Don’t miss this reader-favorite tale of healing hearts from New York Times bestselling author Sherryl Woods. Cynical and soul-weary foreign correspondent Richard Walton had traveled the world and found only pain and misery. He believed there was nothing—and no one—good left in the world. Then he met kind and generous Pastor Anna Louise Perkins. Could this very special woman take away the nightmares and give him the peace his jaded soul is searching for? Sherryl Woods Booklist The Sweet Magnolias Stealing Home A Slice of Heaven Feels Like Family Welcome to Serenity Home in Carolina Sweet Tea at Sunrise Honeysuckle Summer Midnight Promises Catching Fireflies Where Azaleas Bloom Swan Point Chesapeake Shores The Inn at Eagle Point Flowers on Main Harbor Lights A Chesapeake Shores Christmas Driftwood Cottage Moonlight Cove Beach Lane An O’Brien Family Christmas The Summer Garden A Seaside Christmas The Christmas Bouquet Dogwood Hill Willow Brook Road The Devaney Brothers The Devaney Brothers: Ryan & Sean The Devaney Brothers: Michael & Patrick The Devaney Brothers: Daniel The Calamity Janes The Calamity Janes: Cassie & Karen The Calamity Janes: Gina & Emma The Calamity Janes: Lauren The Adams Dynasty A Christmas Blessing Natural Born Daddy The Cowboy and His Baby The Rancher and His Unexpected Daughter The Littlest Angel Natural Born Trouble Unexpected Mommy The Cowgirl and the Unexpected Wedding Natural Born Lawman The Unclaimed Baby The Cowboy and His Wayward Bride Suddenly, Annie’s Father The Cowboy and the New Year’s Baby Dylan and the Baby Doctor The Pint-Sized Secret Marrying a Delacourt The Delacourt Scandal The Parson’s Waiting Sherryl Woods CONTENTS Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen CHAPTER ONE Richard Walton stood atop the hillside in Kiley, Virginia, and looked out over his grandmother’s apple orchards and beyond to the Shenandoah Valley. For as far as the eye could see there was nothing remarkable on the horizon, just green treetops against a crystal-clear blue sky. He drew in a deep breath of the cool morning air with its hint of the approaching fall and waited for some sort of serenity to steal over him. Wasn’t that why people retreated to remote places in the mountains? Wasn’t there supposed to be something in the eternal stillness, in the quiet shifting of the seasons that gave a man peace of mind? So where the heck was it? he wondered irritably. Coffee cup in hand, he leaned against a post on the front porch of the white clapboard house that had been in his family for four generations and waited impatiently for the place to work its healing magic. Nothing. Just as it always had, the quiet got on his nerves worse than bullets flying past his ear. And Lord knows he’d had enough of that in the past few years to be able to make the comparison. Even here, where the noisiest thing around was Nate Dorsey’s rusty old pickup, he could still hear the thunder of bombs exploding in Iraq, the shelling in the streets of Bosnia, the sniper fire in Somalia. But as chilling as those sounds had been, they were nothing compared to the cries of starving children, the screams of tortured women. He still woke up some nights in a cold sweat, hearing those awful moans of anguish. He’d known in his gut that for every one of the children he reported rescued by UN troops or Red Cross workers, for every one of the women whose stories of daring escapes he wrote about for his Washington, D.C., newspaper, there were hundreds or thousands more that no one could save. For nearly ten years he had been highly paid to report from the world’s hellholes. Bloody civil wars, famine and strife were the lifeblood of a foreign correspondent known for his willingness to go anywhere, to brave any danger for the sake of an illuminating interview and a front-page byline. There was little in the way of human depravity that Richard Walton hadn’t witnessed. He seriously doubted that an orchardful of apple trees and a lungful of fresh air could ever wash away those memories. He sipped his coffee, which didn’t taste strong enough. Not nearly as potent as the coffee he’d relied on to keep him awake during endless hours in the field and even more exhausting hours at his laptop computer. He wondered just how long he’d be able to tolerate the quiet. Hopefully it would be long enough. He thought of his grandmother, Maisey Walton, whose fragile heart was finally showing signs of slowing down after nearly eighty years. Only Maisey could have drawn him home again. Not that she’d asked. Maisey knew that he hadn’t been able to leave this town with its small-minded people and bitter memories fast enough. She’d sent him off to college with her blessing and she’d proudly kept a scrapbook of clippings from the Washington paper that had eventually hired him to report on the world’s trouble spots. She’d told him last night, though, that she hadn’t read most of them. “You’ve got an eye for detail and a vivid style that makes those horrible things come alive,” she’d said. “I can’t sleep nights when I’ve read one of your stories. I shed too many tears for all of that senseless suffering.” Of course, to his way of thinking that was high praise. That was just the effect Richard had hoped to have on readers. He’d wanted people to know what it was like in those distant, terrible places. He’d wanted their discomfort to become a rallying cry for change. But over the past nine years, if he’d learned nothing else, he’d learned that change was slow in coming, even when all the world’s forces for good were intent on making it happen. Mankind seemed to have a boundless capacity for doing harm, but very little understanding of how to do good. That knowledge had made his stories hard-hitting and relentless. It had also turned his heart cold and cynical. Maybe it was time for a break, time to use up all that vacation time he’d accumulated with his long, uninterrupted stretches on assignments that had other reporters bailing out after weeks. He was finally willing to admit that he was very close to a bad case of burnout. That alone wouldn’t have brought him back
