A Gentle Rain

A Connecticut heiress. A Florida cowboy. Her secret. His heart. And the very special family she's come home to find.

Kara Whittenbrook is an unlikely heiress. Down-to-earth and lovably quirky, she's never fit in with the stogy Whittenbrook clan of Connecticut. Growing up at her parents' rainforest preserve in Brazil has given her a quaintly off-beat view of life. Now her beloved parents have died in a plane crash, and Kara's learned a stunning truth.

She was adopted.

Her birth parents, Mac and Lily Tolbert, live and work on a backwoods cattle ranch in northern Florida. Ranch owner Ben Thocco is running out of time and money. He's going to need a miracle in order to save the ranch and care for the likable crew of unusual hands he employs, including Kara's parents and his own fragile brother Joey.

Kara's simple plan to find and know her birth parents unravels almost the moment Kara steps foot on Thocco land.

With more than 2.5 million copies in print worldwide, Deborah Smith is one of the most beloved authors of romantic, stylish, contemporary Southern fiction. Romantic times awarded Smith a Career Achievement Award and named her 1996 New York Times bestselling novel, A Place To Call Home, one of the top 200 romantic novels of the twentieth century. Deborah lives in the mountains of north Georgia with her husband, Hank.