Carrick Gap

Imogen Ash has never owned anything bigger than a bicycle. A veterinary nurse in Melbourne, she is thirty-four, practical, and used to being the sensible one. Then a solicitor's letter arrives: her great-uncle Ewan, a man she met once, has left her Carrick Gap, two thousand four hundred hectares of cattle country in the Victorian high country. There is one condition. She must live on the station for a full year, through one complete winter, or the land passes to a trust.
Carrick Gap is harder to love than it is to inherit. The roads wash out. The bank wants the herd sold. A Sydney investment group has its eyes on the lake and the granite ridge, and a grave beneath a snow gum that no one intends to disturb. Its only steady presence is Declan Ross, the quiet property manager who has kept the valley running for eleven years and has never once asked anyone for help.
Declan does not trust easily, and Imogen has never trusted anyone with her heart. But the mountains are unforgiving, and so is the season. A calving in the dark, a frozen lake, a lightning strike across the Gap: together they learn what the land has been asking all along. The valley needs more than a deed to survive. It needs people who will stay.
Carrick Gap is a slow-burn contemporary romance, rich with the Australian high country, animal rescue, found family, and a love that grows the way the snow gums do, quietly, against the wind, and deep in the roots.