Desire, Oklahoma: The Founding Fathers Books in Order

This series goes backward in time and shows how the world of Desire, Oklahoma first took shape. If the contemporary Desire books feel like an established town with its own rules, loyalties, and ways of protecting women, The Founding Fathers books ask a simple question: how did that start?

The answer is frontier ranch country, hard men, dangerous travel, and women whose lives can change in a moment.

The opening books, including Untamed Desire and Scandalous Desire, follow ranchers, brothers, and close allies whose choices slowly build the foundations of the community that later readers know so well. The setting matters here. These are wide-open historical western romances, and the distance between ranches, the lack of safety, and the constant threat of violence all shape the way people live and love.

That practical danger gives the series its tension. Love stories unfold alongside land disputes, attacks, revenge plots, and the plain fact that survival on the frontier depends on trust. The men are protective, blunt, and often stubborn. The women are not weak, but they live in a harsher world, and the books keep that pressure in view.

What links the series most strongly to modern-day Desire is the idea of building a place where women can be cherished and defended rather than left at the mercy of cruel men or bad luck. That thread runs through the romances and through the town-making itself. These stories are not just about couples or triads coming together. They are about creating a code.

That code becomes a town.

If you already know the contemporary books, the fun here is seeing familiar family names and emotional patterns in their rougher, earlier form. The Tylers and the other ranching men are not polished heroes. They are shaped by labor, land, and danger, and the women who love them force them to become something steadier.

So the tone is a little grittier than the later Desire novels, but the core appeal is the same. Strong attraction. Fierce loyalty. A protected circle of family. And a growing sense that Desire is not just a place on a map, but a way of life people are willing to fight for.