INTIMATE STRANGERS

Swapping houses for an eight-week summer idyll is an equally attractive proposition to two couples, British and American, eager to experience living on the "other side of the pond." For Christy and Gabe McCarthy, it's an opportunity to soak up English culture and social life in the wild beauty of Wiltshire where houses seem hewn from the earth's subtly hued stones. For Oliver and Maggie Callahan, a North Carolina antebellum house set amid cotton fields and a beach retreat on a small barrier island represent a journey into the exotic American South...where ocean tides seduce the senses, and the gracious culture has remained unchanged for over a hundred years.
Easily adapting to the Southern way, elegant, witty Oliver charms all the women he meets, drinks bourbon, tells tall tales, and writes his journalist's dispatches on America...while bright and strong-willed Maggie critiques his work, cares for their children, and wonders if she herself will ever write again. Maggie sorely misses Edward Arabin, an antiques auctioneer who appreciates her in a way her husband never has. Still, she can hardly ignore what Oliver has provided: the house of her dreams, money, freedom, shared child care, the best bloody souffle in Britain, and great sex....Reading Oliver's articles in his Wiltshire study, Christy Moore McCarthy feels she has known him forever. Everything she sees and touches and hears is drawing the beautiful, raven-haired Christy closer to him, and further away from her devoted husband, Gabe. A former stockbroker, Christy is a woman who makes decisions, not mistakes. But, after discovering Oliver's unpublished novel about a doomed love affair, she comes upon a sentence that fires her imagination: Making love to her was like being hit by a cyclone, or a storm surge, or some other sort of natural catastrophe from which you can't emerge unscathed...And Christy, for the first time in her life, yearns for passion...pure and perfect passion.