Susannah Peterson knows the value of hard work. She has earned every small thing she owns, and she has never once been given anything for free, least of all a family.
Desperate to escape the orphanage where she both grew up and now teaches, she spends her precious savings on a mail-order matrimonial paper and answers the advertisement of a man in far-off California. He is witty. He is kind. And he refuses to tell her what he does for a living.
Wesley Montgomery has his reasons for keeping quiet. A man in his position cannot afford a wife who wants him only for what he can offer. But Susannah wants nothing except a chance, and that is precisely what draws him in.
When she finally steps off the stagecoach in Bakersfield, dusty and travel-worn, the real work begins: two guarded people learning to trust, to hope, and perhaps to love.
She came west for a fresh start. What she finds may be far more than she ever dreamed. Will she be brave enough to reach for it?
