A steamy Southern summer. A beautiful ex-con. A burned-out cop. And a killer on the loose. Wrongly convicted of her husband's brutal murder, Kathryn McAllister has spent the last four years in a North Carolina prison for a crime she didn't commit. When new evidence leads to the overturn of her conviction, Kathryn returns to the sleepy little town of Elba, North Carolina, determined to clear her name and find Michael McAllister's killer. Police chief Nick DiSalvo has come to Elba to bury himself someplace where he can forget his past and pretend he was born the day he drove into town. His plan is working until Kathryn McAllister walks through the door of his office, hell-bent on justice. Drawn to each other by an irresistible heat, Nick and Kat are at cross-purposes. He wants her out of his hair; she wants to bag a killer. When the sizzling attraction between them explodes into full-blown passion, they discover that in this picturesque Southern town of many secrets, nothing is as it appears. As they draw nearer to discovering the identity of Michael McAllister's killer, they unearth a secret so terrible that one individual would stop at nothing-including killing again-to keep them from uncovering it.