The Woman Who Came After

Hannah Bell walked out of a dead woman's house with eleven dollars and a reference.

No inheritance. No savings. Ten years of service and nothing on paper to show for it. So when she saw the advertisement — rancher, widower, one daughter, aged ten — she didn't answer it for love. She answered it because a woman with nothing needs somewhere to stand.

Thomas Avery needs someone to raise his daughter. He doesn't need another wife to lose. The arrangement is simple: she keeps the house, he keeps the ranch, and neither of them expects more than that.

But the house still belongs to a dead woman. The daughter didn't ask for a replacement. And Hannah didn't cross a thousand miles to live in another kitchen where nothing on the shelves is hers.

Colorado, 1888.

A thousand miles from everything she knew, Hannah Bell is about to discover that the hardest part of a marriage of convenience is when it stops being convenient — and starts being real.

A sweet and clean historical romance about a woman who came for safety, a man who wasn't looking for love, and the ten-year-old who decides whether either of them gets to stay.