Chapter 1 After my husband died, the bakery became the only thing keeping me moving. It had been our dream. We had built it together, one loaf at a time. After he was gone, I couldn’t bring myself to close the doors. I didn’t know what I would do with the silence if I did….
Chapter 1 The first thing Sadie felt when consciousness returned was heat. Not the hard stone pressing against her hip. Not the rough straw beneath her cheek. And certainly not the burning pain in her feet, swollen and blistered after days of walking. It was the warmth against her back. Something alive. Something breathing. Slowly….
Chapter 1 Aurelia discovered the truth about her place in the Silverpine Pack long before she turned seventeen. An omega without a wolf was barely considered a person. She was the girl people whispered about when they thought she couldn’t hear. The failed omega. The one whose first transformation had never happened. The girl who…
Chapter 1 The wagon’s axle gave a groan like a wounded steer when she stepped down, and the whole dooryard heard it. Caleb Hart had sent for a gentle companion — someone small, someone soft, someone whose hands knew a garden and not a yoke. What he got was a woman who had to duck…
Chapter 1 The key turned with a scream that sent dogs barking across Dry Bend, and for one terrible heartbeat Ruth was certain the stranger would refuse to come out. The crowd behind her held its breath, waiting for the widow who had just traded her wedding ring to a smirking sheriff to be made…
Chapter 1 The pouch was warm against her ribs, ticking with every beat of her heart, and above her the rocks rang with her father’s voice — angry, afraid, closer with each call. Behind her, in the shadow of the boulders, a stranger lay bleeding out his last words: trust no one. She was sixteen….
Chapter 1 The biscuit tin had been empty for nine days, and somehow it was still the heaviest thing Clara Bennett had ever carried. She knew the weight by heart now — it lived in the hollow beneath her ribs, in the way her eldest son’s shirt hung loose off his shoulders, in the smell…
Chapter 1 The ropes smelled of old hay and the sheriff’s pipe tobacco, and every breath Clara pulled in tasted like dust and shame. They had ripped her hat off an hour ago, and her auburn hair lay loose and wild around her shoulders while the auctioneer kept gesturing at it like he was selling…
Chapter 1 The first time Eleanor Vance ever aimed a gun at a man, she did not know whether her finger could finish the job. The sting of his bullet was still fresh on her cheek, a bite of gravel and gunpowder that had stopped a hand’s-breadth from her boot, and behind her the sun…
Chapter 1 The rope had chafed Maribel’s wrist raw for three days, and the man who held the other end smelled of rye whiskey and old grief. When the silent rancher stepped forward and said, “Both,” the crowd laughed until it saw that he meant it. But Maribel was not watching the coins change hands….
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