The ramshackle River Queen Hotel is home to vagabonds, gamblers, and heathens—and now, to new widow Rose Peterson. The rundown Gold Rush establishment is the only thing her late husband, Emmet, left her. Despite its raucous saloon and ladies of the evening, Rose can see the hotel’s potential. Her late husband’s family claim that sheltered Rose isn’t capable of running the Sacramento inn herself. But she is determined to make a new life for herself and her young daughter, even if it means flying...
Love can lead you out of the wilderness…1851, Overland Trail to California. As a baby, Callie was left on the doorstep of an isolated farmhouse in Tennessee. The Whitaker family took her in, but have always considered her more a servant than a daughter. Scorned by her two stepsisters, Callie is forced to work long hours and denied an education. But a new world opens to her when the Whitakers join a wagon train to California—guided by rugged Luke McGraw… A loner, haunted by a painful past, Luke...
After the death of her abusive husband, Sarah Gregg is free to join her family along with thousands of others in the nation’s westward march for gold. But in the middle of the hard journey, Sarah’s younger sister, Florrie, disappears. Devastated by the family’s failed attempts to find her missing sister, Sarah now wants only to settle into a quiet, uneventful life when she reaches California . . . But Jack McCoy, a drifter and one-time gambler riding along their wagon train, sees so much more...
Before the war, Belle Ainsworth led a life of pleasure and privilege in the deep South. Five years after losing her fiancé at the Battle of Gettysburg, she is still alone, with no prospects for marriage among the remaining men of her acquaintance. But out west, there are possibilities. And when Belle answers an ad for a mail-order bride and boards a train to San Francisco to meet wealthy restaurateur Robert Romano, it’s with the hope of at last making her dreams of family come true. When the...
Letitia Tinsley’s well-ordered spinster life is thrown into chaos when she learns her beloved brother has mysteriously disappeared from his gold mining claim in California. Determined to discover the truth, Letty sets out on the treacherous journey west. But there’s only one thing more perilous than a single lady traveling alone into the rugged frontier—and that is sharing the passage with Garth Morgan. The wealthy bachelor is astoundingly arrogant—and dangerously handsome. Worse, Letty is...
