Manhattan Stories

Wealthy heiress Jessica McCarthy desperately wants to be married and have a family. A rogue and a scoundrel, Zachary Belk is the only one who has proposed. Even though her father warns her that Zachary won't make a good husband, she marries him. She soon discovers that her father was right. When the stock market crashes, and both families are left penniless, Zachary seeks a new fortune on a property he owns in another Manhattan, in Kansas. They are only there a short time before he deserts her. With a new baby, Jessica must learn to survive and support her family in an unfamiliar frontier land with only her faith and determination to guide her.

Emma is nine on the day they meet. Akecheta is twelve, and already the man of his house. He saves her life and tells her she belongs to him. As they grow up together on the frontier surrounding Manhattan, Kansas, he teaches her how to fish, hunt, and how to survive. She teaches him how to trust and how to share the burdens of his shameful past. When he graduates from high school, an aunt sends him to university in the other Manhattan, in New York. Emma continues her schooling at home. At first, Akecheta is dazzled by New York. When a friend takes him to back-room poker games in the Bowery, he learns that Manhattan, New York, may be more deadly than the wilds of Kansas.

On Nancy's 18th birthday, her father tells her she must marry her cousin Abner, the town's blacksmith. He's already married to three other women, one of them her younger sister. Nancy runs away and gets lost in the woods. Hungry and cold, she finds a seemingly deserted cabin and takes shelter. When she meets Jake, the man who owns it, she must decide if he is a man she can trust. Tired of living alone in the wilderness, he is willing to wait for Nancy to learn to care for him. She expects to spend her life there, but Abner has other ideas. Thinking they will only be safe in one place, Jake takes Nancy to his childhood home, Manhattan, Kansas.