Sunday Secrets Series

He was a blue-eyed heathen with the manners of an alley cat, and I was a devout Christian woman he disliked on sight. When Kova Novikoff picked me up at the airport for a month-long stay at his family's lodge, he was the rudest man I'd ever met. I'd come to Barrow, Alaska, a place as cold and barren as my womb, to write a devotional book to help other Christian women while I ignored my decades-long abusive marriage to a charismatic pastor with more demons than the blue-eyed devil who made me feel like a woman again. Kova's kindness, once he got to know me, more than made up for his rudeness, and the fire he ignited in me changed me. Still, I wasn't sure I was strong enough to walk away from a life of lies for a slim chance with a man fourteen years younger than me who didn't believe in God and still clung to the memory of the wife he'd lost. In the frozen tundra where even weeds couldn't grow, what chance did two very different people have when their hearts were just as cold?  

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. With Dominic Coltrane, I didn't need one. Even though the night we met I threw up in his lap during the worse panic attack of my life. He didn't walk away. After learning I'd survived molestation, the loss of a baby, and my faith by the time I was fifteen He didn't walk away. The man of God I was engaged to had dumped me weeks shy of our wedding after he learned the full scope of my tainted past. I'd gone to the end of the earth, Barrow, Alaska, to lick my wounds and met Dom, a man scarred from the memory of not being able to protect his mother from his abusive father as a child. Dom needed to protect the people he loved regardless of the consequences to himself or anyone else. He was always ready for a fight and was carrying too many demons of his own to sweep any woman off of her feet. When the skeletons in my closet surrounded me and moved in for the kill, He didn't walk away. He protected me in his big strong arms, and the man I thought wasn't what God had for me, showed me that sometimes a Boaz man could be a little rough around the edges, but he always knows how to take care of his woman.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here. William Shakespeare, The Tempest. William Shakespeare didn't specify where the devils were hiding, but I knew one of them was the pastor at New Morning Church. I was adopted into his family at ten, not for love, but to be exploited. The devil had a son, Tarot, and before he'd left home at seventeen never to return, he'd been kind to the scared little girl who'd lost everything. He'd given me something to cling to when living with the devil became too much. I'd built him up to be my knight, but the man who came crawling back home fifteen years later was a widowed, drug-dealing convict with nothing in his life except the beautiful little girl he now had to be a father to. He was never supposed to be the man I fell in love with. I let him move in with me because he was my step-brother and Willa's father, and I loved Willa as if she was my child. No one would fault me for loving an innocent child, but my step-brother? Was our love so wrong that even the devil himself would be appalled if he ever found out?

Nola had been married to Pastor Harris for over twenty years, and Sonya was the church secretary and his mistress for almost as long. Nola had endured Sonya's he's-mine-bitch attitude and the agony of an empty womb while Sonya had given the good pastor three babies. She'd remained a dignified Christian woman until on a writing retreat to Alaska; she'd finally traded in her cheating man for a much younger and faithful one. Now, just weeks before her second marriage and new life with Kova, Sonya wants to talk, and apparently, it's a matter of life and death. Nola has no reason to trust Sonya who could be leading her into a trap set by Harris who'd vowed to destroy Nola for the tell-all book she wrote exposing the lies behind the pulpit of his mega-church. Should she continue to ignore Sonya like she has for almost two decades, or was there something going on that was so shocking that even the pastor's mistress believed he'd gone too far?   December had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of a past that included molestation, teen pregnancy, and the loss of a baby and fiancé. She'd followed her boss, Nola, to Alaska where she'd hoped to rebuild her life. Her plan hadn't included a man, but when Dom rescues her like some white knight with a badge and an I-don't-give-two-shits-about-your-past approach; she can't help but fall for him. December is about to learn that the past doesn't go away just because you don't care about it, and that it can insidiously weave its way into your future and connect you to your boss's mistress in ways you never thought possible.   Nori was a young woman well acquainted with drama and pain. Born to a drug-addicted mother who she'd watched get murdered when she was just five, she'd been adopted by a charismatic preacher doing the devil's work. As an adult, she thought she'd left his clutches but soon learns that the talons of the past are deeply embedded in her future with Tarot, the adopted brother she shouldn't love and yet he makes up for everything that'd ever happened to her. She has no idea that she's a piece of the puzzle behind Sonya's cryptic message, and that the truths lurking in the shadows of her past are about to come to light.   In the conclusion of the Sunday Secrets Series, Nola, December, and Nori have broken away from their churches and found God and love on their own terms. But, the bonds tethering them to their pasts are not so easily broken and each woman must face the things they left behind before it destroys everything they have fought so hard for.