The Passions of Emma — Penelope Williamson

Emma Tremayne's Rhode Island is mansions, foxhunts, and splendid balls-all the grandeur and hypocrisy of American high society in the late 1800s. A beautiful young woman, Emma is expected to marry well and do little besides choose the latest fashions from Worth. Then an Irish immigrant interrupts the last hunt of the season with a dead child in her arms -- a six-year-old killed in Emma's fiance's textile mill. The sight profoundly changes Emma's life.

As it does Shay McKenna...A revolutionary who had to flee Ireland, Shay is a man scarred by bitterness and secret hurts. He despises the rich who dine on pheasant while Irish children starve. But he can't stop the attraction that draws him to Emma, a woman who needs his passion as much as he needs her healing touch, a woman so far out of reach that he would never try to touch her, if it were not for Bria. In Bria, the millworker who dared confront the "Great Folk" with a child's corpse, Emma discovers a friend who knows more about life than Emma has ever dreamed possible. And Bria, dying of consumption yet filled with the joy of living, has a gift for Emma and Shay McKenna...one that can defy scandal, challenge even death itself, and give the two people she cherishes most the one thing they are forbidden to have.