Angela Murphy's plans for a cozy Colorado Christmas shatter when she finds her fellow-teacher boyfriend entangled with another woman. But she goes home anyway—to her grandmother Mollie's Berthoud Boarding House where she's forced into tasks with Mollie's handsome new boarder, Matt Dawson. While temporarily rooming at the boarding house until his new furnace arrives, Matt sees through Mollie's manipulations to pair him with her granddaughter, but he can't complain about spending time with the beautiful gray-eyed school teacher and the mangy stray they pick up on their way home from cutting a Christmas tree. In the company of both a beauty and a beast, Matt understands more clearly the words of a long-forgotten youth leader. Will those words draw him back to a long-forgotten God? And will Angela find that home lies not in the Victorian house of her childhood, but in the arms of the man she's grown to love?