A forbidden friendship turns to love amidst the social and economic turmoil of the Populist Uprising and, as women seek political equality with men, an unlikely heroine steps forward to make history. When her father's death forces Laurel McBryde to leave her beloved childhood home in the Flint Hills to live with the Hartmoors, a prosperous banking family, she feels like a lonely outcast among the prim and proper Victorians of Chisholm, Kansas. Soon, a growing attraction to radical politics and to Carey Fairchild, a tenant farmer on the Hartmoor land, change Laurel's life in ways she could not have imagined.