Little more than a spoiled boy, Raphael Flamenco leaves New Orleans for the new Republic of Texas to drag his willful Yankee wife back to civilization. She is his “property” and she will damned well get used to her new role as a proper Creole wife. If Texas doesn’t kill a man first, it has a way of making him grow up. Raphael quickly learns that there are no artificial codes of honor in this brutal land. When men fight, they fight like animals to survive. He learns that his best friend can be a half-breed Cherokee. And this Creole son of slave owners finds out what it means to be a slave himself. The Comanche are thorough teachers. But Raphael Flamenco survives to become the tough, hardened Texian, Rafe Fleming, who never abandons his search for the woman he cannot stop loving.
Boston abolitionist Deborah Manchester falls so deeply in love with her handsome Creole husband that she tries to adjust to his world, a society steeped in moral hypocrisy and casual cruelty. But when she discovers that she carries her husband’s child, she vows that her babe will not be tainted by the same social “poison” that infects her husband. He will not change, so she must. “Gone-to-Texas” as a runaway wife posing as a widow, she learns on the raw frontier that she possesses strengths she never imagined. Yet in her lonely bed at night, she still dreams of Rafael's heated touch.
When, by chance, they come face to face in San Antonio, both are stunned by how Texas has changed them. He finds his silver-haired “Moon Flower” is now a strong Texas woman of property whose trust he must win in order to reclaim her love. In spite of the scars on his face and the look of a dangerous pistolero, Rafe Fleming is still the only man she will ever love. Now, just what does an independent “widow lady” do when her “dead” husband resurrects himself from the grave?
