Scattered Petals
Priscilla Morton talks her parents into accompanying her to 1850s Ladreville, Texas to attend a family wedding. But she gets more adventure than she bargained for when bandits attack, killing her parents and raping her. Guilt over both the rape and having lured her parents to their deaths slows her recovery. When she discovers she is pregnant, Zach Webster, a kindly ranch foreman, agrees to marry her to give her baby a name. But Priscilla doesn’t know that Zach also has a shameful past that he’s trying to forget. Can the two wounded souls heal each other?
Cabot researched women’s rape accounts, and she makes Priscilla’s conflicted state of mind in the aftermath believable. It’s an unusual theme for a Christian prairie romance. Readers will wish for a mate as compassionate as Zach, who is willing to wait months or longer for Priscilla to get past her trauma. There is an interesting subplot about Ladreville’s German and French settlers’ prejudice against each other because of past conflicts in Europe. While I enjoyed the book, the plot would have been even more intriguing if the pregnancy had had a different outcome. This is volume two of Texas Dreams.