After Alejandro de Bastitas returns to his ancestral home in Texas and agrees to an arranged marriage, he meets Angelique DuHon, the beautiful cousin of his new bride, and the two fall in love

Fugitive hearts... On a wagon train from Louisiana to Texas, Rachel meets a stranger. She is unnerved—and fascinated—by the intensity of his sapphire gaze. Over the course of hot, sun-baked days and cool, starlit nights, embers of desire flare into forbidden passion. Forbidden because Rachel is the sheltered daughter of New Orleans aristocracy—and because her "stranger" is the infamous outlaw "Kid" Davis, now a captive facing a death sentence. But the princess and the prisoner have more in common than meets the eye. And even as Rachel becomes his hostage in a daring escape to Mexico, she yearns to uncover the mystery that haunts him, the secret that keeps his soul in a prison all its own...

Widowed by the town preacher and denounced by her neighbors, Charity Bell finds herself a marked woman who has no hope for love, until a handsome strange walks into her life and ignites a spark of passion she has never felt before