Although she feels that the holidays are a season of misery, Jeanette Brioche is pushed into working on the town's annual Christmas festival with the sexy new town manager, Tom McDonald. But with romance in the air, Jeanette and Tom take a fresh look at their painful pasts and a hopeful look into the future.

A collection of short stories that explore the progress of love and relationships over a course of a lifetime, from a teenager coming to terms with her father's disappearance to a widow accepting two young women into her home.

"Charlotte Parrish has always wanted a certain kind of man: someone responsible, settled, boring. Bad boys need not apply. But when her car leaves her stranded and a mysterious stranger with brooding eyes and a protective streak comes to her rescue, she can't deny how drawn she is to him. In town searching for family he's never met, Mitch is everything she never thought she wanted--and suddenly everything she craves. Finding his half brothers after...

Lenore Fulcher's deepest desire at the age of twenty is to find true love. However, her father wants to marry her off to James Rybus, one of his business partners. But the idea of marriage to a man seventeen years older is out of the question for Lenore. Kolbein Booth, a lawyer from Chicago, arrives in Seattle looking for his headstrong sister who he believes may have answered an advertisement for mail-order brides. Sick with worry, he storms the...

Set in 1898 Texas, this novel features an unlikely romance that's threatened by painful secrets and an angry lynch mob. Just when her romance with a wholesome newcomer begins to flourish, Essie learns her beau's true identity.

"On a summer day on the Gulf of Mexico in 1988, two extraordinary things happen to twelve-year-old Maeve Donnelly. First, she is kissed by Daniel, the boy of her dreams. Then, she is attacked by a blacktip shark. Eighteen years later, Maeve is a world-traveling marine biologist studying and swimming with the very animals that once threatened her life. Known among her peers as the "shark whisperer," Maeve is fearless in the water. On land, however,...

Gloria Mendez is single and thirty-six, and secretly and somewhat hopelessly in love with her oblivious boss. When he disappears on his annual trip to Mexico, Gloria's sudden and impulsive search for him reveals the wreckage of a hidden past. Carl Perreira was not who Gloria thought he was, nor was he anything she could have imagined. As Gloria travels this twisted road into Carl's backstory, she realizes she might not have known him at all. Her investigation...

"From the bestselling author of Prayers for Sale, an inspiring celebration of sisterhood on the perilous Overland Trail "If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband?" It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees the postings soliciting "eligible women" to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter...

"Former pro-football kicker Sam Ridge has notoriously bad luck with women--from cheaters to fame chasers. Still, the gorgeous brunette at the bar in Fool's Gold looks harmless--until she takes him home and he discovers a room devoted to securing a man, for life. Dellina Hopkins never guessed that storing gowns from a friend's bridal boutique would chase away her first and only fling. After her parents died, she skipped her "wild youth" to raise her...

As elderly women, sisters Twiss and Milly live alone in the house where they grew up in Spring Green, Wis. They spend their days tending to injured birds and roaming their land, lost in memories. For Milly, there is the constant reminder of what could have been. Twiss spent her childhood happily trailing behind their golf-pro father, but Milly dreamed about a family and children that never happened. There was hope for a young Milly, until an accident...