A Chesapeake Shores Christmas

Struggling in his role as a newly single father, former army medic Kevin O'Brien moves home to Chesapeake Shores. He wants a haven for himself and his toddler son, surrounded by the family he knows he can count on, and a future that's nothing like his past. But Kevin is suddenly facing a risk he hadn't anticipated, in the form of Main Street bookseller Shanna Carlyle.

Shanna immediately recognizes Kevin as a wounded soul-she's had way too much experience with the type. Still, this charming O'Brien man and his son are almost impossible to resist.

Then, just when the barriers are toppling, someone from Shanna's past appears. Confronted with a threat to their hard-won serenity, Kevin and Shanna face their toughest challenge-learning to trust again.

Life can be full of surprises…

Helen Decatur spent a lifetime setting goals-getting through college and law school, opening her own practice, becoming financially secure and establishing herself as one of the most highly respected matrimonial attorneys in the state of South Carolina. Achieving those goals was a breeze compared to the one she's faced with now.

The most driven-and cynical-of the Sweet Magnolias, Helen is forty-two, single and suddenly ready for the family she's put on the back burner for all these years. Unfortunately, having a child at her age comes with lots of complications, not the least of which is the absence of a serious relationship in her life.

But Helen's not the type of woman to wait around for fate to step in. Taking charge of her own destiny puts her at odds with her two best friends, sets sparks flying with a man who doesn't want a family, and leads her straight into the most unexpected complication of all…love.

Oh, God! She's in love with her preacher.

But it's not as if Amanda O'Leary set out to fall for the most gorgeous (and unattainable) man this side of South Carolina Low Country. It's just that he organized building a cozy home for her and her children at a time when the future looked darker than blackstrap molasses. Not even her own father, the arrogant and wealthy Big Max, would have done as much for her. But that's a whole other kettle of fish.

Caleb can count on fingers and toes why his attraction to widowed Amanda is plain wrong. How can he objectively counsel this chin-up spitfire without letting his emotions--and imagination--run wild? And now that Big Max has burdened him with not one secret, but two, he knows his priorities should be mending fences between father and daughter--but he can't help trying to build a place for himself in her heart first....