Out with Lanterns

Daughter of an ancient estate, Ophelia Blackwood has spent her entire life as a pawn in everyone else’s chess game, but a chance encounter with a Women’s Land Army recruiter challenges everything she thought she knew about her future. Ignoring her father’s disapproval, she gives up her life of ease to pursue something more valuable; a choice of her own. Turning her back on everything she knows to join WLA members working on a Somerset farm, the last person Ophelia expected to run into was Silas Larke. Injured in the war and haunted by his experiences in France, the son of her father’s tenant is just as intriguing as she remembers. And even more attractive.

Forced into an impossible situation by Ophelia’s father, Merritt Blackwood, Silas knows what it is to make a bargain with the devil. Returning from the Front, his body is not the only thing blown apart by war; family scattered, land in the hands of another, and none of it resolved without exposing dark secrets. Finding himself thrown together with the woman he couldn’t forget, while he wrestles with the fallout from the war, is the match that lights the fuse on an explosive situation.

When pressure from the War Office raises the spectre of losing the farm entirely, Ophelia and her friends must pull together more than ever, but the feelings kindled during she and Silas’ one short summer before the war threaten to become a blaze. Under the gun to produce more for the war effort, knowing that their work is the only thing between saving the farm and eviction, Ophelia and Silas try to ignore the rising tide of their attraction. But when her father reappears and the stakes are higher than ever, can their new relationship withstand public disapproval and Ophelia’s desire for an independent life?