Kate Beecher, a young woman from Boston, looks ahead with a sense of restless longing to the life her family and friends expect her to embrace. She doesn't know what she wants, or who, until she moves with her family to the wild Montana Territory of the 1860's. Just eighteen and quietly struggling against the social constraints of the era, Kate meets a woman who fires first her imagination, and then her dreams. Jessie Forbes, a fiercely independent but touchingly tender rancher, finds in Kate the passion she had unknowingly sought all her life. This is the story of their struggle to love in a land and time as cruel as it was beautiful.

The Montana frontier of the 1860s might be dangerous, but only if you have something to lose. Dr. Vance Phelps lost everything in the War Between the States—her professional future, her place in Philadelphia society, and her faith in herself. She travels to New Hero, Montana with no hero of happiness and no desire for anything except forgetting. Mae is a frontier madam, used to standing alone. She fiercely guards the well-being of the lost young women who come under her care—she just never expected one of them to be a doctor, wounded in body and soul. Can two outcasts find refuge in one another’s hearts?