Five years after the final shot was fired in the War Between the States, Selah Daughtry can barely manage to keep
herself, her two younger sisters, and their spinster cousin fed and clothed. With their family’s Mississippi plantation
swamped by debt and the Big House falling down around them, the only option seems to be giving up their ancestral
land–until a hotel management agent for the railroad offers her hope for the future.

If she’ll turn her home into a hotel, Levi Riggins says, he can all but guarantee it will be saved. Selah isn’t sure she
entirely trusts the handsome Yankee. Yet what other options does she have? She’ll have to stay on her guard … but she
never expected to have to guard her heart.

These two may have met their match–in each other.

In the fine tradition established by her Southern grandmama, Aurora Daughtry has recently orchestrated the
marriage of her eldest sister and facilitated her middle sister’s engagement. Just when it seems there is nothing left to
absorb her considerable talent for managing people, in walks federal deputy marshal Zane Sager.

But Zane is not at Daughtry House for a vacation. He’s tracking a killer and collecting two key witnesses to a
federal judge’s murder.

Aurora takes it upon herself to disabuse the cynical lawman of his conviction that the world is out to get him. But
just as she’s on the verge of cracking Zane’s defenses, the man he is after reminds him that no one he loves is safe. Ever.

Joelle Daughtry has a secret. By day, the impoverished Southern belle has been helping her sisters in their quest to turn the run-down family plantation into a resort hotel after the close of the Civil War. But by night and under a male pseudonym, she has been penning articles for the local paper in support of constructing a school for former slaves. With the Mississippi arm of the Ku Klux Klan gaining power and prestige, Joelle knows she is playing a dangerous game. Loyalties shift when Schuyler Beaumont, childhood enemy and current investor in the Daughtry House renovation, takes over his assassinated father’s candidacy for state office. Joelle finds that in order to protect her family and her home, she and Schuyler will have to put aside their longstanding personal conflict and develop a united public front. The trouble is, what do you do when animosity becomes respect–and even love–if you’re already engaged to someone else?