Summary
Daphne Trowbridge, a tempest of lace and stubborn blood, ricochets through her aunt’s pastoral manor like a firefly trapped in a bell jar. She loves Tom Dunstan—the genuine article, all shy glances and forest-gleaned poetry—yet bolts the instant she misreads her aunt’s matchmaking semaphore. Tom vanishes into cedar dusk, heart splintered. Enter Gerald, the aunt’s stealth favorite: Daphne, spurred by pique and a daredevil kindness, accepts his ring, only to unearth the matriarch’s long con on the very altar step. Blind with ire, she purchases rebellion in the form of a hirsute lumberjack—beard like burnt thundercloud, axe slung like a promise—paying him to wed her and evaporate. The joke mutates: her paid phantom spirits her to a pine-scented nowhere, a lean-to cathedral where embers gossip and silence instructs. Two leering woodsmen test her mettle; the bearded stranger, now revealed as the chastened but unbroken Tom, unsheathes both courage and identity. In the hush after scrapped violence, Daphne learns that the contract she drafted with dollars and defiance has rewritten itself in the ink of mutual need; the groom she bought is the lover she once discarded, reshaped by grief, grit, and beard enough to hide a second chance.
Synopsis
Daphne Trowbridge, an impulsive and obstinate but nonetheless kindhearted young woman, lives with her aunt and uncle on their country estate. Daphne falls in love with Tom Dunstan, but when she learns that Mrs. Trowbridge favors the young man, she deserts him, whereupon he departs for the woods brokenhearted. Because her aunt dislikes Gerald, Daphne accepts his proposal, but on the day of the wedding, she discovers that Mrs. Trowbridge has liked him from the beginning. Furious at her aunt's scheming, Daphne hires the first man she meets, who happens to be a heavily bearded lumberman, to marry her and then leave. Later, however, her hired husband abducts her to his cabin in the woods, where he eventually succeeds in taming her. After he rescues her from two lecherous lumberjacks, Daphne discovers that her husband is Tom, whom she had loved all along.
