Neither one is looking for love, but sometimes love comes when it’s least expected. What should have been a dream come true turns into a nightmare when Avice’s parents succumb to cholera along the Oregon Trail, leaving her at the mercy of her uncle, a man who confiscates her parents’ belongings and announces that she must marry his business partner as soon as the wagon train reaches Fort Laramie... moreNeither one is looking for love, but sometimes love comes when it’s least expected. What should have been a dream come true turns into a nightmare when Avice’s parents succumb to cholera along the Oregon Trail, leaving her at the mercy of her uncle, a man who confiscates her parents’ belongings and announces that she must marry his business partner as soon as the wagon train reaches Fort Laramie. If there’s one thing Avice knows, it’s that she will never marry a man she doesn’t love, but all that changes when she enters the post trader’s store and sees a harried young man and a baby in desperate need of soothing. Raleigh has a problem, a big one. Though he’s achieved his goal of becoming the post trader at Fort Laramie, there’s no satisfaction in the achievement, because his beloved wife has recently died in childbirth. Well-meaning friends at the fort urge him to send his son back east to his in-laws, but Raleigh has no intention of letting him be raised by that cold-hearted couple. The problem is that if he’s going to care for his son, he needs a woman and not just any woman. Raleigh needs a wife, but how can he marry when all thoughts of love were buried along with his wife? When he sees how easily the young woman from the wagon train not only calms his son but helps customers, Raleigh does the most impulsive thing in his he asks her to marry him. It’ll be a marriage of convenience, and they’ll annul it a year later. Or will they? less
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