Condemned for the name he carries… Desperate to stop a fiery history from repeating itself, Captain Nicholas Sinclair begins a frantic race against a madman. Never could he have imagined that while tracking his brother’s killer through a community racked with hate over his father’s arsonist past that he would be propelled headlong into marriage with the beautiful daughter of the only man who might hold some answers…nor that Briana’s gentle way and her tiny imp of a daughter might actually manage to penetrate the well-guarded barriers of his worn and battered heart. But the clock is ticking—and as Nicholas intensifies his search and struggles to save his young family, he begins to wonder if his greatest threat will come, not from his faceless enemy, but from the woman he’s dared to take for his own… Haunted by a long buried secret… Briana Corwin will do anything to protect her daughter—and in a rash attempt to keep young Emily’s “not-quite-legal” adoption from coming to light, she soon finds herself the sacrifice that will keep her little girl safe. She hadn’t stopped to consider, however, that the price might well be as high as her own heart and soul, nor that the secret she has guarded for very so very long could well destroy them all. How could she possibly have known that the little girl she has loved, and raised since infancy, is the very child of Nicholas’s own slain brother? A child he has believed dead for some three full years… From the oak-strewn hills of a deteriorating plantation home in Post Civil War Virginia to the dark and mysterious swamplands beyond, Nicholas and Briana are drawn into the most horrific battle they will ever have to face. A battle of wills, a battle of hearts, and finally, a battle against the twisted sickness of an arsonist’s mind…