Book excerpt: When Catrine Lafonte comes to New Orleans as one of King Louisas acasket girlsa during the onset of the French and Indian wars, she is filled with dreams of marrying her old love and finding a peace long denied her. But soon, her expectations are dashed in a way she never imagined, leaving her to long for escape from a new life of drudgery that has been shackled upon her. Now, her future will be decided between the hard-fisted old woman who holds her indenture, and two very different men. Caught in the clutches of a courier-de-bois she despises, rescued by a frontiersman she doesnat trust, and blinded by her own unquenchable desires, Catrine tries vainly and sometimes desperately to create her own happiness, while all the time it is God who is teaching her what it might mean to truly build her house upon a rock.