Charlotte Pelham can handle a lot of things: an old man returning a coffee pot he bought thirty years ago, a woman who thinks “modern” is a dirty word, and a ledger that never balances. What she can’t handle is one more day behind her father’s mercantile counter. So when she answers Josephine Hamilton’s wanted ad for the Lantern Library Society, she trades the register for a wagon full of books and a lantern that marks her as one of Miss Ham’s girls. Her first assignment: deliver library service to a remote logging camp at Granite Creek. One week. Set up the books, organize the men, move on. Simple enough… until she meets the foreman.
Blake Rollins didn’t ask for a library; his boss did. And his boss said the woman coming would be older. Instead, Blake gets Charlotte, a sharp-tongued, stubborn, woman who is completely uninterested in following his rules. He’s spent years running the Granite Creek Mill with an iron grip. He doesn’t need a woman disrupting his camp, distracting his men, and dragging him to church on Sunday mornings.
But trouble is circling Granite Creek, Charlotte’s week is running out, and the foreman who wanted her gone is now the one who can’t let her go. When the gruff man with the heavy conscience starts looking at her like she might be the answer to a prayer he stopped praying, Charlotte has to decide: is she a woman who leaves or a woman who stays?
Lauralynn west 