The Judge's Chosen Bride

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?