Franci McMahon

After a year of mourning, Montana rancher Miles feels stagnated. When Karen, an outdoor adventures leader, turns up at Miles’s ranch in the bone-chilling winter with a proposition for her to lead an all-woman group into the Montana wilderness, Miles snaps it up like a rare steak. Her body comes awake at the sight of Stormy, the horse wrangler sent by the stock supplier to assist her, but Rachel, one of the guests, reaches into her heart with the warmth of a freshly baked pie. The pack trip leads them deep into an isolated area, where cell phones are useless, and the trip morphs into an excursion with a deadly obstacle. The eight guests, the two outfitters, the trip organizer, and Miles must bring their singular wits to bear to surmount an impasse of not granite but men.

Rachel Duncan, a Montana rancher, has led a self-sufficient life and kept her complications of the heart to a minimum. She is as tough as her horses and believes nothing can stop her from winning the one-hundred-mile in one day horse race, the Tevis Cup. She has a horse who can do the job, the Arabian mare, Kestrel. The element of the team she isn’t so sure of is her new veterinarian, Dr. Margaret Carson. Margaret proves herself to the reluctant Rachel, broadening her vistas to discover a tender side, one capable of loving and being loved.

Montana rancher Becky Miles (who decidedly drops the Becky part) is drawn into the snake pit of internalized homophobia when she travels to Vermont to find out if her gal, Jane Scott, still loves her. Jane's life is enmeshed by old guilt and compassion for Georgia, whose horse training business is tarnished by a tragic death in her barn. Miles has little patience for Georgia, a closeted lesbian who is desperate to pass among the upper crust of the horse show world. Neither Jane nor Miles has any idea, at first, just how desperate Georgia is to pass in the straight world.

Journalist Jane Scott finds herself drawn into a world of violence. Horses are being murdered for their insurance value and stolen to sell with new identities. Jane uses her journalist skills in an attempt to expose the growing horror taking place in the seemingly benign horse show circles of the wealthy. When she gets too close to the truth, her own horses disappear from her farm. Is it a warning that she's getting too close to the truth?

Jane unexpectedly meets Miles, a woman who finds her at the feet of a beautiful black Trakehner mare, which Jane calls Night. Jane falls for Miles in more ways than one. But the men Jane is trying to stop are determined she will not expose their lucrative horse theft ring. Can she expose them before they come after her?