Book excerpt: Her Prayer Was Simple: "Dear God, Let Me Die!" But Cordelia Channing -- preacher's wife, preacher's widow -- lived and was born anew as Winter Woman, a woman of power who'd survived the deadliest season in the mountains alone . She knew she could never do it again. Though perhaps there was no need, for Providence had sent her Thomas Nash, an enigmatic Mountain Man who stirred the deep places of her questing soul. Nash had come west to lose himself, to rail at the fates that seemed ready to destroy his life at every turn. But somehow those same fates now saw fit to put Delia in his care. And though he was fighting it at every turn, Delia was transforming his life in ways he'd thought forever lost!