Sanctuary in Providence Ridge

Some women leave home to start over. Clair Whitmore left hers to stay alive.

Six days after fleeing Helena with evidence of embezzlement happening within her deceased father’s business sewn into the lining of her carpetbag and a man’s threats still sharp in her memory, Clair Whitmore stumbles into a stranger’s barn in the middle of a summer storm. She has no family, and no plan beyond staying alive. What she needs is a place to disappear. What she finds is a household held together by duty alone, a six-year-old girl who craves learning, and a widowed rancher whose careful, quiet competence cannot hide the fact that he is carrying more than one man should.

Adam Dawson buried his wife six years ago and sealed every door she’d opened in his heart. He runs his cattle ranch with iron discipline, raises his daughter with steady hands, and watches his mother’s health decline. When a rain-soaked stranger collapses in his barn, he agrees to one thing: she works in exchange for food and shelter and she leaves when she is able.

But Clair does not simply pass through the Dawson household. She mends what is fraying. She teaches his daughter to read. She earns the trust of his mother and the respect of a community that watches newcomers with careful eyes. And Adam begins to notice things about the woman under his roof that have nothing to do with the work she does, things that stir something he has spent six years refusing to feel. When men arrive from Helena, threatening Clair, the woman Adam swore he wouldn’t need may be the one person he cannot afford to lose.

Now Clair faces the cruelest arithmetic of her life. Staying means drawing danger to the only family that has felt like home since her father died. Leaving means walking away from the man whose steady gaze and calloused hands she’s come to love.

Tropes readers love in this book:

• Grumpy Hero / Sunshine Heroine

• Forced Proximity

• Woman in Hiding / Reluctant Protector

• Found Family

• Single Father

• Healing After Loss

Reader Promise: Sanctuary in Providence Ridge is a sweet, clean, faith-forward Christian historical romance with no explicit content, an emotionally rich slow-burn love story earned through sacrifice and daily devotion, and a hopeful, deeply satisfying ending that will leave you believing the best things in life are worth fighting for.