Here is a pic of what I imagine that homestead on the huge grazing property looks like… my ideal dream home …

 

What would you be prepared to sacrifice to protect your child?

This was the dilemma Winsome Grainger faced … protect her unborn child or stay with Jared, the husband she adored … For better or worse Winsome sacrificed her marriage … After her father-in-law’s death she had to return to Totara Park or watch Jared lose the land that is his heritage …. She returns but the secrets she took with her now threaten any chance of finding happiness - the second time around.

These secrets not only threaten her marriage and her love for Jared, they also threaten her precious daughter’s life, and her own … because Winsome discovers she’s a mere pawn in a dark and deadly game. A game whose rules she doesn’t know…

• This story is close to my heart …
• as Jared and Winsome work the land to return Totara Park to prosperity, I have literally walked in their gumboots, Wellingtons or rubber boots depending on which country you call home.
• With my husband we’ve fed out hay to cattle, shifted electric fences and break fed autumn saved pasture … rain, hail or shine …
• Roasted in the summer sun and frozen our buns off in the winter …
• This was my life and livelihood for so many years as we worked the land… a way of life I loved and now that I live in town, I still sorely miss.
• And we too, have our precious twin sons buried at Hautapu Cemetery … and like Winsome; survived this mind-numbing grief to live a happy, satisfying life…
• In our case life followed fiction not the other way around, I wrote this story years before our boys died.
• Farmland in the Waikato’s rich hinterland …

 

Here’s an excerpt

 

“I never ran away.” Her chin lifted as she was forced to say the words. “I left, sure. But I never ran away.”

Her words sat in the pulsing silence.

“Explain the difference, Winsome.” Jared leaned closer and she felt the warmth of his breath on her chilled skin. “Explain the nuance of meaning that differentiates running away from leaving? For the life of me I can’t see it.”

Put like that, there was no difference.

She nibbled on her lower lip struggling for words to explain the inexplicable. She took a deep breath and caught his scent, heady, familiar and totally intoxicating. Her heart rate picked up and her breath quickened as a traitorous desire scorched through every cell of her body.

Oh hell, she did not need this.

“What’s the matter?” Jared’s eyes held a predatory gleam as he stood up and leaned across to take the mug perilously close to spilling, from her weak grasp.

Hurriedly, she stood and took a step backwards, her hands lifted and then fluttered downwards in a helpless movement as colour bloomed in her cheeks. Nervous of him and the gleam in his eye, her tongue darted out wetting parched lips.

Jared came closer, lifting a hand and trailing calloused fingers down one hot burning cheek. The gesture as gentle as it was intimate.

“Don’t, Jared,” she pleaded.

He chuckled, a wicked, knowing sound that scraped nerve ends raw.

“Don’t what?” He asked, his sensuous whisper wrapping her fraught emotions in silken bonds. “Don’t take you to my bed and sate a hunger that’s been five years in the growing?”

Her mouth dry, Winsome stared at him and whispered, “I’m not ready for this.”

“Aren’t you?” He leaned closer, whispering, “Not ready for what Winsome, the feel of my skin against yours? The solace and peace from the torment of sleeping alone for five damnably long and lonely years?”