A Gentle Rain
by Deborah Smith

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, she has 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 are Mac and Lily Tolbert. They 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, using a fake identity on the advice of her lawyer, gets a job at Ben's ranch in Fountain Springs, Florida, where her adventures include entering an unpredictable mare in a local horse show.

Deborah Smith's Bio

Deborah Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of A Place to Call Home, Sweet Hush, and other acclaimed romantic novels portraying life and love in the modern Appalachian South. A native Georgian, Deborah is a former newspaper editor who turned to novel-writing with great success.

With more than 30 romance and women's fiction novels to her credit, Deborah's books have sold over 3 million copies worldwide. Among her honors is a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times Magazine and a nomination for the prestigious Townsend Literary Award. In 2003 Disney optioned Sweet Hush for film.

Deborah is a founding partner of BelleBooks, a small southern press known for feel-good southern fiction including the Mossy Creek Hometown Series and the Sweet Tea story collections.

Deborah lives on a secluded dirt road high in the mountains of north Georgia with Hank, her husband of 27 years, plus a herd of deer, a flock of turkeys, numerous well-fed raccoons, possums and the occasional bear, also eight cats, a dog and two enormous koi fish named Daisy and Albert.