As the daughter of English aristocracy, Lady Theron Renfrew lived an idyllic life, but all of that changes when the untimely death of her beloved mother brings out the truth of her parentage. Her father is in actuality Douglas Campbell, a cad who seduced and deserted her mother. Now, to her further mortification, Theron is being forced to journey to the wilds of America to meet the scoundrel. Trapped between a past that has made her an outcast and an uncertain future in an unknown land, she feels abandoned by those she loves.
Theron is smart, independent, and high-spirited; she steels her heart against her rakish sire and devises a plan to escape everyone who has hurt and betrayed her. Theron carries through with her promise to meet Douglas Campbell, but she is armed with a small fortune in jewels and a deceptive plan meant to make her American father despise her, cut irrevocably the ties to her past, and create a life of her own in which she will be independent of any destiny but the one she carves for herself.
Swindled by thieves that dangerously hunt her, Theron's life veers wildly from her well-laid plans when she is forced to deal with the cutthroat reality of the frontier world and the thorny truth about her mother's indiscretion. When she meets the dashing captain Taylor Robinson and the haunted Jake McCormick, a man too alluring to ignore, Theron has to reckon with the awakening of her own desires during her tumultuous Journey of the Heart.