In Holle Lambrecht’s experience, love is a curse. She’s been engaged twice but remains unmarried. Her first fiancé died, and the second one jilted her two days before the wedding. Then the man who paid for her train ticket to bring her to Montana as a mail-order bride rejected her because of her partial deafness. Abandoned, she must find a job and settles in a working-class neighborhood just like the one she hoped to escape. Widower Eduard Lambrecht discovers his late wife’s Christmas quilt suffered in storage since the last season. He takes it to a seamstress shop, where he learns the woman with the skills to repair it is also the mail-order bride his cousin rejected. Unaccustomed to facing open hostility, he works to gain the woman’s trust. A near tragedy draws them close, but is it enough to base a future on?

Audrey MacIntosh has lived in Castle Rock, Oregon since long before the growing town had a name. Long before the railway came through in 1881, and even before her Pa was hired on as Postmaster in 1883. As a matter of fact, she’s never lived anywhere else. At least not that she can remember. For those reasons, all she wants to do is leave. When Noah Davies arrives in the small town of Castle Rock, he’s immediately drawn to the scenic view and majestic towering mountain slopes... both a far cry from the modern city of Philadelphia, or the buttoned-up world of universities and hospitals. Perhaps answering the advertisement from the town’s retiring physician wasn’t going to turn out as foolhardy as his parents warned. Will Noah’s first unofficial duty as a judge for the yearly quilt-making competition rile up some of his newly acquired patients? And, how crazy does a man have to be to admit he’s fallen head-over-heels for a beautiful young woman who barely knows he exists?