The Heart Is the Strongest: Lightning Gap

By Kari Kilgore

Two Hearts, Strong and True

 

Moving home to Lightning Gap, Virginia, brings the change Craig needs. Slower pace, peace and quiet, caring for his parents. 

 

And a break from relationships that burn too hot and fast.

 

Sophie returns home to join the family business. Working outdoors, helping people, getting closer to nature. 

 

Escaping a rough breakup soothes her bruised heart. 

 

Will a lightning storm, a beautiful old tree, and chance bring them together?

 

An excerpt from The Heart Is the Strongest:

Whether Sophie used the biggest chainsaw he'd ever seen, operated the crane to move logs easily ten feet long, or gathered up a massive armful of branches, Craig's gaze was constantly drawn  to her.

The air fairly crackled around her, from her gorgeous green eyes to her shining black hair. And her words and her expressions, the sharp intelligence she never bothered trying to hide.

That spark was one of the many reasons he'd left Atlanta. To give himself a break from relationships so intense they couldn't help but burn themselves out. 

Reset his circuitry, maybe, figure out a way to be with a woman or a man without getting so consumed. Giving all the intensity and drama up now that he was getting older made all kinds of sense.

Until he met Sophie. 

And realized how much he'd missed that connection.

How much he honestly needed it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Apr 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393798248

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

The Heart Is the Strongest

For Jason

---

Who understands peculiar magic

The Heart Is the Strongest

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Chapter 1

Most of the time, Craig Douglas was nothing but glad he’d moved back home.

Lightning Gap, Virginia, was a welcome change of pace after seventeen years in Atlanta. Hidden away high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with one end of the main road through town passing by a stunning overlook of row after row of mountains way off into the distance.

Craig had always thought they looked like gigantic blue-green ocean waves during summer, and what he imagined the ocean would look like if it instantly froze solid in the winter.

This time of year, late into October with November knocking on the door, the waves transformed again, shifting toward a resting cold-weather gray. A few streaks and spots of green remained from pines and cedars, but the blazing finery of red, orange, and yellow from a few weeks back was almost gone.

The sharp, crisp air was a welcome change against his skin, especially compared to what could still be muggy and warm back in Atlanta. Here at four thousand feet above sea level, highs hovered in the fifties before dropping to around freezing at night. The incredibly blue sky didn’t carry a trace of Atlanta’s haze, as if everything in Craig’s sight (and a lot of things in his heart and mind) had been washed clean by the fierce thunderstorms that gave Lightning Gap its name.

His parents’ house was tucked into the forest just outside of the tiny alpine tourist town, a sturdy wood-frame Craftsman bungalow with a deep screened-in sitting porch. His father’s pride and joy, the still-green lawn, and his mother’s prize-winning flower gardens framed the house and marked it as a well-loved retirement home.

Drifting traces of someone’s wood stove smoke scented the air, cutting through the earthy aroma of the fallen