Bücher von Betty Woods

To escape an arranged marriage to benefit her father's business, Heidi Schultz runs to the ranch owned by her sister, Lily, and brother-in-law, Toby. No one will ever run or ruin her life again. She'll find a job in nearby San Antonio and fulfill her dream of living on her own. She'll never surrender her independence to anyone, especially not to a man. But when her father finds her, Heidi agrees to Toby's idea to postpone her plans for a new life and stay at the ranch a while longer just to be safe.Jethro Bannister likes his life as foreman for Toby Grimes. Memories of the way his Georgia family turned on him don't plague him while living on a secluded Texas ranch. With God's help, he's made peace with his painful past. Until Heidi interrupts his carefully arranged, placid world of quiet. The too talkative woman could worry the horns off an entire herd of longhorns. Plus her family problems remind him too much of what he left behind.Watching Lily and Toby love and depend on each other chisels away at the wall of independence Heidi has built to protect herself from being betrayed again. Despite their misgivings, Heidi and Jethro form a tenuous friendship based on their common wish to be left alone. They understand each other better than anyone else around them does. Confiding in one another deepens their friendship more than either intends. Will Heidi and Jethro's past wounds bond them together in an unexpected love or push them apart?

Newly widowed with her second child due in a few months, Lily Johnson has nowhere to go until Toby Grimes, her late husband's boss, asks her to stay on as housekeeper at his ranch. Remaining in the house Mr. Grimes built for her and her husband is an answered prayer. But malicious gossips see her godsend job as a ruse for a sinful dalliance since her employer is a nice-looking, single man.God and a lot of others turned their backs on Toby during the war, so he returns the favor by keeping to himself. Yet the need to care for and protect Lily overwhelms him. The way she tugs at his heart scares him more than going into a losing battle.Unwilling to allow anyone to destroy a fine woman's reputation, he proposes a marriage of convenience. After much prayer, Lily accepts. Her first marriage was a love match made in heaven. The second leads down a trail only God knows. The peace she has concerning a marriage to a troubled man she doesn't love begins a walk of faith to a destination neither she, nor Toby, can guess.