Six miles, and a trunk too heavy to be carrying so little.

The driver wouldn't take her any closer. The storekeeper warned her off before he'd even finished explaining the job. Three housekeepers in eighteen months, he said. One lasted four days.

She went anyway.

Elias Brandt hadn't asked for help. He'd stopped believing he deserved it a long time ago, in a winter that took everyone he loved and left him the only one standing in a house built for seven. He answered his door expecting to turn her away.

He didn't.

What neither of them counted on was a debt that followed her west, a man who meant to collect it by force if the law wouldn't do it for him, and a locked room at the end of the hall that neither of them was ready to open.

Some houses don't need a stranger. They need the right one.

A frontier romance. New stories every day.