Virginia, 1860. The old antagonisms between the Ronald and Pegram families have festered for generations, each side nursing grievances that have outlived their original causes. When Baillie Pegram encounters Agatha Ronald in the Virginia countryside, her horse thrown and her pride in ruins, courtesy demands he help her, an act that should be impossible given what their families have sworn to each other. What begins as awkward necessity becomes something neither can resist: conversation that crackles, recognition that unsettles, a pull neither chose but both feel. Eggleston writes with the deliberate grace of a vanished era, letting the landscape of antebellum Virginia breathe as richly as his characters' conflicted hearts. As war gathers like a summer storm on the horizon, Agatha and Baillie must decide whether the feud that defines their families will also define them, or whether love, in wartime, demands a different kind of courage. This is historical romance at its most restrained and most devastating: a story about what happens when the heart chooses a enemy, and the nation prepares to tear itself apart.
