Clara and the Texan

Dr. Clara Ashby has set bones, stitched wounds and written down every case she ever treated, in a clear upright hand that her father's partner would very much like to burn. Her father has sold the Philadelphia practice to Edmund Thayer and promised Clara's hand along with it. She answers an advertisement from a matrimonial agency in Wyoming Territory instead. She arrives with a carpetbag, a walnut case of surgical instruments and eight notebooks she will not let out of her sight. Ben Rusk is a Texas rancher with a stiff hip, a small niece to raise and a spread that is one bad winter from failing. He wrote to the agency that he wanted a wife and did not want a doctor. He has his reasons, and they involve a barn floor, a surgeon's saw and a brother who never came home. He gives Clara a lock on her door and his word to keep his distance until she asks him not to. Then a stranger with a camera starts watching the house, a blizzard buries the range, and fever breaks out in the bunkhouse. Clara has to choose between the notebooks and the people in front of her. Thayer files a complaint to bring her back to Philadelphia, and the only thing that can save her is the one thing she has never trusted anyone to hold. Clara and the Texan is a slow-burn western romance with a marriage of convenience, a ready-made family, a heroine who refuses to be less than she is, a hero who has to face the thing he has been running from, and a happy ending. It is book three of the standalone Juniper Ridge Mail-Order Brides series.