Pregnant and on bed rest, McKenna calls her sister Natalie, who fled Shelter Springs, Idaho, after family tragedies took their toll, pleading for help running the Shelter Inn during the busy upcoming Christmas season.

Texas hill country, 1868. As nineteen-year-old Benjamin Shreve tends to business in his workshop, he witnesses a stagecoach strand a passenger. When the man, a treasure hunter, persuades Benjamin to help track down the vanished coach and a mysterious fortune left aboard--Benjamin is drawn into a drama whose scope he could never have imagined, for they discover on reaching the coach that its passengers include Nell, a pregnant young woman, and her...