Real Love #54

Hattie Radford dreams of catching the eye of popular Win Willis, but as a quiet, overlooked girl keeping house for her brothers at their garage, she seems invisible to him—until she gets an idea inspired by his passion for hot-rods. She convinces her brothers to build her the fastest car in town, hoping the attention will finally make Win notice her, but soon discovers that drawing a crowd isn't the same as winning a heart. When her desperate scheme backfires and leaves her humiliated, Win shows up at just the right moment with a confession that changes everything.

Campus sweethearts Janie and Roy Chandler have kept their romance deliberately casual—both are focused on their futures, with her interior design career and his civil engineering ambitions taking priority over serious commitment. When a sudden storm forces them to shelter in a barn during a hiking date, their carefully maintained emotional distance begins to crumble, and they mutually decide to stop seeing each other to avoid further temptation. Back at school, however, the innocent night spent waiting out the weather becomes campus gossip that threatens everything they've tried to keep private.

Gretchen, a sheltered and spoiled young woman, meets Hill Marshall and falls in love, prompting her to leave her hometown for a fresh start after their marriage. But as a housewife in their new town, her old habits of irresponsibility resurface, and when Hill's capable coworker Abbie Mayo begins helping around the house, Gretchen finds herself struggling between genuine change and taking shortcuts to save face. As tensions simmer between what Gretchen pretends to be and what she actually is, she'll have to decide whether the shortcut to keeping Hill's affection is worth the cost of her own integrity.

Patricia Gannon never expected to become a fruit tramp picking harvests in California, but when her family lost their farm in the drought, that's exactly what happened—until she catches the eye of Dana Rhodes, the wealthy ranch owner who defends her from his superintendent's advances. When Claude, a neighbor who's harbored feelings for Patricia since childhood, falsely claims she's his fiancée to impress Dana, Patricia finds herself caught between Claude's possessive grip, her own uncertain heart, and an undeniable attraction to Dana that seems impossibly out of reach for a girl of her station.