The Christmas Ranch. RaeAnne Thayne

a new teaching job. She could handle this. Heaven knows, she had faced tougher obstacles before.

      She and her sisters had survived being kidnapped with their parents by leftist rebels in a foreign country—being held for several weeks in very tiny rooms with no running water and a bucket for a toilet, watching her mother growing increasingly sicker from the cancer ravaging her body while they were helpless to get her the medical help she needed, watching her father die in front of her just when they all thought they would be rescued, then losing her grief-stricken mother just a few months later.