The last thing Sloan Chisholm expected when he walked into the roadside cafe in the middle of nowhere was to fall in love. He'd always had a weakness for blondes, but two at once? That wasn't like him. They were taking a survey. "Are you single?" Oh, yeah, he was. "On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you like little girls?" He was a goner. Then their mother, Emily, came to take his order, and he knew he was in deep, deep trouble. Another blonde, and this one was closer to his age, and a knockout. He soon learned that the three ladies were in trouble, with a broken down car and no way to get to Emily's new job in Fort Smith. Then one disaster after another happened in the cafe, none of them anyone's fault but a negligent manager. Next thing Sloan knew, Emily was fired and she and her daughters were without the motel room they'd been living in. The next thing Sloan knew, he was inviting them back to his ranch in Oklahoma, where she could work as the housekeeper for his grandmother while his brother fixed her car.

Widowed Emily Nelson thought she might be out of her mind, packing up her precious daughters and heading off to this stranger's ranch. But the decal on the door of his pickup said "The Cherokee Rose Ranch," and when she quickly looked it up online, it was legit, and so was Sloan. The entire family, as well as the ranch, were, in fact, highly regarded all over the state. She just wished she didn't find him so attractive. She'd loved one man in her life, and he'd been dead more than two years. Was she ready to trust her heart again. In his arms, she thought she just might be.