Margaret Garnett, too tall, too smart, and much too much a Northerner, felt as if she were being watched from the moment she arrived to teach at Tennessee''s Magnolia University. The feeling became a shivery chill when she moved into Rebel''s Retreat, the historic cottage built by Confederate General Ashton Johnson. But the shock of seeing the general''s portrait and recognizing him as the man of her most passionate fantasies left her with an eerie certainty -- that somehow his ghost was actually there.

Soon Margaret was reading old letters and devouring every fact on the dashing Ashton, his engagement to a fickle beauty who may have been a spy, his death at the hands of a Union sharpshooter. But nothing prepared Margaret for the fever, the dizziness, and the shock of waking up in a vanished era -- in Ash''s arms. Suddenly alive in a South of scorched earth and tears, she knew this was where she had always belonged...where she had been sent to alter the course of war itself, to embrace a destiny time could not stop and a love death could not deny....