Daniel Reed only meant to stay for a season. A recently divorced veterinarian, he arrives in the dead of winter to take over a retiring doctor's practice in a small Montana town he knows nothing about ? Sweet Creek, population a few thousand, tucked beneath the Wolfsong Mountains, where the season's first snow is already settling over the pastures.
His very first emergency call, the night he arrives, brings him to the Whitfield ranch ? and face-to-face with Laura, a quarter horse breeder and single mother to a sharp, notebook-carrying seven-year-old, who has learned not to trust anyone who "stays for the winter and leaves come spring."
Over the course of one full year ? Christmas markets, a harrowing foaling in the barn, misunderstandings, long-held secrets finally spoken aloud, and a very real threat to the ranch's future ? Daniel and Laura discover, each in their own time, that some lives aren't built by running toward something bigger, but by choosing to stay. And that sometimes, a town chooses you before you ever choose it back.
A warm, feel-good Christmas romance featuring a notebook-keeping eight-year-old narrator-in-training, a foal named Comet, and the quiet certainty that home is sometimes found exactly where you weren't looking for it.
