A widowed mail-order bride. A rancher whose little girl has barely spoken in two years. One Christmas to become a family in truth.

Rachel Doyle, Widow and Mother. Two years after a fever took her husband, Rachel counts her train fare out of a tobacco tin and brings her six-year-old son, Sammy, from St. Joseph, Missouri, to the Kansas prairie to marry a stranger. She expects a hard winter and an honest bargain. She does not expect a shut parlor, a stopped clock, a husband who will not speak of the river ford, or a seven-year-old stepdaughter who watches her with unblinking eyes and never says a word.

Caleb Hartman, Rancher and Widower. Caleb runs a cattle and wheat outfit outside Harmony Ridge and blames himself for the icy night his wife drove out for a doctor and never came home. Since then his daughter, Lucy, has barely spoken. He wrote for a woman to keep his house and mother his child, and he held back the hardest truths until the wagon ride from the depot: Lucy’s silence, and a letter from her wealthy grandmother in Topeka.

Eugenia Prescott is coming at Christmas, and she has a lawyer. If she finds a settled family and a recovering child, she will leave them in peace. If she does not, she will take Lucy back to Topeka. Rachel has four weeks to turn an arrangement into a home: meals at one table, Christmas kept, a church nativity with a wordless angel’s part, and the door Caleb refuses to unlock. If she pushes too hard, she may lose the girl who is just beginning to trust her. If he keeps his grief locked away, he may lose his daughter, and the wife he never expected to love.

Can a marriage of convenience become a family before the Christmas Eve snow flies?

– clean closed-door Christian romance: no on-page intimacy, just a few tender kisses

– Christmas mail order bride: a November wedding and a race to Christmas Eve

– marriage of convenience: a widow and a widower who marry for their children

– blended family: a chatty six-year-old boy and a silent seven-year-old girl

– a child who stopped speaking: a little girl, a hidden song, and a voice waiting to be found

– grief and healing: two parents carrying old guilt and learning to set it down

– a formidable grandmother: a custody threat from Topeka and a heart that thaws

– prairie Christmas: a church nativity, a cedar tree, a frozen river and a blizzard

– faith woven gently: grace, forgiveness and the courage to open a locked door

Perfect for fans of heartfelt mail order bride stories, marriages of convenience that blossom into real love, found family, and cozy frontier Christmases.

Pick up Book 1 of the Christmas Brides Come Home series today; every book brings a new couple and a complete story.

Heat Level: Closed Door (no on-page intimacy)

Tone: Heart-warming · Tender · Hopeful

Series Type: Book 1 of 4 in the Christmas Brides Come Home series, each book reads as a standalone

Ending: HEA, Happily Ever After

POV: Dual POV · Third Person

Content Notes: off-page deaths of spouses (drowning and illness), grief and guilt, a child’s grief-related silence, children in peril on river ice, minor injury and frostbite

Inspirational Theme: Christian themes of grace and forgiveness, naturally woven, never preachy