Just hours after her lover's death, Ellie meets Evan, a handsome mulatto. She's struggling to regain her integrity... he's anxious to take it. He loves women. Black, white, mulatto... he enjoys them all. He's the privileged son of a wealthy South Carolina planter, who welcomed him into his home while the boy's mother, a slave, was left to plant rice in knee-deep mud. After his white family grew bitter toward his father's favoritism, Evan was sent away with a small fortune. And then he met Ellie. She was good at smelling money... but the thumping in her heart began right away. Should she fall...

In an act of kindness (and to alleviate guilt over her family's role in slavery) Amanda Roberts became the benefactor of Promise Land, a school and orphanage for black children. Not afraid to confront Klansmen who fight against the school, and engaged to a local plantation owner, she finds herself falling in love with the school's administrator, a black man from the East, Noah Jackson. Faced with condemnation from the start, their steamy liaison is more than she'd bargained for. Why should she, a white heiress from a prominent Southern family, risk so much? That kind of love was too painful....

Two brothers, Isaac and Levi, fighting for opposite sides during the Civil War, and their sister Sarah, have contrary views about how Kentucky's post-war days should take shape. Levi wants to send for his nurse Prudence, a beautiful fair-skinned mulatto who saved his life and captured his heart. Isaac is opposed, believing that it's wrong for a white man to marry a black woman. He fought a war to prevent that. Sarah, comfortable with tradition, would rather her brother not get involved. It feels terribly wrong, until she meets Pru's handsome almost-white brother Thomas, who moves into the...