Four men brave the western frontier, putting their lives on the line to develop new land...and new love. Gideon Scott, adrift from home, rides the range of emotions...can he ever be worthy of the woman he adores? Range-riding preacher Joel Scott searches for his lost father...will he also find hope for his heart? Smokey Travis wants a woman to ride into the sunset with...but is Columbine more interested in escape than marriage? Andy Cullen is saddled with concern for Linnet, who lives under a death sentence...will wild horses drag him away from her side? Can each man find his true worth? Will renewed faith be the trail that leads to his bride?

No one is more surprised than Sunny Licht when Noah Whitmore proposes. She's a scarlet woman and an unwed mother—an outcast even in her small Quaker community. But she can't resist Noah's offer of a fresh start in a place where her scandalous past is unknown. In Sunny, the former Union soldier sees a woman whose loneliness matches his own. When they arrive in Wisconsin, he'll see that she and her baby daughter want for nothing…except the love that war burned out of him. Yet Sunny makes him hope once more—for the home they're building, and the family he never hoped to find.

Hannah Forrester's Life Did Not Belong To Her A contract of indenture saw to that. But no one owned her soul, and Ethan Reed knew instinctively that she was the one woman who belonged by his side, for now and forever. Rugged as the frontier he roamed, Ethan had left his mark on Hannah's heart.

Complete with actual advertisements from both women seeking husbands and males seeking brides, Hearts West includes twelve stories of courageous mail order brides and their exploits. Some were fortunate enough to marry good men and live happily ever after; still others found themselves in desperate situations that robbed them of their youth and sometimes their lives. Desperate to strike it rich during the Gold Rush, men sacrificed many creature comforts. Only after they arrived did some of them realize how much they missed female companionship. One way for men living on the frontier to meet women was through subscriptions to heart-and-hand clubs. The men received newspapers with information, and sometimes photographs, about women, with whom they corresponded. Eventually, a man might convince a woman to join him in the West, and in matrimony. Social status, political connections, money, companionship, or security were often considered more than love in these arrangements.

If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man's world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Now with five new teachers covered and a new chapter, the second edition of Frontier Teachers brings these important stories to light. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.

When a man comes west, he puts his life on the line to develop a new land; range-riding preacher Joel Scott rides many trails in search of his father and wonders if renewed faith will be the trail that leads to his bride.

Meg Archer has had enough of being invisible in a family of six girls—especially since the man she’s pining for doesn’t notice her, either. When she finds out he needs a mail-order bride in a hurry, she hatches a plan to get him to notice her, one way or another. Sam Allen gave up his career ambitions and left New York for Tombstone, Arizona, and a new start. He enjoys his job as a bartender—and is very good at it. But because he knew his mother would not approve, he told a white lie that he never thought would be found out. When his high-society mother unexpectedly decides to make a trip to visit, he needs to make that fib a reality—and fast. Sam is dismayed to discover that he has only one positive response to his ad—and to say that he is surprised by who it is is an understatement. It also presents him with a dilemma—what to do when the only person who will marry him is someone he shouldn’t be marrying?