Cold Front · Book One
She built a life she could survive. He made her want more than survival.
Kindle, paperback, or included with Kindle Unlimited. Chapter one is on this site, and we don’t ask for your email to read it.
At forty-two, Elena Hartwell has spent three years keeping her Minnesota farm — and herself — standing after the storm that killed her husband. She can repair broken machinery, outwork bad weather, and carry every burden alone. Letting someone close enough to matter is the one risk she refuses to take.
Jake Morrison has been moving since he left the service, never staying anywhere long enough for the past to catch up. He came home from an IED attack. The men beside him did not. At twenty-three he is looking for a reason to keep living, not for someone to love.
When chance brings him to Elena’s farm, he does not try to rescue her. He works beside her. He listens. He understands that some wounds cannot be repaired by force.
Widow. Farmer. Two hundred and eighty acres.
Her husband was killed on the place in an April storm three years ago — a limb came off the oak and took the old barn down while he was inside it, securing cattle. She kept the operation running on grit, patched machinery, and margins she does not discuss. She is not waiting to be chosen and she is not looking for help. She does not want help. She needs a second pair of hands. Both are true at once, and she knows it.
Marine veteran. Mechanic. Twenty-three.
He rode up from Ohio in a January blizzard to sit with the parents of a friend who did not come home, and tell them who their son had been. He went off the road into a drift a mile short of their place, and the friend’s father was the one who found him. He knows engines. He knows nothing about crops. He is quiet, exact, and careful with other people’s boundaries. That is the one thing Elena cannot argue with.
She is forty-two. He is twenty-three. The book does not hide it, apologize for it, or pretend the town has not noticed. The co-op bench has an opinion. The church circle has an opinion. Some of them say it to her face.
She owns the ground. She knows the work. She is the one teaching, and he is a student in her world for the whole season.
This is a slow burn. That is a promise, not a warning.
Elena and Jake spend a season working side by side before either is ready to cross the distance between them. Attraction comes early. Trust does not. What happens later is paid for by the season that comes first — the repairs, the silences, the storms they wait out in the shed.
The work, the equipment, the weather, and the practical business of keeping the place alive run through the whole book.
What lifts Touched by Thunder beyond a typical rural romance is the sheer caliber of her prose. It’s clean, confident, and quietly powerful, shaped by a precision that feels effortless and rooted in deep care. … This is definitely a must read debut from an author I’ll be keeping an eye out for. Selena Jodha, Reedsy Discovery
So nobody buys the wrong book.
Three books following Elena and Jake, and the beginning of a larger set of connected stories set in Millfield.
Kindle, paperback, or included with Kindle Unlimited. Chapter one is on this site, and we don’t ask for your email to read it.
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