Newly widowed Xu Tiantian clutched the little compensation her husband had left behind and fled her former in-laws’ home in a panic. Her vicious mother-in-law wanted to take her money, while her brother-in-law actually planned to sell her to an old bachelor in a neighboring village so he could use the bride price to get himself a wife!
With nowhere else to turn, she stumbled into the Hong family’s homestead, a place no one in the village dared approach.
In the earthen courtyard lived five tough brothers, all notorious and none of them easy to mess with. But when Hong Zhen, the eldest, returned from military service and saw her drenched and terrified, he simply said, “She’s my distant cousin,” becoming the shelter that kept the storm at bay.
A sham brother-and-sister relationship made Xu Tiantian the one and only “young lady” of the Hong family.
In the hormone-charged earthen house, all five men, each with his own temperament, fell for the frail young woman who had suddenly appeared in their lives. One concealed a domineering desire to possess her, another guarded her with tender protectiveness, and a third teased her with flirtatious little hints. Undercurrents quietly stirred among the brothers, but they all treated her like a treasure and did everything they could to keep her safe.
She was a little lamb who had wandered into a pack of wolves, pampered and protected by five tough men in their own ways, while caught up in feelings she could not untangle.
But her former in-laws never stopped harassing her, and village gossip spread everywhere. Wolves circled from outside, while inside, the brothers’ feelings for her kept pulling them in every direction.
Looking at the five men before her and the winds of reform and opening-up sweeping into this mountain hamlet in the 1980s, Xu Tiantian quietly made up her mind: this time, she would no longer be a weak widow for anyone to prey on!
She would preserve her dignity, withstand the gossip, and defeat the villains. More than that, she would ride the tide of the times and carve out a place of her own in the Funiu Mountains. As for the five tough men who spoiled her rotten, which one would win her heart would depend on what he could do!
