Winter Nursery

He is not stuck. He is on time. Everyone else is early.Fifteen months after her husband died, Nora Ashby has started something with the enormous grey-green man two doors down, and Fenn's Landing has noticed. Mrs. Vaughan at number 27 is so pleased for her. And so soon.Daniel's coat is still on the hook in her hallway. Nora knows exactly what the whole street will think if she takes it down now.Halvard Onn drives her up to the nursery on a cold Sunday — four acres on the north edge of town that she has passed for eleven years without once turning in. Rows of young oaks no higher than her knee. Forty full trees at the top of the hill with their roots wrapped in sacking, waiting for somebody. He has been growing them since 1860, and he has seen eleven of them reach full size.Standing in that field, Nora finally understands what everyone in this town has got wrong about him.Then he tells her what standing is.Among his own people, grief is not a feeling. It is a status. You keep the house. You keep the name. You do not take another. And you stay in it until your family releases you — four minutes at a kitchen table, a few plain words, and it is done. It cannot be offered. It can only be asked for.He has not asked in two hundred and three years.There is an unopened letter on his chest of drawers. It has been there twenty-six days. This morning it is not on the chest of drawers any more, and there is somebody at the nursery gate.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.Warm, low angst, and a happy ever after by Book Five.Nobody dies on the page. The dead stay respected.Book Two of five. Approximately 4,500 words. Best read in order — start with The Troll Next Door.Contains explicit sexual content and depictions of grief and bereavement. Intended for adult readers.