She knows this is linked to Ian and her need to find him and see if he’s okay, to thank him for all he did and to let him know that she and Bobby appreciated him. Now that it’s been a year since that, Marcie finds that she’s having trouble moving on. When Bobby passed she wrote to tell him that too, even though she never heard back. Marcie kept writing, for herself more than anything. Marcie tried his family, his former fiancee, everyone she could think of but no one knew where Ian Buchanan had gone. Then he dropped off the map entirely, disappearing without a trace. Marcie and Ian corresponded by letters a few times, as she updated him on Bobby’s progress and what was happening with him and she met him once when he came to see Bobby. If he’d died in that desert, she would never have been given that opportunity. For years she was grateful to Ian Buchanan for giving her back her husband so that she could say goodbye. Marcie however, never saw her invalid husband as a burden. Even though Ian did all he could, Bobby’s injuries were too extensive for him to ever recover. And when Bobby was severely injured, it was Ian who went back for him and carried him to safety. Bobby admired him, looked up to him and the two men became close as brothers over there in dusty Iraq. In Bobby’s letters to her from Iraq, he talked a lot about one man – Ian Buchanan. Married at just 19 before Bobby shipped out, Marcie finds herself a widow by the time she’s in her mid-twenties. Bobby was injured in combat in Iraq and lived for some time as an invalid – paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak or communicate. Marcie Sullivan lost her husband Bobby a year ago.

Usually a preceding book introduces the two main characters before they get their own story but this isn’t the case here. It’s not as long as the previous 3 books and introduces new characters we’ve never seen before. A Virgin River Christmas is the fourth novel in the Virgin River series and seems to maybe have been a novella or appeared in an anthology or something at some stage.

A virgin river christmas