Those Distant Dreams

The Distant Series - Book 4

Burrawang, New South Wales, 1868

Patrick Kittrick has wagered everything on two hundred acres of raw Australian bush, his inheritance, his pride, and a quiet, stubborn conviction that a man can build something worth keeping. He has bled for every cleared acre and every planted row. Now his neighbour, Mervyn Craddock, means to take it from him.
Craddock is the kind of man who mistakes brutality for strength and has never learned the difference. When asking fails, he reaches for darker methods and behind him stands Louis Proctor, a man who fled England one step ahead of a murder charge and wears his civility like a blade wrapped in silk.
Jemma Craddock has spent twenty years learning to survive her father. She knows precisely what he is capable of, because she has carried the proof of it on her own skin. Now he intends to hand her to Proctor, and her time is almost gone. She had resigned herself to having no choices left until Patrick Kittrick made the fatal mistake of treating her as though she had.
Patrick knows Craddock will not stop until he is broken or gone. But Patrick Kittrick is his mother's son. And the Irish, as a rule, do not break easily.
His land. Her life. Neither was supposed to become the other's problem, but will Craddock and Proctor take everything before they get the chance to find a brighter future?

A sweeping story of courage, survival, and the fierce, quiet hope of two people who refuse to be broken by the world arranged against them.