Stunned siblings, Sheri Watkins, a third-year nursing student at TWU in Denton, Texas and her older brother, Kyle Watkins, a first-year med student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, vow to find the dark secret behind their seemingly happy, successful parents' double suicides. In their quest, they encounter many closed doors, but continue relentlessly in their search and discover a hidden past known only to their father.
To honor his wife's death-bed wish, William Brock had sent his impulsive, gangly, rabbit-shooting, tomboyish fourteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, to Boston to live with her aunt and to attend Boston Finishing School. In 1827, four years later, Hannah returns to Arkansas Post as a beautiful, poised and gracious young lady. She meets a handsome, elusive stranger who sends her emotions reeling, involves herself with the problems of a childhood friend and takes on a ruthless banker who is out to destroy her. She quickly realizes she must combine the best of both her worlds to survive in the currently evolving structure of Arkansas Post.
Widowed Ellen Ross, an urban professor, had no warning of whatawaited her and her three children when she married Garth Epstein,whose resume read like a fairy handsome, charming, well-educatedand owner of one of oldest and largest ranches in East Texas. What itdidnt list narcissistic, arrogant and controlling, with an undertoneof darkness that only Jennifer, her precocious oldest, seemed toperceive. Garth uprooted the family and moved them to Lake Point,Texas, a place deeply steeped in old bloodline traditions and prejudicesagainst women, a piercing thorn in Jennifers liberated and extremelycompetitive side.