The frontier might be dangerous, but only if you have something to lose. Can two outcasts find refuge in one another's hearts? 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 Hope, Montana with no hope of happiness and no desire for anything except forgetting. There she meets a trio of women, all of whom will play a pivotal role in her life—rancher Jessie Forbes, her lover, Kate Beecher, and Mae, a frontier madam. Mae, used to standing alone against physical danger and social sanction, 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.