When it comes to family secrets, Southern gentry would rather let sleeping dogs lie. Abigail Wetherington believes the evil that stalks her family in the streets of London is a sleeping dog come back to bite them. So with her last breath, she implores her beautiful granddaughter, Lillie, to flee to the family’s polo estate in South Carolina and seek the protection of someone Abigail has come to trust—Swain Butler. What Lillie doesn’t know is that she is putting herself in the hands of a woman who may be the biggest family secret of them all. “Be careful,” Abigail cautions Lillie. If sleeping dogs must be roused, then call them forth softly.

Secrets lead to nothing but trouble and heartbreak. Newly arrived in the small Southern town of Oakboro, Salem Lacy is planning to keep a low profile after an ill-timed step out of the closet cost her the corporate job and high-powered friends she had in Atlanta. That plan derails when Salem meets the mysterious and beautiful Knox Bolander, a woman who is whispered to cause odd and sometimes dangerous things to happen. When a fire that occurred twenty years earlier on the Bolander estate threatens to destroy Salem’s chance to rebuild her life, she must decide if she will risk everything again for this secretive woman who has been rarely touched and never loved.

The note attached to her grandmother’s will has left debutante Mae St. John with the family fortune is gone; the father she never knew lives in Louisiana; and her only income is a modest trust fund left for the care of Big Mae’s poodle, Rhett. Hog-tied by her father’s financial predicament and mental decline, Whit Casey is not happy at being strong-armed to hire Mae, who knows nothing about quarter horse racing, to write for her racing magazine and dot-com. Still, attraction grows between the two women until Mae’s investigation into a horse cloning controversy implicates Whit and the colt she is depending on to stop the foreclosure of her father’s farm. It’s a race against time to clear the colt before the big race and claim what both women desire most in their lives—someone to hold them forever.