James White-Hawk Morgan has a trading post in the Mohawk River Valley in New York, and a fairly promising future. What he doesn't have are friends in high places. . . like England. A business man like himself can prosper if he has the proper connections, so he seeks to remedy this deficit by travelling to London. . . and there he meets Lizzie Gardener, a pretty spinster with connections, but few prospects she will actually accept. There is an instant attraction between the English rose and the wilderness entrepreneur, yet their potential relationship is cut short when James receives news that his mother is dying, back in New York. He must return to his young sister immediately, and Lizzie is left with a memory of a handsome, rugged, would-be suitor. Then, their correspondence begins, and though an ocean separates them, James woos her thoroughly. Lizzie is so taken with him that she agrees to wed by proxy in London, and undertake a voyage by sea to join her new husband in the colonies. Once she arrives she discovers that nothing is quite what she had imagined it to be. She is an Englishwoman, raised in London, and accustomed the finer things in life. Now, she faces a choice: stay with her husband, who has misled her in order to marry her fortune, or go back to London in shame, an unwanted spinster living in her brother's household. And then, there is James, half-Indian, half-white, with a foot firmly planted in both worlds. A man unlike any she has ever met. He is handsome, and his kisses are electric. Slowly, surely, he seduces her into becoming a wife in every sense of the word. What Lizzie does not know is that there is one last secret James has been keeping-and the one thing that brought them together-his beautiful letters-is the very thing that may well tear them apart.