Troll Next Door

Everyone tells her it gets better. He's the only one who doesn't.Fourteen months ago, Nora Ashby's husband went out to move the car and didn't come back in. She ran into the road in her socks. She can still feel the cold of it.Now she's forty-three, she empties the houses of the dead for a living, and she is very, very good at it - right up until she gets to her own hallway, where her husband's coat is still on the hook and has been for four hundred and thirty-five days.The Tuesday bereavement group in the community centre basement has a bad radiator, a stack of folding chairs, and a facilitator with a laminated handout about the five stages of grief. It also has an enormous grey-green man folded into a chair he is much too big for, who brings the good biscuits every week and has not said a single word in sixty years.His name is Halvard Onn. He runs a tree nursery. He sells oaks to people who will never see them grow. And when Nora finally asks him to tell her it gets better, he says no."e;It gets further away. That's all. You get bigger around it."e;He's six foot eight. He's two hundred and sixty years old. His wife died in 1823, and by the customs of his own people he is still, formally, in mourning, and will be until he asks his family to release him. He has not done that in two hundred and three years.He lives two doors down.And he has spent every one of those years being enormously, painfully careful. Which means that the first time Nora reaches for him, he holds absolutely still, and asks, and waits.SECOND WINTER is a complete five-part cozy monster romance about two people whose grief is real, who are not each other's cure, and who fall in love anyway.Explicit and unapologetic. No fade to black.A heroine in her forties who knows exactly what she wants.Size difference, touch-starved hero, small town, found family.He asks. Every single time.Slow burn, low angst, and a happy ever after by Book Five.Nobody dies on the page. The dead stay respected.Book One of five. Approximately 5,400 words.Contains explicit sexual content and depictions of grief and bereavement. Intended for adult readers.