Laura Duffle has come to Stones Creek, with her two young sons, hoping to find love again. She’s spent the last five years at Sanctuary Place Mission for Women after the death of her husband. She needs to set up her laundry business but doesn’t know where to start. Hank Johnson, the town barber, is flattered by and attracted to the lovely widow who comes seeking his advice. He hasn’t been looking for a wife, but maybe he’ll begin with Laura. Ranch foreman, Red Dickerson, would like a wife. He hopes to find one among the Ladies of Sanctuary House. He sets his sights on Laura. Hank sets her heart on fire, but is he only interested in helping her get her business off the ground? Red is solid and dependable, but is this enough to base her future on? Should Laura settle for safety and security for herself and her boys? Will she hold out for love? Or will she just chuck both of them into the washtub and rinse the men from her life altogether? Find out in the first book of the Ladies of Sanctuary House Series from award-winning author Sophie Dawson.

    Thornton Duvall was orphaned at a young age, and he was taken in by a rancher. He’s been working on a cattle ranch all his life.He can read and write, but he’s not well-read. He’s a good man, one who would give the shirt off of his back to anyone who needs it.Despite the strong objections of his boss, Thornton says that it’s time he got married and puts out an ad seeking a mail order bride. He has always wanted a family of his own.Jane starts falling in love with a man that she’s never met before. But how could a city girl learn how to live on a ranch? Will she be able to break through the hardships of a ranch life for the sake of a stranger?Can two people coming from completely different worlds, put their disagreements and create the family they always wanted? Or, their stubbornness and the opinion of others will become a self-fulfilling prophecy for them?

    After she buries him, she knows her only option is to travel down the mountain to live with her Aunt Eunice. She finds a baby on her way down, whose parents had obviously died tragically. With the child, she finds shelter from a blizzard in a cabin on the side of the mountain. Brandon Taylor is on a mission for the sheriff in Trace Hollow, checking on the homesteaders around the area. When a sudden storm comes up, he has to take shelter in his family’s hunting cabin, on the side of the mountain. When he finds a beautiful young lady, a stranger to him, in the cabin along with her son, he tells himself repeatedly he can’t marry her. When they reach her aunt’s house, and the other men come sniffing around her, his feelings become more apparent to him. Can he find the courage to marry the beautiful Gabby? Or will he let her be married off to one of the other young men in town?

    This big step seems her best chance to find a husband. After all she is twenty-four and a schoolmarm on the fast track to spinsterhood. Wearing her best hat and her bravest face, she steps off the train expecting to find a respectable marriageable man waiting for her. Specifically she expects to be met by “a fine-looking bachelor rancher of twenty-six years of age in need of a cheerful, sturdy and well-mannered wife.” Instead she is met by a rangy looking cowhand who is fifty years old if he is a day. When she refuses to marry him and rebukes him for misrepresenting himself he tries to force her to go with him. A handsome cowboy strides over and confronts the lying creep who lured her out West. He is every inch her idea of the perfect cowboy, strong and handsome, confident and heroic. After he runs off the lout, she thanks him. She remembers him from the train. The moment he boarded she noticed his striking gray eyes and his charismatic way. Unfortunately since a woman and three small children were with him she took him for a married man. But he isn’t. He is looking after his widowed sister and little nephews. Good news. Savannah, resigns to wait a week for the Georgia bound train to come, but soon learns the school teacher is seriously ill and volunteers to substitute for as long as she is needed, even though it will delay her departure. As sickness spreads through town and her relationship with the cowboy becomes more complicated, it becomes unclear whether she will find love in Dovetail or return home content to be a spinster schoolmarm. Also by Crystal Anne Tilden The Best Selling Christian Western Romance, Mail Order Bride: Carrie and the Cowboy