Young and pretty, the temporary housekeeper, Ellie Jo Cade, doesn’t seem to know how to make something without charring it to ashes. Turns out, Ellie Jo has come to Crown Seven not just  to fill in for her friend, Mrs. Leach, over the Christmas season, but to reunite with her father, the notorious rustler, who she has reason to believe is hiding out near the Crown Seven. Imagine her surprise when her father, Ezra Kincaid, walks into the house kitchen and introduces himself as the ranch cook, Gaby Moss. He’s there because he heard that a cowboy, Slim Cullen, was working at the ranch. As of yet he hasn’t laid eyes on the man who killed a young woman and apparently framed Ezra for the murder.

Surprising, since Reid Barclay, Gaby/Ezra’s boss, was known as Slim Cullen and was initially saddled with the young woman’s murder and then released for a price that could ultimately cost him his ranch. But no one knows his old moniker and that’s fine by him, though the guilt he feels for a crime he doesn’t remember is eating away at him.

Also eating away at him is his desire for his new, temporary housekeeper. He knows something’s not right when she burns just about everything she puts in the oven. But that doesn’t keep him from trying to charm her.  Trouble is, it’s been arranged for him to marry his benefactor’s English-bred daughter who he feels more brotherly toward than husbandly. And when she arrives, there’s more sparks between her and his English sheepherder neighbor than with him.

Nothing and no one is as they seem at the Crown Seven Ranch in Maverick, Wyoming. And it doesn’t help that Ellie Jo is attracted to the rancher more than is decent considering he’s going to be married to another woman any day now. Besides, what would Reid Barclay say when he found out she was an infamous rustler’s daughter.

Of course, when she finds out Reid’s Slim Cullen, the person who has brought more misery on her poor father than he has on himself—well things couldn’t look bleaker for her lovelorn heart.

Ms. Kenny has written a high adventure set in the rip-roaring west where men are fighters as well as lovers. Brimming with passion and romance and taut with tension, the story of Ellie Jo and Reid is also the story of family and forgiveness in concert with the Christmas season it celebrates.