Summer visits to her family are usually filled with friendship, joy, and love, but the year Kylie Bellows turns sixteen, she faces the reality about her family. For the past nine years Kylie has attended school in Boston and has only come home for a few months each summer. She does not realize, when she sees one young man selling a horse at the livery and then meets another man several years older than the first, that her life is about to undergo a dramatic change. She falls in love with one of the men, but the other receives her father's blessing to marry her. Kylie's father sent her to Boston to control her, but he does not understand that Kylie will not be controlled by any one, for any reason, and this leads him nearly to kill her. Kylie's strength, determination, and independence infatuates one of the men, who eventually becomes her husband. He knows she has secrets but does not know what they are, but when he sees what her life in Boston entails, he cannot deny that she truly loves him and that she knows that he truly loves her. This forbidden relationship leads to a showdown that could lead to the death of Kylie and of her unborn child.