From somewhere among the colony of North Carolina's Gaelic gentry, twenty-five-year-old backwoodsman Jacob Dare is determined to find a young woman to recreate the home that his father's Dare Castle must have been. She would have to be well bred, well read, and gifted with the ability to turn the primitive into the palatial. If she Is favorable to look upon and sweetly dispositioned, that would be even better. That she could ever come to love him is irrelevant. The Lady Catriona Kilcairn is desperately seeking to save her familial colonial home from 1776's bloodthirsty insurrectionists, demanding she take the American Oath of Allegiance. Marriage with the backwoods oaf Jacob Dare is her only immediate option, and a most objectionable one, given that her love and loyalty belong to the Sassenach of her youth, the aristocratic Barrett Fairfax. Yet, as the famous Scotsman Sir Walter Scott warned, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!"