Annie and the Widower

Annie Merrow spent ten years counting her mother's breaths. Now the house is sold, her brother has a room waiting off the pantry, and the only man who ever promised her a future married someone else. So she writes to a matrimonial agency in Wyoming Territory and crosses a continent to a sawmill town that needs a schoolteacher. Eli Garrity lost his wife in childbirth and has not spoken her name since. He runs the mill, raises a nine-year-old who has stopped talking and a five-year-old who talks for everyone, and owes eighteen hundred dollars on a boiler note held by a man who wants the mill for himself. He wrote to the agency that he wanted a kind woman who could bear a quiet house. He also wrote that he couldn't promise love, and he meant it. Annie takes the schoolroom, a snake in her desk and a month's trial. Then Eli's brother-in-law arrives from Cheyenne with a lawyer and a plan for Eli's son, someone starts wrecking the mill's machinery, and the whole town is asked to decide what makes a family. When a blizzard shuts the road and a child goes missing, Annie has only one habit to rely on, the one she has had all her life. Annie and the Widower is a slow-burn western romance with a mail-order bride, a ready-made family, a heroine who counts when she is afraid, and a hero who has to learn to say what he feels. It is book four of the standalone Juniper Ridge Mail-Order Brides series.