I am thrilled to share that my short story Rain Ignited is part of the brand-new anthology Rainy Day Romance, available now for pre-order on Amazon at just $3.99 for the Kindle edition. It releases May 19, 2026, and if you enjoy historical romance with a little danger woven in, I think you are going to love this one.
What Is Rain Ignited?
Rain Ignited is set in Chicago, November 1910, and it follows Daisy Flynn, a 23-year-old stenographer working at the German Consulate in the Schiller Building. Daisy is smart, lonely, and a devoted reader of Laura Jean Libbey, the real-life queen of working-girl romance fiction who was at the height of her fame at exactly that moment in history.
Daisy has absorbed Libbey’s advice columns and novels like gospel. She believes in bold love, in testing a man’s character through action, in the idea that real passion requires bravery and sacrifice. Then a man named Maxwell Grant walks into her building on a rainy Monday morning, and she decides this is her moment to be the heroine of her own story.
Grant is charming, cultured, and completely false. He is not there for her. He is there for classified documents. And Daisy, lonely and romanticizing everything, becomes exactly the tool he needs.
What follows is a story about the difference between passion and manipulation, between what we want love to be and what it actually looks like when it is real. It is a story about a woman who makes a dangerous mistake, faces the truth anyway, and walks out the other side of it stronger than she walked in.
The Real Woman Behind the Story
The author Daisy admires throughout the story, Laura Jean Libbey, was a genuine historical figure. Born in 1862, Libbey was one of the most widely read novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her working-girl romance novels sold in the millions. Her advice columns ran in newspapers across the country. She championed women who worked for their own living at a time when that was still considered radical, and she had the kind of devoted readership that modern authors dream about.
In Rain Ignited, Libbey appears in person, in Chicago for a book tour event at Marshall Field’s department store. What she tells Daisy at the midpoint of the story is not what Daisy expected to hear. And that is where everything changes.
I loved researching Libbey. She was formidable, self-made, and deeply committed to her readers. That is exactly the kind of real historical woman who belongs in every story I tell.
Why This Story Fits Who I Am as an Author
Every book I write is grounded in real history. The Schiller Building where Daisy works was a genuine landmark in downtown Chicago and a hub of German-American cultural life in that era. The espionage concerns between Germany and America in 1910 were real, pre-war tensions building quietly under a surface of diplomatic courtesy. Women working as stenographers was a relatively new phenomenon in that decade, and the social anxiety around it, the fear of ending up a “maiden lady” alone in a boarding house, was something working women of that generation navigated every single day.
I spend a lot of time in old newspaper archives and Census records on FamilySearch.org so that the world inside my stories feels inhabited rather than constructed. Rain Ignited is a short story, but it carries the same research commitment as my full-length novels. 1910 Chicago is alive in it, soot and rain and electric trolleys and all.
About the Full Anthology
Rainy Day Romance gathers six stories from six different authors, all centered on love forged in downpours, storms that turn out to be fate, and connection that only happens because two people end up stranded together. The anthology is a Kindle edition collection from the First Coast Romance Writers, a chapter of the Romance Writers of America.
Rain Ignited is the only historical story in the collection. The other five stories are contemporary romance, which means you get a full range within one $3.99 purchase. Six love stories, six very different worlds, one rainy theme tying them all together.
Pre-Order It Now
If you have been following my work through Where Trade Winds Meet, A Widow’s Dilemma in Cuba, or Pinevale Intrigue, you know what to expect from me: women who drive the story, real historical settings, and research that shows up on every page. Rain Ignited delivers all of that in short story form, which means it is a great way to introduce a friend to my writing without asking them to commit to a full novel right away.
And if you want to be the first to hear about my upcoming full-length releases, including the long-awaited Misadventures of Janie and Diane steampunk series, the best way to stay connected is through the Chrono Mystery Guild newsletter. Subscribers get an exclusive bonus story with every quarterly issue that is never published anywhere else.
Daisy Flynn thought she knew exactly what a real love story looked like. Chicago, 1910, had other plans. Rain Ignited is available as part of the Rainy Day Romance anthology, pre-order now at $3.99 on Kindle.
In Honor of
Laura Jean Libbey
March 22, 1862 – October 25, 1924
