A young mother's troubled past catches up to her—and sets her heart aflame—in this spellbinding western romance from bestselling author Jane Bonander. Sierra Nevada, 1867. Susannah Walker has fled to Angel's Valley with her three-year-old son, seeking safety and a place to start over—a...

Living as a spinster and caring for her sister's illegitimate child, Julia Larson has never known passion. So she's surprised by the feelings that are stirred up when a secretive new ranchhand shows up to work on the Larson ranch. He's not a man she can trust, but as a violent fight for her land's water rights heats up, he may be the man she needs. Wolf McCloud charms the ladies, but never sticks around long. Having traced the mother who abandoned him to Northern California, he never expects to be drawn to Julia Larson as more than a means to an end.

Desperate to escape a dark past, Dinah Odell will do anything, even risk her freedom by posing as a nurse and accepting a job to care for Tristan Fletcher's mentally fragile sister. She thinks she's prepared for anything, except the sensitive, generous, and mysterious man behind the facade that Tristan Fletcher presents to the world. With a dark past of his own, Tristan survived the barbs of childhood by closing his heart off from the rest of the world. He sees something similar in Dinah, a desire to flee, and it sparks his desire to protect her. To marry her, even.

After losing his wife in a vigilante attack, Jackson Wolfe ran from his grief and his guilt, leaving behind his baby daughter to be raised by strangers. Twelve years later, he knows it's time to quit running. He's learned everything there is to know about vengeance in his travels around the world, but now it's time to settle down and take up a new mantle: father to Dawn Twilight. He knows that if he finds her, he'll be the best father a little girl ever had. But when he arrives in Thief River to be the new sheriff and claim his daughter, her adoptive mother has other plans.