The Heart She Trusted

She crossed a territory to build a life no one could decide for her—then fell for the one man determined to do it.

Schoolteacher Ava Lang has learned the hard way that a lie told by the right people can outrun the truth for miles. Courted once as a convenient solution to another man’s deadline—and slandered when she saw through it—she boards a stagecoach to Providence Ridge wanting a life measured by something sturdier than her social standing in society. The frontier town she’s headed to needs a teacher for its brand new school.

Wade Pemberton has buried himself in honest work. Widowed at twenty-one with a baby daughter and believing that a man is granted only one great love in life, he’s come home to raise the town’s schoolhouse and church. Then the new teacher steps down from the stagecoach in a fine traveling dress, plainly out of place and just as plainly unafraid, and his guarded heart begins to open.

Thrown together by a town that keeps finding reasons for them to share a wagon seat, Ava and Wade become a team long before either dares call it anything else. But when a trunk filled with things from her old life arrives from Bozeman, Wade sees only the gulf between the comfortable life in which she had lived and what a carpenter who rents a small home can give her. So he does the kindest thing he knows to do: he decides, without asking her, that she deserves better—and begins to pull away.

Ava has felt the damage from other people making decisions for her, from people who called it protection. This time it comes wrapped in love, which somehow makes it worse. To reach for each other, they’ll both have to surrender their guarded hearts and trust the God who put them together in the same small valley town.

Tropes:

• Small-Town Frontier Romance

• Wounded Widower & Single Father

• Second-Chance at Love

• Forced Proximity

• Adorable Matchmaking Child

• Faith, Trust & Healing

Reader Promise: A faith-forward, sweet and clean historical romance—kisses only, no explicit content—woven with gentle spiritual growth, hard-won trust, and the tender, satisfying happily-ever-after Christian readers can always count on.