When three young women as different as their backgrounds meet in the seaside resort of Ocean Promenade, Maryland, in the 1920s, their lives will never again be the same. Hannah Waters, the awkward country girl, will do anything to replace the suitor she lost to WWI so she can be a moral, married lady. Belle Longstreet, the streetwise seductress with a painful childhood, defies propriety but longs to be free of the bedroom where she earns her keep. And Edie Childers, the fragile debutante, mourns the loss of her pampered childhood and can't face an arranged marriage to a man she loathes.
One by one, they say goodbye to their old lives as their brief vacations end and they decide to stay, embarking on a whole new life together. The realities of independence soon sober their enthusiasm, but when they meet men as different as they are, they discover love is a heady cocktail and pin their entire futures on happily ever after. Those dreams are shattered, however, when they realize each man has a major flaw that can destroy them emotionally and even physically.
While Hannah is enamored with Clive Scribner, the mysterious writer, WWI has left scars too deep to see, preventing him from giving her the commitment she craves. Belle has met her match in the elegant bootlegging tycoon, Raoul Fabrizio, but just when she's ready to surrender her heart for the first time in her life, he betrays her by being unfaithful. And when Edie's association with Drake Morgan, the swashbuckling pound fisherman, causes her family to disinherit her, she flies into his arms for comfort and protection, only to discover his embrace is the most dangerous place she can be.
Only when the girls take their futures into their own hands and open their own hotel, the Three Dolls, can they really be free. But when the men go too far, the bonds of friendship are strained to the breaking point, spawning a secret so powerful it could destroy everything they've built together. Meanwhile, their flapper style, bawdy shows, and bootleg liquor upset the conservative women hotel owners of Ocean Promenade, turning the whole town against them in a battle of propriety versus modernity.
And just when everything is lost in a stroke of tragedy, the power of friendship lifts them from the ashes, showing the girls they are each stronger than they ever dreamed of and can indeed survive anything -- together.