When Delilah Belle Beaumont sails into Charleston in 1881, she's a woman with more secrets than trunks-and one dangerous gift she's sworn to keep leashed. Her charm can make people adore her on sight, but admiration is a kind of hunger, and Delilah is done being anyone's feast.
Intent on reinventing herself, she opens the Beaumont Academy for Young Ladies-a finishing school where fainting is forbidden, opinions are mandatory, and grace comes with a backbone. But Charleston's grand dames and their Ladies' Civic Refinement League have other ideas about what a woman should be, and Delilah's quiet revolution soon draws both scandal and fascination.
As her lessons turn the city's drawing rooms upside down, Delilah finds unexpected allies in the sharp-tongued bookkeeper Pearl Rivers, the curious Miss Eliza Prentiss, and a reformer with kind eyes who might just see the woman beneath the veil. Yet shadowed behind every polite smile is a whisper from her past-and a reminder that the Devil doesn't like his daughters building schools instead of chaos.
Rich with Southern charm, sly humor, and a touch of the supernatural, Charleston Charmer is a story of women who learn to wield wit like a weapon and love like a choice.