The Winter Rescue

Violet Delancey has spent three months answering a mayor's letters. They were warm and well written, and by the time she steps off the train in Cutbank, Wyoming Territory, with her mother's music in a battered trunk, she is nearly in love with the man who sent them. Then the mayor learns she has no rich relations and no money. He tips his hat and leaves her at the depot in the first snow of December with three dollars and forty cents.

Ethan Cross owns a sawmill, a mountain and a house too big for the two relatives who live in it. He came to the depot for a crate of saw blades. He stayed when a stranger sat down at the waiting room piano and played a nocturne his mother used to play, and he asked her to stop because he could not bear to hear it. Later, ashamed of that, he drives her up the mountain in a sleigh because there is nowhere else for her to go. The bridge has been sawn through. A child in the camp is burning with scarlet fever. By morning the mill is under quarantine and the road is closed.

Violet has a sick little girl to nurse, a stiff-hipped grandmother to feed, and a silent man who looks at her as though she is the first fire he has seen in a long time. The mayor has a land company, a marshal on his payroll, and a plan to take the creek that runs the mill. With a hearing set for Christmas week and the passes closing, Ethan will have to cross the mountain on foot to save his family's land. Violet will have to decide whether she has the courage to be the one who lights the lamp.

A sweet, slow-burn western romance with a snowbound house, a piano silent for nine years, a mill whistle that carries eight miles, and a Christmas Eve nobody in the valley will forget.