For the past fifteen years, I've been writing Christmas stories for various magazines. Each year as I sit down to compose yet another, I feel a pleasant warmth flood into my heart. Each year I draw on memories to inspire my tales and carry me into the true spirit of Christmas, but it was only last year I realized it was through my stories that my heart re-discovers the wonder that is Christmas year after year.

When a bull-riding accident ends Ross Turner’s rodeo career, he hermits himself away on a remote farm in New Brunswick. Depressed and disheartened, he’s determined to leave his cowboy life behind. Beautiful Jessi Wallace, sent to help him out of his crisis, is resolved that he won’t do any such thing. She has healed dispirited horses; she can bring him back from his defeat. And living alone in the farmhouse with him doesn’t bother her. After their childhood together, she feels certain handsome, charismatic Ross holds no romantic threat to her. Recently betrayed by her rodeo cowboy fiance, she’s not about to let another rodeo rider into her heart.

Youthful dreams of romance shattered, Allison Armstrong is a hard-nosed businesswoman with no illusions of happily ever after for her future. Then her grandfather's will leaves her bound in a property settlement to the very man who destroyed her teenage fantasies. She has no interest in the remote land and wants to sell it off. Yet with all the legal resources at her disposal, Allison can't escape the web of the will's provisions. Heath Oakes was just a skinny teenager from the city the last time he saw Allison. Now he's just as determined to maintain the estate as a natural preserve as Allison is to get rid of it to developers. Hoping to alter her opinion, he shanghais her into a canoe voyage through the wild, pristine beauty of the area. Will the beauty of untouched wilderness help her heart remember the sweetness of stolen teenage kisses?

Beautiful, vivacious Emma Prescott has a love-'em-and-leave-'em reputation. Fact is, Emma's holding off for a hero. When she moves to a cabin at wilderness Loon Lake and meets her one neighbour, biology professor Frasier MacKenzie, he's still just another guy, even with his killer blue eyes and a body that just won't quit...until he rescues her and her Pug from one danger after another, from drowning to wild animals to a pair of armed and angry drug dealers. Then he definitely falls into hero territory. But the professor has no intention of filling the role of white knight in Emma's life. All he wants is to be rid of her and her annoying little dog so he can get on with his "research." In fact, he's ordered to get rid of them whether he wants to or not. Looks as if Emma may have to go on holding off for a hero...

"Nothing but a counterfeit cowboy." That's how veterinarian and horse farm owner Dr. Shelby Masters contemptuously describes the number-one male country music singer. Strapped for cash when her prize stallion is stolen, she is forced to spend six weeks with the man, teaching him enough to do his own riding in the western movie he's signed for. Jordan Brooks can sing and play a guitar, but he can't ride a horse. He has a month and a half in which to learn, and he might just give strait-laced and distanced Shelby a few lessons of his own. For instance, how to make the most of a warm summer's night on a moonlit beach...

Starr Reynolds is determined to fight her way out of a life of poverty and violence, and she's not above using her beauty and feminine wiles. But when she marries into wealth and position, she discovers the path leads to despair for a love she can never have, as well as a growing awareness of the ruthlessness of her new family's patriarch. Starr will do as he dictates or find herself thrown out to once more fend for herself. Charismatic, darkly fascinating, Captain Barret Madison has earned his place as commander of a fleet of merchant ships, but no woman has ever tamed him. With the presence of Starr on his ship, his emotions are stirred, but she is promised to another. When she becomes the wife of his employer's son, how can he do more than wish them well?**