Christmas at the Parsonage: A Sweet Christian Mail-Order Bride Romance (Christmas in Jubilee Book 3)
About
She crossed two thousand miles to find a husband. She never expected the hardest part would be learning how to be truly known.
Theodora Bly has spent six years making a life out of keeping herself hidden.
In a Quincy, Illinois, printing office, she is the woman behind the type cases—and the anonymous voice behind the newspaper column everyone reads. Her words are praised throughout the city, but no one knows they are hers. Even at home and at church, Thea has become accustomed to being the quiet woman nobody really sees.
Then, at twenty-nine, she does something no sensible woman in her position would do.
She leaves everything she knows behind and travels two thousand miles west to Jubilee, Colorado, to meet Barnabas Kittredge, a quiet, respected assayer she knows only through a minister’s letter. Under Jubilee’s unusual winter courtship custom, she will spend the winter in town, get to know the man, and make her own decision when the mountain pass opens in spring.
Barnabas is everything the letter promised: honest, capable, courteous, and steady. But for a woman who has spent her whole life longing to be seen, there is a problem.
Barnabas is remarkably difficult to know.
As winter settles over Jubilee, Thea finds herself drawn to the quiet man who seems to understand the value of truth—but has trouble sharing the deeper truths of his own heart. Between the warmth of the parsonage, a Christmas program for the town’s children, the dangers of a mountain winter, and long conversations that reveal almost as much in silence as they do in words, Thea must face a question she has spent her entire life avoiding:
Can two people who have learned to hide themselves ever learn to let each other in?
Set against a snowbound Colorado town where neighbors look after one another and faith is woven into the ordinary work of life, Christmas at the Parsonage is a tender Christian historical romance about truth, trust, forgiveness, and the courage it takes to be fully known.
If you love clean historical romance, strong but quietly wounded heroines, honorable heroes, small-town Christmas settings, and deeply emotional love stories built on faith and trust, you’ll want to spend this winter in Jubilee.
The Christmas in Jubilee books:
Book One — Christmas at the Teel House — Adelaide, a clever milliner who has said no twice and meant it, comes to Jubilee for one careful winter with a quiet rancher, Josiah.
Book Two — Christmas at the Sawmill — Frances, a hard, honest orchard woman, is matched to Gideon, a man everyone likes and no one truly knows, up at the mountain sawmill.
Book Three — Christmas at the Parsonage — Thea, a newspaperwoman read all her life and never once truly seen, meets Barnabas, an assayer with a wound of his own.
Book Four — Christmas at the Wheel Shop — Honora, who has never once been let to choose for herself, makes a refusal that becomes a rule protecting every bride after her — and finds Ira, the wheelwright who mends broken things.
Book Five — Christmas at the South Grass — Verity crosses a whole country to be let into a family, not to fix one, and loses her heart to Alonzo Baca on the high winter grass.