intend to celebrate it, over the past week and a half I have been sharing with you the characters I’ve created -- The couples within my stories. If you’ve read my books, you’ll recognize them and you can comment on how you see and view them, or if you’ve learned something new about reading these posts. I hope these intrigue you to read their stories to get to know their situation.

Now, I should remind everyone that I write closed-door romance. My reasonings were discussed in a post last year (Feb 03 2025, titled “Where’s the Romance?“) but you can expect PDA and flirting at most in my books. Insinuations and innuendoes as well. Zero smut. Zero explicit descriptions or talk. But does that make for a crappy romance book? Nope. In fact, I doubt you’ll even miss the “spicy” scenes.

Although this is called the 'Portrait of an Unlikely Affair’ series, it has absolutely nothing to do with ‘affairs’ as in ‘cheating’ or ‘unfaithfulness.’ It does, however, have everything to do with a chain of improbable events.

(NOTE: All photos are AI representations of the characters created using various AI apps on Canva.)So let’s get started!

This series consists of six books (as of the writing of this) with the first book being The Leftover Son (previously published as Portrait of an Unlikely Affair) and this is where we will begin.

The Liberty Creek Law Firm is just a law firm on the surface, specializing in international conflict resolution. They are on permanent retainer for the Cloud Basin Land Management Company, which held land interests all over the world. These properties are actually secret military bases for a highly classified, top secret special operations unit. The year we begin in is 1995.

Our male main character is Brian Ridley, also known as “249.” He is considered the “deadliest weapon” in the world. He holds a classification so high that he doesn’t exist to the rest of the world. On the day that we meet Brian, he has been a part of the Firm for fourteen years. He has been promoted to major and transferred to the Firm base that is run by his father, General Thomas Ridley. The base is hidden in plain sight in rural northwestern Montana with the guise of a mining town called Cable Glen, and today Brian is flying home with his dad to Cable Glen.

Now Brian is not your average man. He is very much in his head. He is very logical. He has been raised in the Firm, trained to be something that holds no feelings. He is very good at his job and some consider him to be a ‘monster’ because of his skills. But Brian isn’t. Brian has never been allowed to be anything other than what he is. He isn’t good with people and he has a complicated relationship with his family. Despite all of his capabilities and ability to survive, he has a very rare terminal disease. He has one mission in life — to finish the only thing he has failed at before the disease kills him.

Our female main character is Avonlea Stone. She is a celebrity, a movie star who has been acting since she was a child. Last year she had been engaged to her childhood love but broke it off after they were attacked by a fan. She ‘disappeared’ from the public after that attack, realizing just how scary the world could be. She broke off her engagement and only began to recently date a young up-and-coming casting agent, Connor Jones. Connor is someone that Avonlea wouldn’t normally date. Avonlea is known as a sweetheart, the ‘Princess of Films,’ and is fully aware of how she is treated by others. She wants a real relationship. She wants to be treated for who she is, not just what people see. And by dating ‘different’ from her past, she hopes to find the fairy tale.

Now Connor has just invited Avonlea to come home with him, to meet his mom, and Avonlea decides to go, if only to experience meeting a common family in a romantic-movie-plot way. And on the day we meet Avonlea, she is flying on a commercial airliner with Connor, bound for where his mother lives in rural northwestern Montana, where they will be meeting his stepfather, Thomas Ridley, at the airport.

Unbeknownst to the both Avonlea and Brian, this day is where their lives will change.

Make no mistake, this story is primarily about Brian and his life, but Avonlea is a major part of that life.

The Leftover Son is just the start. This book series is a saga. It's not full of fluff and feel-goods of your typical closed-door "romantic suspense." This series is a high stakes, make you cry, make you laugh, make you feel emotions kind of ride. The main characters are tried and true, steady, and almost seemingly real -- The kind you actually care about as you get to know them, the kind you grow in personality with, the kind that you'd enjoying knowing in real life by the end of the series. You really care. You'll love them, and you may hate a few of them -- But you have to believe that love will always wins. And the vibes of this series? Small town, family saga, secret military, a father's regrets, fantasy with some magical realism, thriller and suspense, good guys vs. bad guys (I mean really bad guys), exes wanting second chances, beating terminal illness, the impossible and the improbable, faith, cliff hanger endings that wrap up, and an rock steady hero who absolutely only gives his heart the love of his life. Yeah, sure it's closed-door --- there's no smut, no explicit scenes -- but you won't miss it, no not with how the love story entangles with everything else happening. And the language is minimal, just conveying frustration, nothing too foul or even excessive, because after all, they are soldiers. But the adventure....The adventure is nothing like you've ever been on before.

Possible sensitivities throughout this series include some swearing/language (but not gratuitous or overdone); PDA, innuendoes, and insinuations; mild violence; bullying; terminal illness; death; abandonment; family drama; manipulation; conspiracy theories; and discussions and ideas of faith/religion. This series will evoke emotions and strong feelings. It is written with cinematic pacing and psychological realism.

My Portrait of an Unlikely Affair series are the only books that I find difficult to discuss. They are the characters that have been with me the longest. They are near and dear to my heart. I had no intentions of sharing them with the world, yet when I shared them with others, the feedback was so positive that I decided them to publish them for all to read. They are so intense and powerful… with a story that isn’t like your every day read. Brian is not the average “hero,” and his story is not your average book series. I do wrestle with sharing and promoting them with the world, and keeping them back because some days I don’t think the world deserves Brian and his story.

******Author Q&A: ⚠️May contain spoilers!⚠️******

(Above: This AI generated image above is what readers agree is Brian and Avonlea after or during the third book, The Ghost of Oscar.)

Q: How did you come up with Brian and Avonlea?

Brian has been a part of my writing brain since I was around 10 or 11 years old. He was a character that hijacked my writing of stories about phenomenal racehorses, their owners, and their journey (and trust me, I wrote about them all of the time, had pedigree charts, knew the terminology, and had character profiles built.) Avonlea didn’t appear until a few years later. As I’ve said in my previous blog post ( Nov. 11, 2023, “Why Should You Read an Em Brooks Book, Part 2”) about Brian, “And then, as I was writing about horses, I tapped into this boy named Brian who was definitely not a horse. He was a child soldier. He seemed ‘a lot’ older to me and was interesting, so I just kept on writing his story in between my race horse stories. Those pieces I first wrote are actually found in book 2 of the series, The Legend of CùSithGrim. I was never going to share this novel series with anyone. It was one that I wrote for myself because the characters intrigued me. It was what I wrote because I wanted to. It became a book that I would want to read myself.”

Q: Why are they both secretive about who they are?

Obviously Brian is a classified military secret who is part of an even bigger covert military force. He doesn’t exist, remember? He doesn’t appear in any state or federal systems, he doesn’t have a social security number, he doesn’t have a drivers license, and it’s safe to say he doesn’t have a passport either. He does not “exist” in our world. Avonlea was open with her life when she was a teenager. She dated, she was in the news and gossip, everyone knew who she was. But then when her stalker attacked her -- And here we haven’t had more details other than she was out with Dave Garton and this man got past security with a knife and stabbed her. That was pretty much her breaking point on being in public and discussing her personal life again. She became reclusive and secretive as a form of self preservation. Why did I make them both this way? Brian, being non-existent, would never be the perfect match for a celebrity who is always in the limelight and never heard of a secret.

Q: Talking about the Portrait of an Unlikely Affair series, would you and your main characters get along?

That’s a funny thought because I do often wonder if they are ‘real’ people sometimes. Perhaps not with these names, but who and what they are. I’ve always loved the idea that real life is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense, life does not. I’m envisioning a formal event, like a reception, where I have all of these characters invited for, say a book launch, and I’m having to mingle with them. (The thought is rather awe-inspiring because I know them so well. They are superstars to me.) We’d get along, I think. I have always said that knowing Brian Ridley in real life would be interesting simply based on everything he knows! It’d be like having your own personal encyclopedia of the world. He’d be very handy when writing and homeschooling! Also, he isn’t big on social settings and people and neither am I so there couldn’t really be much of a conversation outside of knowledge. Avonlea would be an interesting person to know as well but I’d have to know her for several years to be totally comfortable with her overall character as a person. I’m not sure what I would even talk to her about. She’d likely be nice and personable and I’d hope that I’d be able to converse well and not blubber. Of course, seeing them as a couple, I think they’d be rather intimidating to have a conversation with. I’d be rather star-struck. I actually feel like the Ridley family themselves would be more of the people that I’d likely be more at ease with because they are all much more ‘normal.’

Q: Would you change anything about their story or their romance?

No. I couldn’t change it even if I tried. I have tried writing from a storyline. I have tried plotting out their futures and all I get from it is writer’s block. So, I let them “tell” me where they want the story to go. So, even if I wanted their story to go differently, it went the way it was meant to go.

Q: It’s Valentine’s Day. What songs are Brian and Avonlea going to dance to?

Their song. It’s a totally fictional and made up song that I titled “You.” I have zero clue as to what the lyrics would be. I’m an author, not a songwriter. So I imagine they’d dance to that. Out of curiosity I did a title search for the song (because you know, what if there are actually these people out there and what if the song exists too?! You know how writers think.) and the closest song to it that I could find was a song from Paul Brandt called, “You.” Otherwise I think they’d dance to the King of Country music and Texan George Strait and his song, “The Man In Love With You,” or “Your Love Amazes Me” by John Berry. Or perhaps the more recent song of “What Else Ya Got,” by Brett Eldredge.

**************

If you have read the Leftover Son (or it’s previous edition Portrait of an Unlikely Affair), what sticks out to you about Brian and Avonlea? Who are your favorite characters and why? What surprised you about their story?

There is always an adventure in an Em Brooks book -- Get started today! You can find The Leftover Son and its complete series at Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and kindle, as well as on Kindle Unlimited. Also, please subscribe to my Substack to be notified of all future posts!

Thanks for stopping by!! Click on the graphic below to be taken to Amazon!