I Was Auctioned to The Marshal

A woman's first night can be put up for auction, and the money goes to whoever puts her on the block. Stella Sue's adoptive parents put her there, with her boyfriend's help, to raise a dowry for the daughter who is theirs by blood. The buyer is Gabriel Ferns, the young marshal of the southern state, and he asks her to marry him. She refuses because of the boyfriend. When she gets home she finds the boyfriend proposing to her adoptive sister, and she goes back to Gabriel and accepts. After the wedding a misunderstanding about Gabriel and another woman makes her leave the marshal's house on her own. She is caught and kept locked up for five years by the people who sold her, and she sinks into a severe depression. At the end of the five years her son, a child Gabriel never knew he had, finds the marshal and asks him to save his mother. Gabriel gets her out and goes after the people who held her. She comes out of it damaged and closed off to him, and he sets about winning her back with patience and day-to-day care.