When Joel Larson goes out to check on a sick child, the last thing he expects is a shotgun and a marriage proposal he can't refuse!

Mary Peters despairs that she will never get married. At nineteen, she has no prospects for finding a husband, so she takes matters into her own hands and becomes a mail order bride. When she arrives in Omaha, Nebraska to meet the man she's due to marry, he takes one look at her homely appearance and rejects her.

But fate has other plans for Mary, for Dave Larson, happens to be nearby and figures she will make a suitable companion to help him on his farm. Though she is stunned that someone as handsome and as kind as Dave would ask her to marry him, she accepts, realizing that this marriage of convenience will not bear the fruits of love. Love, after all, is for beautiful women. Isn't it?

Seven years after Eye of the Beholder ends, Neil Craftsman's story begins. When Sarah Donner learns she's pregnant, she hopes this blessing will be the thing to make her husband finally love her. But to her horror, he announces that she will go live with her overbearing mother-in-law. Weeks before she is due to give birth, they are traveling to her mother-in-law's when some thieves kill him.

Ready to give birth, she has to rely on the aid of the one man others had warned her about: Neil Craftsman. She knows of his tarnished past, and no respectable woman will go near him. But when she learns her husband left her with no home and no money, she has nowhere else to go but to the one man she's shunned.

As she gets to know Neil, she learns that there is more to him than meets the eye. But when his past comes back to haunt him, will her newfound love be enough to redeem him - or will he always be a shunned man?