Barbara J. Scott | The 5 Senses of Christmas Romance

Admit it. You love Christmas romances just as much as I do. Why do these stories
touch our hearts so profoundly? Because every page engages our five senses of
sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

They evoke our memories of the scent of mulled cider sipped near a real
Christmas tree. The way a warm sugar cookie melts on our tongues. Curling up
under a cozy afghan in front of a crackling fire. Imagining the soft touch of
his finger stroking the curve of our cheek. Christmas carols add the background
music to our own romantic Hallmark movie.

Christmas is the season of miracles, and we want to believe in miracles. But
most of all, it’s the season of love. Sweet romance novels stoke our
imaginations with the possibility that we, too, will live happily ever after
with our one true love.

SLEIGH BELLS RING is a collection of four contemporary Christmas novellas in which each Tucker sister is the heroine of her own story. The Tucker girls have inherited their father’s Kentucky horse farm for Christmas. Make that . . . a run-down horse farm. It needs some serious TLC in order to make it sell-ready.

Jo-Jo, the youngest, is convinced that by recruiting her sisters and one
handsome ranch hand, they can fix up the place and even celebrate one last
Christmas while they’re at it.

But for the next oldest sister, Bella, returning to her childhood home in
bluegrass country for Christmas seems like an impossible hurdle and not on the
top of her wish list. As a Chicago business woman, she’s always spent her
Christmas holiday on a sunny beach in the Caribbean.

Sophie, my sister in the novella “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” drags her feet
until she’s caught by a blizzard and slides into a ditch. As the true
horse-lover of the family, this equine veterinarian should be the most eager to
return home. But she only remembers the disappointing memories of growing up. At
thirty, love has passed her by, or has she always pushed it away? No one has
ever lived up to the memories of the blue-eyed boy she used to race across open
pastures. Although feisty and fun-loving as a teenager, Sophie has sobered and
still nurses old wounds.

And when the fate of the horse farm is put in jeopardy because the oldest
sibling Amy accidentally fraternizes with the enemy, tensions rise between the
four sisters. But it’s not like the land developer stole Christmas . . . just
her heart.

SLEIGH BELLS RING is about coming home, family, forgiveness, and finding love in the most unlikely of places: a Kentucky horse farm that’s been in the Tucker family for generations.