Showing results by narrator "Pilar Witherspoon" in All Categories

Five years after the final shot was fired in the War Between the States, Selah Daughtry can barely manage to keep herself, her two younger sisters, and their spinster cousin fed and clothed. With their family's Mississippi plantation swamped by debt and the Big House falling down around them, the only option seems to be giving up their ancestral land. Pinkerton agent and former Union cavalryman Levi Riggins is investigating a series of robberies and sabotage linked to the impoverished Daughtry plantation.

After almost 20 years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father and then for their cantankerous 93-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined.

Gray Delacroix has dedicated his life to building his very successful global spice empire, but it has come at a cost. Resolved to salvage his family before it spirals out of control, he returns to his ancestral home to save his brother and sister before it's too late. As a junior botanist for the Smithsonian, Annabelle Larkin has been charged with the impossible task of gaining access to the notoriously private Delacroix plant collection. If she fails, she will be out of a job and the family farm in Kansas will go under.

Exiled from his beloved Acadie in Canada, Bleu Galant has little on his mind but survival as the tumultuous French and Indian War comes to a close. When his journey to Virginia's Rivanna River settlement takes an unexpected turn, he crosses paths with Brielle Farrow—a woman whose presence stirs something in him he cannot explain nor express. Unable to forget her, his decision to help her takes them across an ocean into a lavish world he's never known. Will their intricate tie decide not only her fate but his future?

In 1837, Juniper Collins and her sisters are shocked by their father's final request in his will for a special set of beads to be returned to a Piegan Blackfoot woman he credits with saving his life during his travels west. Together, the sisters set out for the trapper rendezvous to find the woman, but their mission turns more daunting when they come upon the mass of men and lodges spread out in the Green River Valley.

Lily Chalmers wanted only two things from life: a farm of her own, and to find the sisters she hadn't seen since they were all little girls heading west on the orphan train. She certainly had no desire for a husband.

After her father's death, Lizzy Brookstone, the star trick rider of the all-female Brookstone Wild West Extravaganza, loses interest in performing. Ella Fleming is fleeing a forced engagement when she stows away on the Brookstone train. Lizzy finds her and gives her a job in the costume department. When Mary Reichert, a former sharpshooter for the show, learns that her brother, August, has been killed at the Fleming farm, she returns to the show to find the truth, As the three women work together to discover how August died, Lizzy strives to hold the show together.

Evangeline Keating came West because she had to: after her husband's passing, she needed to build a new life for her young daughter, and marrying a stranger from Montana Territory was her best chance. After a difficult winter journey, she arrives at an isolated outpost called Springwater Station. But the handsome man who's come for her is not her husband-to-be, and Evangeline soon finds herself thrust into a most inconvenient - and highly improper - arrangement.

For Havyn Powell, growing up on her grandfather Chuck Bondrant's dairy outside the 1904 gold-rush boomtown of Nome, Alaska, offered all she needed. She had the love of her mother, two sisters, and grandfather. But now, at 23, Havyn realizes the stability of her life may soon vanish. Havyn is determined to find a way to keep the family together, but her grandfather's health is declining and everyone seems to be holding secrets from each other, including the handsome, dark-haired stranger who recently arrived.

In "Legacy of Love", Sarah Gooding never suspected returning a brooch to an elderly woman would lead to a job and introduce her to the woman's grandson. Widow Ruth Albright uses the family brooch as collateral for a loan from the local banker and hopes for a second chance at love in "Gift of the Heart". In "A Shot at Love", Fleeta Brady never expected her family's brooch might be how a fellow hunter turns her attention from competition to romance. Maddie Winslow stumbles upon an old family brooch in "Because of You". Might it finally be her turn for love?

Abigail Brantley grew up in affluence and knows exactly how to behave in high society. But when she is cast from the social registers due to her father's illegal dealings, she finds herself forced into a role she never imagined: tutoring rough Kansas ranchers in the subjects of manners and morals so they can "marry up" with their mail-order brides. Mack Cleveland, whose father was swindled by a mail-order bride, wants no part of the scheme to bring Eastern women to Spiveyville, Kansas, but as time goes by, his heart goes out to the teacher.

After Aggie Dunkirk's career is unceremoniously ended by her own mistakes, she finds herself traveling to Wisconsin, where her grandmother, Mumsie, lives alone in her rambling old home. She didn't plan for how eccentric Mumsie has become, obsessing over an old, unsolved crime scene - even going so far as to re-create it in the dollhouse. Mystery seems to follow her when she finds work as a secretary helping to restore the flooded historical part of the cemetery. Forced to work with the cemetery's puzzling, yet attractive archeologist, she exhumes the past's secrets.

May, 1924. It's been months since young British widow Emma Blackstone arrived in Hollywood to serve as companion to Kitty Flint: her beautiful silent-movie star sister-in-law. Kitty is generous, kind-hearted . . . and a truly terrible actress. Not that Emma minds; she's too busy making her academic parents turn in their graves with her new job writing painfully historically inaccurate scenarios for Foremost Studios. So when one of Kitty's old flames calls Emma and tells her it's imperative he meet with Kitty that morning, she's not surprised. Until, that is, he adds that lives depend on it.

All of her life, Irish American Moira Doherty has relished her mother's descriptions of Ireland. When her mother dies unexpectedly in the summer of 1920, Moira decides to fulfill her mother's wish that she become the teacher in Ballymann, her home village in Donegal, Ireland.   

The beloved daughter of Jewish captives in Babylon, Keren is sold into Daniel’s household to help her family survive. She becomes Daniel’s most trusted scribe, while taking lessons and swordsmanship training alongside Daniel’s sons and their best friend, Jared. But after a tragic accident changes the course of her life, Keren finds herself in a foreign country, charged with a mysterious task: teaching a shepherd boy how to become a lord. When she overhears whispers that hint at his true identity, she realizes she must protect him from the schemes of a bloodthirsty king.

For years her explorer father promised Dr. Lauren Westlake she'd accompany him on one of his Egyptian expeditions. But as the empty promises mounted, Lauren determined to earn her own way. Now the assistant curator of Egyptology for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lauren receives two unexpected invitations. The first is her repentant father's offer to finally bring her to Egypt as his colleague on a new expedition. The second is a chance to enter the world of New York's wealthiest patrons who have been victims of art fraud.

When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she'd left, that's exactly what happens - Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children. What she hopes to find is solace with "Bootsie", her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories.

Summoned back to Philadelphia from the social whirl in London, Violet Mitchell never expected to find her brothers living on the edge of financial ruin while their father seeks new wealth in Montana's gold fields. With the family's home and social standing at risk, Violet makes a drastic decision.  

The year 1924. After six months in Hollywood, young British widow Emma Blackstone has come to love her new employer, glamourous movie-star Kitty Flint — even if her late husband’s sister is one of the worst actresses she’s ever seen. Looking after Kitty and her three adorable Pekinese dogs isn’t work academically minded Emma dreamed of, but Kitty rescued her when she was all alone in the world. Now, the worst thing she has to worry about is the shocking historical inaccuracies of the films Kitty stars in.  

The call for liberty creates a divide between family and country, desire and duty, love and loyalty. In 1777, caught in the crossroads of the American Revolution, sisters Maebel and Coralie Bohannon's quaint New Jersey village becomes a battleground as they house American officers. Rebellion...