Boldly trading the stuffy drawing rooms of fashionable Boston for the darkly majestic wilderness of the rugged north country, Brandy Claybourne comes to Maine in the years following the Civil War, an idealistic young teacher in search of a new life. Here she meets Grey King, head of a vast shipping empire and arrogant master of King's Inland, a man marked by dark rumors and haunted by a tragic past. At his request, Brandy comes to Grey's magnificent mansion hoping to end his daughter's troubled silence--a silence that began the night her mother, a legendary southern beauty, died in a mysterious stable fire. But even as she fights to win the child's trust, and to unlock the truth about the past, Brandy finds herself irresistibly drawn to the strong and seductive Grey King, a man she begins to suspect is capable of anything--including murder.