Widow Rachel Stevens is very happy with her job as a cook for the Lazy Sunset ranch where she is raising her son. However, the new foreman, Rusty McIntyre, is turning her life upside down. She could overlook how her son has begun to idolize Rusty, but she’s having a heck of a time ignoring the flutters in her stomach every time the man smiles at her. But Rusty has problems of his own. His previously unknown fourteen year old daughter has just arrived to live with him. Used to always being on his own, now he has a young boy following him around imitating his every move, and a surly young lady glaring at him. Throw into the mix the tug he feels toward the ranch cook—who wants no part of him—and life is no longer as easy as it once was.

Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1912. Priscilla Cochran intends to prove to the world she is a grown up woman, able to take care of herself. She accepts a job as a teacher in Dogtown, Colorado, where the man who hired her thinks she is a woman of “mature years.” Mitch Beaumont is tired of young women who come to Dogtown and leave in tears because it is not a built up city with entertainment a young woman would want. He has finally secured a teacher for the town who has assured him she is a middle-aged spinster and will be able to last through the hard winters. Then twenty-year-old Priscilla steps off the mail coach and falls at his feet in the mud.