Sneak Peek: A Farm in Golden Clouds
What if love came back into your life at the exact moment everything else was falling apart?
In the quiet, dust-streaked world of Kestrel Creek, two people are doing everything they can just to hold it together—grief, responsibility, and the weight of expectation pressing in from all sides. Indi Carmichael is fighting to save her farm and protect her son, while Ben Whittam is clinging to control in a life that refuses to stay on script. Neither of them is looking for love—but sometimes, the heart doesn’t wait for the right time.
And sometimes, it asks the biggest questions when you’re least prepared to answer them…
Start reading A Farm in Golden Clouds below 👇
Kestrel Creek, Victoria
There were days when Indi Carmichael found it impossible to separate the land from the night sky in the brisk darkness before dawn. When the farmhouse slumbered and her torch lay untouched in her pocket, the blinking of a car’s head- lights in the distance was the only sign she wasn’t completely alone in the world.
She wasn’t alone, though. She had her cows. And they were quite pretty cows, even if she did say so herself.
They emerged from the gloom as Indi lowered the bale of hay into the feeder, killed the tractor’s engine and leaped to the ground. Her breath misted in the chilly air as she cut the netting free from the hay, mimicking the wispy clouds shifting across the moonless sky. The day would warm quickly once the sun rose.
Patting Professor McGonagall’s rump as she pushed past to reach the feed, Indi glanced at the next paddock and the heifers almost due to breed. Her thoughts returned—as they always did—to the endless list of jobs and chores ahead of her.
She still had to feed their three bulls as well as the sheep grazing in the top paddock, then it was back to the house to throw scraps in the chicken coop and collect the eggs.
‘Come on, you two,’ she said as Luna and Cho shoved through the others, almost knocking her over in their haste. ‘There’s plenty here.’
A nose nudged Indi’s elbow and she turned to scratch Hermione’s ears. Smaller than the others, Hermione was Ollie’s favourite. And pregnant, thanks to Ollie accidentally releasing the heifer into the wrong paddock after taking her for a walk eight months ago.
Thinking of her spirited daughter, Indi turned to the faint glow of the house perched on the hill, where the kids were still sound asleep. It looked picture perfect from down here in the paddocks, silhouetted by the hint of pale dawn behind it. Except, perhaps, for the broken gutter hanging from the roof. She grimaced. Hadn’t she just fixed that a few weeks ago? The house was most definitely not picture perfect, and the pre-dawn gloom only hid the endless litany of problems she’d have to face once the sun tore itself free of the horizon. A kookaburra cried out in answer to the roar of the engine as Indi climbed back on the tractor and headed to the next paddock.
By the time she turned for the farmhouse, pink clouds feath- ered the pale sky. The tip of the sun burned their undersides with a golden glow, warning Indi she was running late, even as a strange rattle in the tractor’s engine distracted her. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. She couldn’t afford a costly mechanic’s visit this month.
Back in the yard, her basket overflowing with eggs, Indi tossed the bucket of food scraps into the chicken coop. Turning to leave, she trod on something soft and the air exploded in a flurry of feathers and panicked squawking as the chook beneath her boot desperately tried to free herself. Indi spun around, jerking like a puppet on strings as she tried to avoid stomping on the rest of the chooks darting beneath her, and slammed her forehead against the timber doorframe. Pain exploded in her skull, tears springing to her eyes as she rode the waves of dizziness.
‘Goddamn it—’
‘Mum?’ The soft voice drifted across the yard. ‘That you, Ollie?’ Indi clutched her head. ‘Have you finished?’
Indi inhaled sharply, then breathed out. Ollie only ever woke at dawn for one reason, and she mentally added washing urine-soaked sheets to the to-do list. Indi assumed a little regression was normal, considering what her eight- year-old daughter had been through, but a bone-deep weariness still settled over her. At least this was easier to deal with than the quiet crying that sometimes woke Indi in the middle of the night. Sliding into her daughter’s bed as the force of her sobs shook her small body left Indi’s heart frayed and raw.
Indi let the exhaustion take hold for only a minute, then, along with the throbbing pain in her skull, folded it away in a lockbox in the back of her mind. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed. But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until the kids were at school. Not until she knew she could finally surrender to the pain tightening her chest without her children around to witness it.
‘I’ll be right there,’ she called, glancing mournfully at the smashed eggs on the ground. She’d have to clean that up now, too.
Everyone had wanted to organise something for tomorrow to distract her from the realisation she’d made it another year without her husband.
Seven-hundred-and-thirty days on her own.
But she hadn’t wanted any of it. Hadn’t wanted to mark the occasion as if it were something to celebrate.
Yet she should be celebrating—her first book was coming out tomorrow. It was both gratifying and terrifying that the diary she’d written in that first year after Mike’s death would soon be sitting on shelves in bookshops, and that friends and strangers alike would know all the gritty details about what life had been like for her and the kids over the past two years.
Indi still couldn’t believe Carlene had managed to convince her to send the manuscript to an old friend who worked in publishing and that the publisher had actually wanted it. Indi wasn’t a writer. She’d never written anything before she’d earned that unlucky and unwanted badge of widowhood. But the words had helped, as if she could cut and paste her emotions into the journal with the precision of a surgeon and their scalpel, leaving nothing behind except scars.
Still, celebrating the publication of her book felt wrong. If Mike hadn’t died, the book wouldn’t even exist. And Indi would give up the book deal in a heartbeat to have her husband back.
Exhaling, Indi trudged towards the farmhouse. Yanking her gumboots off, she detoured into the kitchen to put the kettle on then went down the hall to wake Noah and strip Ollie’s sheets. If they didn’t hurry, the kids would miss the school bus and she’d be stuck making the hour-long round trip to drop them off instead.
‘Noah, get up. We’re late. Again!’
A muffled grunt was the teenager’s only response.
Rolling her eyes, Indi rapped her knuckles on his bedroom door and caught her reflection in the window. A mottled purple bruise had already formed on her forehead, hay decorated her unruly braid, feed pellets dotted her temple like glitter—and was that chicken poo on her cheek?
Indi’s groan echoed through the stirring farmhouse.
Everyone kept telling her that things would get easier, but she wanted to know when.
