My Billionaire Husband Didn't Come Home for Christmas, So I Didn't Either

My husband has never once been cruel to me. That is the whole problem.

Fergus would give me anything I asked for. He bought the empty flat below ours in London so I'd have proper shelving for my seed orders. He sent an enormous wreath to our own front door. In four years he has never raised his voice at me.

He has also never set foot in the mill office in Orneville Flats, Maine, where forty families borrow seed out of a padlocked cabinet every spring, under a rule somebody wrote on the inside of the door in pencil: you take a packet, you bring back more than you took.

I wrote that rule. I was twenty-two.

So when his Christmas Eve filled up with a signing, a dinner after, and a guest list eleven names long with mine nowhere on it, I left a note against the fruit bowl and flew home to my mother without him.

He came the day after Christmas in city shoes, in a blizzard, having walked the last mile and a quarter from a ditched truck. He brought twenty acres, a plane waiting at Bangor, a cheque for anything in that town that needed one - and an apology he hadn't worked out yet.

I said no. To all of it, no.

What I gave him instead was five nights, a bad heater, and a job weighing half-ounce packets in front of six volunteers who have known me since I was born. Because the one thing he has never offered me is himself, in the room, with nothing in his hands.

He didn't cheat. He gave another woman his evenings, his Thursdays and the version of himself that gets admired, then rang me at nine to ask if I'd eaten. Before the year turns he will have to say the whole of it out loud - and then say it again in a hall over the fire station, in front of ninety people who watched him not come.

Inside this emotional holiday standalone:

• A marriage that breaks over absence, not infidelity - there is no cheating in this book
• A book-length grovel that costs him the account of his career, his division, and the one arrangement that always let him say yes
• A heroine who stops asking, stops waiting, and sets her own terms before she takes him back
• The other woman written as a person, not a villain
• A snowbound Maine town with opinions, pies and a long memory
• An apology said out loud in front of everyone, and a yes said loud enough for the back of the hall
• Open-door love scenes, a crooked-bow wreath, and an epilogue that runs to the next December

First-person heroine POV. Full-length contemporary romance, complete standalone, no cliffhanger, happily ever after.

Curl up with Ruthanne and Fergus this Christmas, and find out what a man has to bring back when he has taken more than he brought.