Star Quartet (abridged)

Giana Van Cleve, the heroine, has fallen in love with a vicious fortune hunter. Her mother, the renowned shipowner and builder Aurora Van Cleve, is desperate to save her daughter. She agrees to support Giana’s wedding if Giana agrees first to spend an unusual three months in Rome with her Uncle Daniele. But Giana’s uncle takes this bargain far beyond what Aurora ever imagined.

Midnight Star, the second of the four Star novels, is the story of Delaney Saxton, a man who struck it rich in the California gold rush of 1849 and stayed to build a great city, and Chauncey FitzHugh, an heiress from England who travels to San Francisco to avenge her father. She believes Delaney Saxton ruined him and plans to destroy Saxton in the same way he destroyed her father - leaving him betrayed and penniless.

There are men and then there are MEN, and then there’s Brent Hammond, a gambler who’s handsome as sin, distrustful as only a betrayed man can be, and wilder than an unbroken stallion. When he meets Byrony by chance in San Diego, he can’t help himself - he’s charmed - until he sees her again in San Francisco as the petted wife of an older rich man. All his distrust and cynicism come out, and he treats her very badly indeed - until her life is threatened, and he is the only one to protect her.

Saint Morris first meets Juliana DuPres on the island of Maui when he is a very young doctor, just landed off of a whaler, and she is the thirteen-year-old daughter of an impossibly puritanical minister. When he leaves Maui, he takes the girl’s heart with him. When Saint sees Juliana again, it is six years later, and she is being sold in a slave auction in San Francisco. He saves her, then returns her to her parents in Maui.But there is no welcome home for Juliana....