The Pastor's Wife

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?