Bella is seventeen years old when she is tricked into marriage with a man she has met only once. Edward Sutton makes her his wife and then orders her to follow him to the New World, where he has bought a tobacco plantation.

It is on the long restless sea voyage to Virginia that Bella meets Adam Tarrant — the man she knows at once she will love for the rest of her life. Despairingly she tries to resist the passionate desire which flares between them, knowing that on the other side of the world a husband awaits her whose dark good looks hide a cruel and sadistic nature — and that he will never let her go.