Tender Refuge

Some Journey’s take you across time. Others take you home.The past found her once. Now it has come looking for her again.Trina thought she had finally escaped the life that nearly destroyed her.Years ago, she was rescued from a world of exploitation, fear, andm control and given something she had never believed she would have again: a home. At Callahan Manor, she learned how to sleep through the night. How to laugh without looking over her shoulder. How to work, care for the people she loves, and wake each morning knowing she was safe.She built a quiet life on the Montana prairie.Then Cade Morrison arrives. He doesn’t come on horseback. He doesn’t belong in 1889. And he certainly doesn’t belong on the Callahan’s ranch.Cade is a detective from the future who has spent two years refusing to let a cold case die. Sarah Wharton disappeared after her husband’s murder and a suspicious ranch fire, leaving behind too many unanswered questions and a trail that never made sense. Cade has followed that trail farther than anyone else would have dared, until it leads him to a hidden crossing among the Montana willows.One moment, he is standing beside a river in the twenty-first century. The next, he is stranded in a world more than a century in the past.For a man trained to read danger, Cade recognizes something in Trina immediately. She isn’t simply cautious. She is a survivor. Every movement, every question, every careful assessment is the result of lessons learned the hard way.And Cade knows better than to push.He waits. He listens. He gives her room.For Trina, that restraint is both unsettling and impossible to ignore. Because Cade is different from the men she has known before. He doesn’t tell her what she should feel.He doesn’t demand her trust. He doesn’t treat her like something broken that needs to be repaired.And when he looks at her, he sees the woman standing in front of him-not the woman someone else tried to make her believe she was.But Trina has learned that safety can disappear without warning.Just when she begins to believe the worst of her past is behind her, a familiar threat emerges in the present. And he has no intention of letting her go.But this time, she isn’t alone. As danger closes in, Cade and Trina are forced to confront more than the threat standing outside their door. They must confront the scars that remain inside them-the things they fear, the things they regret, and the futures they never expected to want.For Cade, the past he left behind isn’t as simple as he thought. The modern world still exists. His career exists. His unfinished business exists. And somewhere beyond the crossing is everything, and everyone, he once believed he couldn’t live without.For Trina, the future has always been something she survived one day at a time. Until Cade makes her wonder if it could become something more.But the crossing that brought Cade to 1889 doesn’t operate according to human plans.It brought him there for a reason.The question is whether that reason has anything to do with the woman who met him at the ranch gate holding a pitchfork.And if it does, what will happen when the crossing demands its price?Tender Refuge is a time-travel romantic suspense about two people from different centuries who find each other when neither is looking for love.It’s a story of danger and healing, courage and trust, and the powerful realization that home isn’t always the place where you were born-or the time where you were meant to live.Sometimes home is the person who sees your scars and doesn’t ask you to hide them.